This week has laid claim to the UK’s GCSE results day – the results gained at the end of high school, aged 16. The debate over whether or not these results are important is a long tested one, but let’s not get into that; let’s just say that GCSEs are important because they get you into college, and college is important because it gets you into University, and so on. However, this year’s GCSE results have found the lowest pass rate for quite some time. The number of students getting an A grade is 20%, down 0.5% from years previously, and there have been multiple comments on social media suggesting that the exams have been harder this time round than ever before.
I remember from my own college years the grade boundaries – the number of marks between each grade – being ridiculously close. There were around 20 marks between a D and an A* for my psychology exam. Again, I know from my own exams that the highest grade, A*, is almost impossible to get without lacking in another subject. A teacher will expect you to get the highest grade possible, forgetting that every other teacher is expecting the same thing. In these situations, something has to give, and though it develops reasoning skills, it’s unfair on the student to have them choose which subjects they’d rather do poorly in and which ones they’d rather do well in. Many students make these decisions anyway, and choose to focus on one subject over another, but to be forced to do this is frankly unfair.
One of the most important things a school can teach a student is how to exercise autonomy, and having such ridiculous grade boundaries strips autonomy away from them. They get the illusion that they’re making choices over their subjects, but realistically, the choice has already been made for them.
Of course, the reason why this is happening is obvious; it’s a widely known secret that the Conservative party want to privatise schools, and create a more elitist education system, as if the one we already have isn’t elitist enough. The Conservatives began their dismantling of the education system when they first rose to power in 2010, and when they appointed Michael Gove. Gove has had an unutterably devastating effect on the education system, prioritising wealth, status, and class over actual intellectual talent. Exams since them have become more and more difficult, with more and more useless information being thrown in, with a huge emphasis on memory rather than the emphasis being on the ability to apply knowledge to appropriate contexts.
For a clearer picture of the British education system currently, let’s turn to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (I know, I know, everybody’s bored of the comparisons between Potter and current affairs, but hey, I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t true): Umbridge was appointed with a tiny bit of power, clung to it like a spider to a thread, and exploited it, and made sure she inflicted the most amount of harm possible. She tried to turn every Hogwarts student into a miniature fact spouting machine who end up not equipped to deal with the world outside of school (and inside it, frankly), and then, to top it all off, she banned pretty much everything interesting or fun. Umbridge is essentially a metaphor for the quintessential Conservative MP. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that I hope Gove meets a fate similar to Umbridge’s, but you, dear reader, are free to imagine I have done.
I feel a huge amount of sympathy towards the large number of students who won’t have done as well in their exams as they were hoping to, not because they didn’t work hard enough, but because the government has an agenda that they wish to see through; an agenda that will result in a Britain terrifyingly similar to the one that produced Dickensian novels of ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. It’s a sad time to be in school and I fully empathise with anyone and everyone wanting to transcend the barriers of class to have a better life. And I empathise with everyone whom the government is trying to hinder in this pursuit, myself included. All I can say is that the government is missing out on some serious talent by attempting to make schools more elitist and aristocratic.
Featured Image courtesy of Flickr
