I cannot describe to you the relief that I feel having left teaching. I did it about 7 years ago now, and although I sometimes miss the classroom interaction (my students got very good at rendering me incapable of delivery by reducing me to tears of laughter), I do not miss the administrative and management grind that accompanied the latter part of my career. Occasionally things happen that cause traumatic flashbacks, and this week, with the release of A Level results, the UK press was full of such reminders.
For a number of years my summer holiday would end mid-August when, as manager of a sixth-form, I was expected to return to work and deal with the release of A Level results. Imagine the scene - hundreds of hysterical teenagers weeping or laughing, followed by phone calls to parents, followed by phone calls to me from parents, followed by days of fraught interviews dealing with either, “My daughter has failed, what can we do now?”, or “My daughter has failed and it is your fault! What are you going to do about it now?”
And while all this was going on, there were brief opportunities to celebrate with students, as well as the inevitable demands for information from ‘on high’ and from the local press. The ‘on high’, of course, wanted instant statistical analysis of how performance compared with previous years and with surrounding rival institutions, of which subjects had done well, and which subjects were performing badly, and what was my action plan to deal with any problems. The other complicating factor was that 10% of my salary was performance related, and although I had very little direct influence over what went on in the hundreds of classes in my department, the announcement of examination results immediately informed me about whether or not my own children would be kept in the manner to which they had become accustomed in the following year. Mid-August was always stressful for me.
Every year the national examination results improve, and every year there is a fairly predictable debate about whether standards are falling. My own views (based on 20 years teaching experience) are that the core of good A Level students are no more able or less able than their predecessors. The curriculum has changed giving them a much wider choice of subjects, and the demands of showing knowledge through, for example, managing a project about an author and analysing a range of texts, is different to that which may have been traditionally required (in depth knowledge and memory of fewer texts). Things are not necessarily easier, though they are different.
However, there have been significant other changes which I believe have led to the standards being moved over the years. The key problem is that the wrong people (schools and colleges) are paying the Examination Boards. As a result, the Examination Boards are under pressure to deliver what the schools and colleges and students and parents want - which is success. However, the universities and employers want something different - a means of measuring ability and of distinguishing between potential students. If they paid for the results there would be pressure of the Examination Boards to deliver what the universities and employers wanted, and not what the students and schools and colleges wanted. If the results were meaningless because everyone passed and they didn’t discriminate between good and very good students, the Universities and employers would complain and vote with their money or force change.
When I sat my own A levels, around 6% of the population did so. When I retired from teaching, around 40% of the population did so. The numerical growth, and the expansion of the ability pool taking the examination, has inevitably meant that the Examination Boards have had to produce a product that delivers a reasonable degree of success. If you have an examination that more than half taking it are going to fail, your product will not have many takers and you will soon go bankrupt.
Another pressure has come from the changed climate of accountability. Educational institutions now have to be much more open about their apparent ’successes’ and ‘failures’ and examination results are an easy (albeit crude) measure of that. I knew only too well that they influenced whether or not parents encouraged their students to study at the institution where I worked, and intake numbers influenced the amount of money the institution received as well as the Principal’s salary, and my own. As a result of all this, there is huge pressure to deliver, not useful information that accurately discriminates between students, but success.
One of the hats I used to wear was that of ‘English teacher’. I decided to introduce a new A level subject as an option for my students - English Language Studies. It thought it might attract more students to the college, and arguably it offered a relevant and interesting curriculum choice. It is as valid (and potentially useful) for students to know something about the language of advertising, as it is for them to know about the Metaphysical poets. We taught it for four years before abandoning it.
The reason for abandoning it (despite the cost and effort of training teachers to deliver it and the new resources required), was to do with numbers and results. Although the teachers delivering it were very enthusiastic about the new subject and its relevance to students, the students themselves were afraid of it and didn’t take it up in large numbers. Studying drama and poems seemed a ’softer and friendlier’ option than thinking about nouns and verbs. And although we achieved a range of good results, everybody teaching it agreed that students were getting around one to two grades lower in this subject than they would have done studying the more traditional English Literature Examination. The particular examination board delivering the new subject had a fierce reputation of being harder than the one we had chosen for the traditional subject. And so, we stopped teaching it. It seemed unfair on the students and it influenced my performance related pay in terms of recruitment and results.
So, you see, almost everything in the present system works against producing an examination system that is capable of delivering objective results that would enable employers and universities to discriminate effectively between potential students. If we change the paymaster and find a system for Examination Boards being funded by Universities and Employers, then we stand a chance of getting a much more objective and useful assessment system.
Of course, it will never happen. Despite the logistical difficulties of developing a new examination funding regime, it would be political suicide for any government that suggested it, let alone introduced it, because it would inevitably deliver more examination failure. Each government faces its own pressure to deliver what its people want (and hence survive) rather than necessarily do what is right.
