This week annual school league tables were published ranking schools according to how many of their pupils received 5 A*-C measures at GCSE. As you’ve no doubt read, this year the tables included another column showing what percentage of pupils had obtained the new English Baccalaureate: A*-C in English, Maths, a science, a humanities subject and a foreign language. The introduction of this new measure has been marked by the haste that has marred so many of Michael Gove’s doings this past year. One can understand his hurry – it seems motivated by a genuine desire to improve our dire education system as fast as possible – but as someone concerned with education he should really be more wary of that old lesson: ‘more haste, less speed’. With each botched directive he gets ever further away from the only real hope that is government and teachers working together.
The aim of the Ebacc is to give “recognition” to pupils who study the selected “rigorous” courses. It stems from a viable concern: as league tables have placed huge pressures on schools to drive up their results, this has led to more students taking subjects where they were more likely to gain above a ‘D’, but which in the long run would not be as highly recognised as more traditional counterparts. Certainly in terms of improving social mobility, there should be nothing to deter students from taking subjects that are more likely to lead them to university. Yet the solution to this warping pressure should be to scrap league tables, not add another pressure that further complicates the process of students trying to choose subjects for themselves.
Some in favour of the measure argue that more traditional subjects offer a ‘better education’, but most people who remember school know that a good education depends on teachers, not subjects. The Ebacc sets the academic/vocational divide back a couple of centuries, as there has been no real effort to emphasise that this is a resorative measure, not one that aims to create a hierarchy of subjects about which is ‘best’. The ‘soft’ subjects that are being pushed to the sidelines contain elements that are just as potentially useful, engaging and interesting as GCSE biology. One can see that Gove is trying to create a program that imparts to children a foundation of knowledge and ways of thinking, but that Philosophy GCSE is left out is a telling sign that this is not so much about rigorous core disciplines as about exam structures. History, Geography and foreign languages are likely still deemed ‘rigorous’ because they are studied mainly in top schools, and have been least hit by exam boards efforts to make their tests more teachable.
Given the somewhat arbitrary collection of subjects that qualify, and the fact that no IGCSE exams do, the EBacc in this form cannot be a meaningful qualification for individuals, and thus cannot be a significant national measure. Even its name seems ill thought out. It has been mocked by commentators pointing out that the baccalaureates in Europe are prized qualifications received at the end of school, or even university, while the I.B. is widely held as being more comprehensive and more rigorous than A levels, let alone a handful of GCSEs. That we need a more developed sense of what a minimum education should be is certainly true, but calling this a baccalaureate is the very definition of dumbing down and renders the whole thing yet more meaningless.
Gove is trying to create a brilliant education out of our current mainstream qualifications, but he must soon realize that crap cannot a cake make. If he wants to set an aspiration that all children get some semblance of a broad education which allows them to begin their world and how they can make meaning in it, he needs to revolutionise our current qualifications, or at the very least, free teachers from the tyranny of league tables so that they can throw away the assessment objectives and have a go at making learning interesting on their own terms.
