Educatin, edukation, educashon

 I can barely look. What on Earth are they playing at? 

It was always going to be impossible to, fairly, assess this year’s children in the way we normally do. They couldn’t take exams, they hadn’t finished the work but instead of just writing the whole thing off and giving the Universities the freedom to give places to who they want without the need for formal exams the government decided that a botched system was better than no system.

Last night, at about 10pm Gavin Williamson did an about turn on A level results.

There was already some upset in Scotland as it was found that the regulating body had adjusted grades of the Highers because it seemed that some teachers were being overly ambitious for their students. Some teachers will have been fair and some will have been harsh. Nothing is ever perfect. If exams had gone ahead some kids would have lucked out and got the questions they could do well in, others would have mucked up completely. No system is ever completely fair. However, when they looked at Scottish data it appeared that there was an institutional bias. Poorer schools seemed to have been more lenient in their gradings and given higher grades than their students normally get. This could be because children who go into exams hungry always do less well than they could do. A lot of brain power can be wasted on wondering where the next meal is coming from, or whether your parents are going to lose their job and therefore your home. 

Before you read this and say, “Well, what’s the answer then?” I’m going to confess that I don’t know but pissing off a whole load of 18year olds probably isn’t a good idea. I think it would be better not to keep changing your mind. At least if you stick to the original plan (and let students appeal on a case by case basis, providing evidence) then you look vaguely competent. 

What he has said is that they can’t get a grade lower than their mock result. I’m not sure all schools will have done mocks but if they were anything like mine then they were exams that were set to be so difficult that it would shock you into doing some work. In my school, everyone failed their mocks. Other schools might have felt their pupils needed a boost and they could have set exams to encourage them, “See, you’re not as bad as you thought you were.” I’m not sure this plan is going to be a comfort to most kids. Also, if you don’t want to make a mockery of something you should never give journalists the word mock to play with.

Obviously, if Michael Gove hadn’t insisted that one exam at the end was better and kept the continuous assessment approach things would be fairer but even he can’t be blamed for a global pandemic.

Teachers everywhere are looking out for government announcements on schools like this meme.

It hasn’t been the most relaxing holiday. 

We were hoping for guidance, yesterday, on what we could actually teach in music lessons. There seems little point in completely redesigning your teaching plans if you don’t have to. 

Meanwhile, teenagers, already fed up with the fiasco over exam results and the fact that their lives had suddenly being taken away by a virus that didn’t seem to affect them too badly are now being given advice on the ‘new normal’ way to have sex by Newsbeat. To be fair, Newsbeat are only reporting Terrance Higgins Trust’s advice but I can’t look. I may be an old prude but I do think that once you are swapping bodily fluids then you are in a position to catch things off each other, whatever position you swap them in. 

The young people I know are sensible, intelligent people. Maybe we should have asked them because they couldn’t do a worse job.