Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
What else could they have done?
I`m concerned about the decision Scotland has made, but seems to me that the rest of the UK has no option but to follow it.
It irritates me, I must admit, that the clever kids who didn`t try in their mocks because they were lazy and complacent could get away with this and come out with top grades just because their teachers think that`s they would have got top grades if they sat the exam because they are clever.
Once the decision was taken to close everything and keep it closed for months, there was nothing, of course, that could be done. One of the lessons of Covid is that should there, heaven forfend, be another pandemic flap to deal with after this one, then we won't throw a whole cohort of kids on the bonfire if it becomes obvious that they're about as likely to perish of the illness as they are to be struck by lightning. But we are where we are.
Scotland can do what Scotland does, why should the rest of us pay any attention? Another important lesson of Covid is that the UK is now a loose confederacy of four states that do whatever they please in most areas of domestic policy. If we think they're wrong we should just do something completely different.
To be fair to them, clever kids who couldn't be arsed with mocks can hardly be faulted for not having the foresight to see a plague (and the authorities' reaction to it) rocking up at precisely the moment that meant it would wipe out all their exams.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
What else could they have done?
I`m concerned about the decision Scotland has made, but seems to me that the rest of the UK has no option but to follow it.
It irritates me, I must admit, that the clever kids who didn`t try in their mocks because they were lazy and complacent could get away with this and come out with top grades just because their teachers think that`s they would have got top grades if they sat the exam because they are clever.
That's unnecessarily moralistic about the "clever kids who didn't try." Exams reward cleverness and the object is to reproduce the effect of exams, not improve on it.
It follows from this that any procedure for awarding grades has to be unfair if it is to be accurate, because life is unfair. Take 10 candidates all exactly equally capable of getting A* in an exam. In the real world 2 or 3 of them will always underperform, because we all have bad days in general and have all had exam disappointments in particular. There is not much of a countervailing tendency to outperform, because generally speaking we all have shit days about 100x as much as exceptionally good ones, and specifically the A* cohort can't outperform anyway because there is nowhere to go. So an accurate algorithm must randomly and unfairly mark down 2 of the 10 candidates, or it ceases to be accurate.
The headline finding is almost useless in and of itself. The question should be: what changed since 2017?
The robotic Theresa was replaced by Boris the showman and Corbyn's 2019 manifesto was an uncoordinated shambles.
Yes, both those points are correct. However, neither is the same as saying the problem was Corbyn personally, which was what the polls found. (So that raises another question: were poll respondents blaming Corbyn as shorthand for one of these other factors?)
I think it was a gestalt of factors rather than a single one. Boris looked better than TMay, in 2019 Corbyn was a proven election loser thanks to 2017, the British public has never liked Marxism since the 1970s and Corbyn put a lot of Marxists in post giving the Tories easy targets to attack.
Corbyn also showed almost zero interest in any current political topic of the time and was apparently more interested in preparing for the socialist utopia to come instead of offering an alternative to the govt of the day.
Come 2019 and what was on offer to the electorate? Nothing that was going to make their lives better.
I sort-of agree about there being multiple factors but that is not what the polls in OGH's header found. I think the polls are at best misleading and probably just wrong.
OGH's graph in the header suggests that Labour was more disliked than Brexit, but Brexit was a fact whereas Corbyn was a possibility so not really comparable IMO
Mike's graph is about those folk who changed their vote away from Labour between 2017 and 2019. Even the relatively small number who shifted over Brexit don't say why. For at least some it may have been a move to LDs, SNP and Greens to a more clearly anti Brexit party, particularly so in London and SE. Swinson for all her failures did increase the LD popular vote from 8 to 12%.
It does indicate that folk didn't like the Labour leadership, but not why. Mostly the novelty of Corbyn wore off as his toxicity and vacuity became clear.
Worth noting too that Corbyns best performance was a hundred seats worse than Blairs worst performance.
Bad as Corbyn was you have to go back to the 1970s to see Labour winning elections with one glaring exception - the one many Labour supporters and probably a big majority of members are wholly embarrassed by. But he was the only one who could take the public with him - the rest simply couldn't do it.
I joined the Labour Party in the mid nineties and voted New Labour in 1997 and 2001. I quit the party in 2003 because of 2 things: 1) the warmongering 2) the increased marketisation and privatisation of the NHS. With this it was not just the policy itself, but also that it was a betrayal of the 1997 pledge to abolish the internal market.
Iraq hangs like an albatross around the neck of Blair, and was in many ways part of the rise of Corbyn.
Well, I wholly disagree with your beliefs but that is neither here nor there. The voters never really left Blair as such but many stopped voting Labour after he went. I suspect the members and voters may have deserted for largely different reasons - the latter because they tend to vote centre left or right in most elections and while the country as a whole has become much more socially liberal in the last 30 years on many issues they lean much more to the right economically and one issues relating to immigration. On Iraq - clearly massive mistakes were made afterwards but I don't miss Saddam Hussein.
I don't know if you've watched Once Upon a Time in Iraq (everyone should I think) but there's a strand going going through it suggesting that the massive, massive mistakes made afterwards negated any benefits from Saddam being removed. Some Iraqis who detested Saddam and lost family to him, hate the US (and presumably us) even more for the way we comprehensively fcuked their country.
Of course a decent chunk of voters stopped voting Labour while Blair was still around (4m in eight years). Ed got almost as many votes in 2015 as TB did in 2005, and Corbyn more in both 2017 and 2019. It's interesting to consider if Blair could have bullshitted his way out of the great financial crash if he'd stuck around, the trajectory of his vote winning ways suggests not.
Everyone should watch once upon a time in Iraq, I agree. I don’t blame the Iraqi people for hating us and the US. However watching it makes clear the utter irrelevance of the British govt in the whole venture. Iraq should go down as the biggest foreign policy disaster since the war.
The UK didn't even get much of a chance to wet their beaks on the post-war arms sale bonanza. A bit of body armour and some USB cables. The Russians did a lot better and they opposed the whole thing.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
I thought they had binned most of that work ?
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
No. It goes beyond that. The system has demonstrated it is fundamentally flawed. Civil Servants of low grade should not be running exams.
This has got to lead to fundamental reform if anyone is to have confidence in the exam systems.
The only problem is nobody in government has either the imagination or executive ability to carry such reform through. And worse, some think they do and are wrong.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
No. It goes beyond that. The system has demonstrated it is fundamentally flawed. Civil Servants of low grade should not be running exams.
This has got to lead to fundamental reform if anyone is to have confidence in the exam systems.
The only problem is nobody in government has either the imagination or executive ability to carry such reform through. And worse, some think they do and are wrong.
Gove "fixed" it once...
The irony being of course that most of his plans worked in the opposite way to his intentions.
So either his plans were stupid and ill thought through, or OFQUAL and the DfE ran rings round him because they are cleverer than him.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Of course, everybody takes GCSEs, even in the purple wall*
*Purple as it is contested electoral territory, it is no longer a red wall and neither is it a blue one.
Not really a wall them is it?
The metaphor of a castle wall with a breach in it always sucked anyway
The headline finding is almost useless in and of itself. The question should be: what changed since 2017?
The robotic Theresa was replaced by Boris the showman and Corbyn's 2019 manifesto was an uncoordinated shambles.
Yes, both those points are correct. However, neither is the same as saying the problem was Corbyn personally, which was what the polls found. (So that raises another question: were poll respondents blaming Corbyn as shorthand for one of these other factors?)
I think it was a gestalt of factors rather than a single one. Boris looked better than TMay, in 2019 Corbyn was a proven election loser thanks to 2017, the British public has never liked Marxism since the 1970s and Corbyn put a lot of Marxists in post giving the Tories easy targets to attack.
Corbyn also showed almost zero interest in any current political topic of the time and was apparently more interested in preparing for the socialist utopia to come instead of offering an alternative to the govt of the day.
Come 2019 and what was on offer to the electorate? Nothing that was going to make their lives better.
I sort-of agree about there being multiple factors but that is not what the polls in OGH's header found. I think the polls are at best misleading and probably just wrong.
OGH's graph in the header suggests that Labour was more disliked than Brexit, but Brexit was a fact whereas Corbyn was a possibility so not really comparable IMO
Mike's graph is about those folk who changed their vote away from Labour between 2017 and 2019. Even the relatively small number who shifted over Brexit don't say why. For at least some it may have been a move to LDs, SNP and Greens to a more clearly anti Brexit party, particularly so in London and SE. Swinson for all her failures did increase the LD popular vote from 8 to 12%.
It does indicate that folk didn't like the Labour leadership, but not why. Mostly the novelty of Corbyn wore off as his toxicity and vacuity became clear.
Worth noting too that Corbyns best performance was a hundred seats worse than Blairs worst performance.
Bad as Corbyn was you have to go back to the 1970s to see Labour winning elections with one glaring exception - the one many Labour supporters and probably a big majority of members are wholly embarrassed by. But he was the only one who could take the public with him - the rest simply couldn't do it.
I joined the Labour Party in the mid nineties and voted New Labour in 1997 and 2001. I quit the party in 2003 because of 2 things: 1) the warmongering 2) the increased marketisation and privatisation of the NHS. With this it was not just the policy itself, but also that it was a betrayal of the 1997 pledge to abolish the internal market.
Iraq hangs like an albatross around the neck of Blair, and was in many ways part of the rise of Corbyn.
Blair's Iraq policy is the epitome of an unforced error. Wilson was very sympathetic to LBJ on social policy, but kept his distance over Vietnam. The recent BBC2 series on Iraq showed what a disaster the aftermath of the invasion turned out to be. Saddam was evil personified, and deserved removal but the way the Americans conducted things after 'victory' will be in the textbooks as an example of how not to do things!
I was passionately opposed to the Iraq war at the time, but when you have the entire force of the US government pressing you to join them it's s stretch to call it an unforced error. The UK is a lot less powerful relative to the US than it was during Vietnam in military and diplomatic terms (and is even more reliant on the US now, of course, post Brexit). We could have stayed out of the Iraq misadventure, and should have, but the US would have punished us for it.
I've never thought Blair's policy was based around fear of US punishment. He thought that the World would be a much more dangerous place if US was completely isolated (but went ahead anyway), and thought that by offering complete support that wouldn't happen.
Simpler than that: Blair believed what he was saying. Remember that before Iraq, Tony Blair had undertaken several military interventions, for instance in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
Morning all. I posted this last night but I will repeat it since it’s missing from this linked paper.
Singapore has had +55k confirmed infections and only 27 deaths. There are only 83 still in hospital and all are said to be stable/improving with none in ICU. So Singapore’s CFR is < 0.1%.
So why is that? We can hypothesise all we like about low viral loads due to mask wearing or cultural factors. But almost nowhere in APAC has been severely affected by covid, despite it being the area with the highest preponderance of travellers from inland mainland China.
So why are studies like the linked one here ignoring that? Singapore really does have a very very low CFR. It’s possible it’s barely missed a case and we’ve missed millions in our estimates. And that everywhere has a CFR much less than 1%. But where are the cascades of deaths in the much larger Vietnam and Indonesia?
Seems to me the background immunity theory has strong merit (from a previous corona outbreak?) and it just depends on how widespread it was in a given population that determines the severity of a cv-19 outbreak.
Without a recent detailed country study (which I’ve not been able to find), it’s hard to say. What is the age profile of their infected ? All I can find is a note on wikipedia that the “vast majority” of infections has been in migrant worker dorms, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Singapore FWIW, they are almost certain to be under 60, and most considerably younger.
The IFR in China has been nowhere near as low.
Migrant workers is the story of the Singapore outbreak. But given Singapore has such excellent stats, why leave it out this study? At worst it supports the risk stratification of control measures. But what of Vietnam? 20 something recorded deaths? Indonesia, comparable population to the US at only 5k? And even Japan? This is a super Western centric study which is odd given the virus had an Asian epicentre.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
The levels of incompetence really are spellbinding. To be treating young people in this way - unless they are privately educated, of course - shows just how much contempt the government has for them and reveals levelling up to be no more than a clever electoral slogan. If Cummings were serious about it, he would not be doing what he is.
These jibes at privately educated children are getting a bit tiresome, to be honest. My daughter goes to a private school and I can assure you they these pupils - and their parents - are as concerned as anyone.
The fact is that privately educated kids have not been downgraded in the way state school pupils have. That’s not their fault, but it’s what has happened. It’s not levelling up. A government that cared about such an agenda would have spotted the issue and done all it could to mitigate it. But Boris Johnson put Gavin Williamson in charge of education, which tells you exactly what priority he gives it.
No-one has been "downgraded". You make it sound that the centre assessed grades were final grades in the first place. They were always to be subject to moderation.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
While I'm here, on Priti Patel, migrants and France. I have a suspicion that there is a simple reason that some young, fit migrants choose not to stay in France but try to get here. My suspicion is that it is much harder to be invisible in France and to work illegally, cash in hand, as regulations on this in France are much more rigorously enforced. In the UK, it's a doddle to earn money outside of the scope of the authorities. I accept my theory may be nonsense, however.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
A-level grades have always differed wildly from subject to subject, from year to year, and even from girls to boys. Don't let the government fool you there is some ideal or "true" level from the past -- their algorithm was based on a false supposition.
Morning all. I posted this last night but I will repeat it since it’s missing from this linked paper.
Singapore has had +55k confirmed infections and only 27 deaths. There are only 83 still in hospital and all are said to be stable/improving with none in ICU. So Singapore’s CFR is < 0.1%.
So why is that? We can hypothesise all we like about low viral loads due to mask wearing or cultural factors. But almost nowhere in APAC has been severely affected by covid, despite it being the area with the highest preponderance of travellers from inland mainland China.
So why are studies like the linked one here ignoring that? Singapore really does have a very very low CFR. It’s possible it’s barely missed a case and we’ve missed millions in our estimates. And that everywhere has a CFR much less than 1%. But where are the cascades of deaths in the much larger Vietnam and Indonesia?
Seems to me the background immunity theory has strong merit (from a previous corona outbreak?) and it just depends on how widespread it was in a given population that determines the severity of a cv-19 outbreak.
Without a recent detailed country study (which I’ve not been able to find), it’s hard to say. What is the age profile of their infected ? All I can find is a note on wikipedia that the “vast majority” of infections has been in migrant worker dorms, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Singapore FWIW, they are almost certain to be under 60, and most considerably younger.
The IFR in China has been nowhere near as low.
Migrant workers is the story of the Singapore outbreak. But given Singapore has such excellent stats, why leave it out this study? At worst it supports the risk stratification of control measures. But what of Vietnam? 20 something recorded deaths? Indonesia, comparable population to the US at only 5k? And even Japan? This is a super Western centric study which is odd given the virus had an Asian epicentre.
The study was a review paper of existing studies. As I said, I can’t find the data for Singapore; no doubt it will emerge in time - but that is down to the countries themselves rather than some scientific establishment bias.
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
Government, management and unions all contributed to the mess.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
I thought they had binned most of that work ?
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
They haven`t binned all the work!
The schools provided two sets of information which were intimately connected: 1) individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject and 2) a top-to-bottom pupil league for each subject based on 1).
2) has been retained and matched against the algorithm (which seeks to keep standards broadly consistent to previous years at that particular school).
As I posted yesterday, if you think the outcomes are unfair, you are saying either that grades should NOT be consistent with prior years (i.e. there should be grade inflation) or that the teacher rankings were innacurate. (If you are alleging the latter then bear in mind that this works both ways).
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
Lack of investment meant that new models had to be cobbled together by reusing parts of older and obsolete cars.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
No. It goes beyond that. The system has demonstrated it is fundamentally flawed. Civil Servants of low grade should not be running exams.
This has got to lead to fundamental reform if anyone is to have confidence in the exam systems.
The only problem is nobody in government has either the imagination or executive ability to carry such reform through. And worse, some think they do and are wrong.
Gove "fixed" it once...
The irony being of course that most of his plans worked in the opposite way to his intentions.
So either his plans were stupid and ill thought through, or OFQUAL and the DfE ran rings round him because they are cleverer than him.
Either are possible.
Have a good morning.
The Cummings/Gove reforms to seem to have failed by their own metric of restoring academic rigour and credibility.
On that note, most of Fox Jr's contemporaries had a remark of at least one exam, often with quite an upgrade as a result. When did this become a thing? I don't recall it happening at all when I took my O and A levels in the early eighties.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
That's the old Tories. Boris has just ennobled his own brother and is now planning yet another honours list (or punningly titled "donors list") because some of his pals were turned down after a lifetime's service writing cheques for CCHQ.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Actually I think that it is just there is so much fire fighting going on at the moment that people aren’t having the headspace to work through all the scenario analysis they would in normal times.
People joke that government is slow - it is, but that’s because problems are much more complex than in the private sector.
Interesting that Labour's stance on Brexit cost it most in London, presumably through defections to the LDs while Corbyn cost it most in the North and Midlands, presumably through defections to the Tories
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Elton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
Elton came from Watford, a great example of equality of opportunity
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
That is certainly true. VW were on their knees.
My point was that Robinson's rhetoric was echoed forty years later by Corbyn's crowd. Few were listening on either occasion.
My neighbour was a Shop Steward at a supplier to Longbridge and rubbed shoulders with Robbo. His view was Robinson was more interested in a Soviet style overthrow of the then Labour Government than saving industry Jobs.
Militant trade unionists and politicians have come and gone. In my lifetime there have only been two genuine heroes that have cut through to the working classes. Both were Conservatives, Thatcher and Johnson. Not that I personally ever saw the attraction in either.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Elton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
A moderately talented musician making a great career is a good example of social mobility... 😝
Abolishing Eton and the like (as you imply) is a negative approach. I’d rather work hard to remove any road blocks that restrict the ability of talented people from modest or challenged backgrounds to achieve their full potential. That’s far more productive than the envious emotional response you espoused
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Actually I think that it is just there is so much fire fighting going on at the moment that people aren’t having the headspace to work through all the scenario analysis they would in normal times.
People joke that government is slow - it is, but that’s because problems are much more complex than in the private sector.
If they thought it was a problem they would have fixed it.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Excuse me, you've got the wrong end of the stick - I would be the last person to say state school pupils aren't clever! I was making an educational point - both in private and state schools, A-level entrants for the subjects I mentioned have, on average, very high GCSE scores. You're right about the funding of small class sizes, which is why I am an advocate of gradually shutting down small school sixth forms and a massive expansion of sixth form colleges, which are the beacon of post-16 comprehensive, state education.
Interesting that Labour's stance on Brexit cost it most in London, presumably through defections to the LDs while Corbyn cost it most in the North and Midlands, presumably through defections to the Tories
The two, I think, are related. A more respected, liked, and articulate leader would have had much more flexibility to plot his own course on Brexit. You could have pitched a soft version of it and maybe got away with it in the northern Brexity areas if those voters thought you were otherwise alright - and not an unpatriotic goon. Similarly, people who generally lean Tory or Lib Dem but were staunch remainers might well have either lent their vote or got on board if they didn't think it'd mean putting someone bonkers at best, and actively malign towards them at worst, in no. 10.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
That's the old Tories. Boris has just ennobled his own brother and is now planning yet another honours list (or punningly titled "donors list") because some of his pals were turned down after a lifetime's service writing cheques for CCHQ.
I don’t have access to the telegraph, but there are multiple peer creations each year (New Year, Birthday, Dissolution, ad hoc working peers) so it’s not that the PM is doing anything unique
(this should not be taken as a defence if the current system which is not working effectively because it has been corrupted by politicians)
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
Lack of investment meant that new models had to be cobbled together by reusing parts of older and obsolete cars.
As a youngster, I was a keen biker. I recall reading this fascinating book about the decline of the British motorcycle industry, from one of the three biggest export earners in the mid Sixties, to complete collapse a decade later.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
What else could they have done?
I`m concerned about the decision Scotland has made, but seems to me that the rest of the UK has no option but to follow it.
It irritates me, I must admit, that the clever kids who didn`t try in their mocks because they were lazy and complacent could get away with this and come out with top grades just because their teachers think that`s they would have got top grades if they sat the exam because they are clever.
That's unnecessarily moralistic about the "clever kids who didn't try." Exams reward cleverness and the object is to reproduce the effect of exams, not improve on it.
It follows from this that any procedure for awarding grades has to be unfair if it is to be accurate, because life is unfair. Take 10 candidates all exactly equally capable of getting A* in an exam. In the real world 2 or 3 of them will always underperform, because we all have bad days in general and have all had exam disappointments in particular. There is not much of a countervailing tendency to outperform, because generally speaking we all have shit days about 100x as much as exceptionally good ones, and specifically the A* cohort can't outperform anyway because there is nowhere to go. So an accurate algorithm must randomly and unfairly mark down 2 of the 10 candidates, or it ceases to be accurate.
I`m not criticising the algorithm (that`s only because I don`t fully understand it) and I accept what you say.
Here`s my beef: I know - as a fact, through conversations with teachers and the deputy head - that when the school learned from Ofqual that it had to come up with exam predictions based on actual evidence that the school panicked that it had insufficient evidence to support top grades for some of the pupils they regarded as clever. Especially those which didn`t try hard in the mocks. And those parents would be unhappy.
So the school introduced lockdown work which could be used to bolster their assessments if needed and, importantly, introduced additional pieces of "evidence" including IQ (cognitive ability test) test scores. I`m annoyed because my daughter, through the rankings, will have been disadvantaged by this for certain and I don`t think this is fair when whe worked her nuts off to do well in the mocks (note: "well" for my daughter means a 5 or 6 not a 8 or 9 grade).
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
The Tories got 47% amongst those with household income of £20 to £40k at election 2019 ie the lower middle class and skilled working class but only 40% amongst those on £70k plus ie the upper middle class more likely to educate their children privately
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Elton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
A moderately talented musician making a great career is a good example of social mobility... 😝
Abolishing Eton and the like (as you imply) is a negative approach. I’d rather work hard to remove any road blocks that restrict the ability of talented people from modest or challenged backgrounds to achieve their full potential. That’s far more productive than the envious emotional response you espoused
But the tories don’t, schools will suffer badly as the economic crisis unfolds as will what’s left of services such as remaining youth clubs and other support. Does Eton suffer education cuts? I doubt it. Whilst the system is run by people who have benefited from it nothing much will change as they self justify its existence. It’s like the voting system, it doesn’t matter how corrupt it is if it serves your objectives your not going to change it.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Actually I think that it is just there is so much fire fighting going on at the moment that people aren’t having the headspace to work through all the scenario analysis they would in normal times.
People joke that government is slow - it is, but that’s because problems are much more complex than in the private sector.
If they thought it was a problem they would have fixed it.
They are focused on getting schools open. There is just too much in the”stuff that needed to be done yesterday” to get the right level of senior focus. It may be that the bias in the algorithm was noted but it wasn’t escalated to a level where it could be fixed. That’s a question of prioritisation nothing else - and way below the level of politicians.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
The Allegro actually had some worthy ideas (Issigonis had a hand in it, after all) such the concept of interior habitation and a very stiff monocoque. The Hydragas suspension introduced on it was still in production in 2002!
The original Paul Hughes penned ADO16 concept didn't look terrible either although it obviously had some Peugeot influences. The financial disaster of the BMC/Leyland merger scuppered further much needed development.
Legend has it that the challenging rotund shape came from a mistake in the pressing tools for the panels but as the mission statement at The Plughole of Despair was "That'll have to do." they went ahead and moved to production anyway.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
I thought they had binned most of that work ?
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
No they haven`t binned all that work!
The schools provided two sets of information which were intimately connected: 1) individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject and 2) a top-to-bottom pupil league for each subject based on 1).
2) has been retained and matched against the algorithm (which seeks to keep standards broadly consistent to previous years at that particular school).
As I posted yesterday, if you think the outcomes are unfair, you are saying either that grades should NOT be consistent with prior years (i.e. there should be grade inflation) or that the teacher rankings were innacurate. (If you are alleging the latter then bear in mind that this works both ways).
Effectively yes, they did bin that work.
From Ofqual’s own paper explaining their process: ... We proposed an approach that placed more weight on statistical expectations - determining the most likely distribution of grades for each centre based on the previous performance of the centre and the prior attainment profile of this year’s students. Then using the submitted rank order to assign grades to individual students in line with this expected grade distribution. We noted that the likely result of this approach would be that the final calculated grades received by centres would more often differ from those submitted...
So they retained rank order predictions, and statistically minimised any input from predicted grades.
Grading to a curve is prehistoric claptrap. What links the success of the Parthian Empire, the creators of Instagram and Isombard Kingdom Brunel? None of them were graded on a curve which neglects super genius.
The real answer is DfE should have used machine learning quantum AI to determine based on the Facebook profile of students what their grades would be. Whole thing should have been outsourced to Palantir years ago as I advocated at the time (link to recently edited Blog post from 10 years ago).
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
While I'm here, on Priti Patel, migrants and France. I have a suspicion that there is a simple reason that some young, fit migrants choose not to stay in France but try to get here. My suspicion is that it is much harder to be invisible in France and to work illegally, cash in hand, as regulations on this in France are much more rigorously enforced. In the UK, it's a doddle to earn money outside of the scope of the authorities. I accept my theory may be nonsense, however.
I think it is definitely part that but also a lot around the fact in France et al, you need things like identity cards, health insurance to use the hospital etc that you do not need here. The UK is an easy society to disappear into compared with other European countries.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Broadly consistent at a population level. For given individuals, arbitrarily all over the place.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
I thought they had binned most of that work ?
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
No they haven`t binned all that work!
The schools provided two sets of information which were intimately connected: 1) individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject and 2) a top-to-bottom pupil league for each subject based on 1).
2) has been retained and matched against the algorithm (which seeks to keep standards broadly consistent to previous years at that particular school).
As I posted yesterday, if you think the outcomes are unfair, you are saying either that grades should NOT be consistent with prior years (i.e. there should be grade inflation) or that the teacher rankings were innacurate. (If you are alleging the latter then bear in mind that this works both ways).
Effectively yes, they did bin that work.
From Ofqual’s own paper explaining their process: ... We proposed an approach that placed more weight on statistical expectations - determining the most likely distribution of grades for each centre based on the previous performance of the centre and the prior attainment profile of this year’s students. Then using the submitted rank order to assign grades to individual students in line with this expected grade distribution. We noted that the likely result of this approach would be that the final calculated grades received by centres would more often differ from those submitted...
So they retained rank order predictions, and statistically minimised any input from predicted grades.
Yes. That`s what I said. The rank order predictions were entirely the teachers` work. So the outcome - i.e. pupil A got a higher grade that pupil B was down to the teachers ranking. The algorithm tempered overall grade inflation (which was bound to happen unless one is naive) to mirror previous years. It is not true to say that teachers` assessments of their pupils was not part of this - it was an integral part.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Elton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
A moderately talented musician making a great career is a good example of social mobility... 😝
Abolishing Eton and the like (as you imply) is a negative approach. I’d rather work hard to remove any road blocks that restrict the ability of talented people from modest or challenged backgrounds to achieve their full potential. That’s far more productive than the envious emotional response you espoused
But the tories don’t, schools will suffer badly as the economic crisis unfolds as will what’s left of services such as remaining youth clubs and other support. Does Eton suffer education cuts? I doubt it. Whilst the system is run by people who have benefited from it nothing much will change as they self justify its existence. It’s like the voting system, it doesn’t matter how corrupt it is if it serves your objectives your not going to change it.
The King Henry VI Foundation responded to Covid by donating £100m from its unrestricted funds to support education for disadvantaged kids in the Midlands, East Anglia and the North. The King’s College itself is a flagship means-blind school for educating talented kids to work in the public sector.
Most of the criticism relates to the Town houses which are operated at a surplus to support the Foundation’s charitable activities.
I see the next part of the government’s levelling up agenda is to find ways to throw more money at Dido Harding.
Oxford PPE, married to a Tory party MP, uninspired performance running T and T.
Just as well we got rid of those unelected metropolitan elites.
Indeed, it’s all very ‘new labour’ how it works at the moment.
Not really, New Labour was competent.
With a capital ‘IN’ Ah, rose tinted glasses. A wonderful thing. Like all governments they did some things well, had an army of quangocrats and cronies over promoted and had many major cock ups. Sending troops to war without the proper protective equipment and useless snatch land rovers was a belter. Some soldiers families bought equipment to protect them.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Broadly consistent at a population level. For given individuals, arbitrarily all over the place.
Yes. But that’s why they took into account (a) prior work and (b) school ranking of individuals.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. They’re shit and don’t understand basic educational processes.
Can`t believe I`ve woken up to this news - I actually slept well last night! First time in ages.
I am desperately sorry for all parents caught up in this - the likes of you, Scrapheap, Eek, RP. It’s bad enough for me, I hate to think what you’re going through.
But I am afraid that the problem lies not with your daughter’s school, who from what you have said have done all the right things, but with OFQUAL and the government.
They are amply and cruelly displaying how shite they are, and why they need removing and replacing.
At bottom, though, they are trying to get to an outcome which mirrors overall gradings from previous years to maintain the integrity of this year`s results and are seeking the input of teachers as to which pupil, in their opinion, would have got the highest grades, by league, top to bottom.
I thought they had binned most of that work ?
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
No they haven`t binned all that work!
The schools provided two sets of information which were intimately connected: 1) individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject and 2) a top-to-bottom pupil league for each subject based on 1).
2) has been retained and matched against the algorithm (which seeks to keep standards broadly consistent to previous years at that particular school).
As I posted yesterday, if you think the outcomes are unfair, you are saying either that grades should NOT be consistent with prior years (i.e. there should be grade inflation) or that the teacher rankings were innacurate. (If you are alleging the latter then bear in mind that this works both ways).
Effectively yes, they did bin that work.
From Ofqual’s own paper explaining their process: ... We proposed an approach that placed more weight on statistical expectations - determining the most likely distribution of grades for each centre based on the previous performance of the centre and the prior attainment profile of this year’s students. Then using the submitted rank order to assign grades to individual students in line with this expected grade distribution. We noted that the likely result of this approach would be that the final calculated grades received by centres would more often differ from those submitted...
So they retained rank order predictions, and statistically minimised any input from predicted grades.
Yes. That`s what I said. The rank order predictions were entirely the teachers` work. So the outcome - i.e. pupil A got a higher grade that pupil B was down to the teachers ranking. The algorithm tempered overall grade inflation (which was bound to happen unless one is naive) to mirror previous years. It is not true to say that teachers` assessments of their pupils was not part of this - it was an integral part.
Most of the work was the “ individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject”, though.
Grading to a curve is prehistoric claptrap. What links the success of the Parthian Empire, the creators of Instagram and Isombard Kingdom Brunel? None of them were graded on a curve which neglects super genius.
The real answer is DfE should have used machine learning quantum AI to determine based on the Facebook profile of students what their grades would be. Whole thing should have been outsourced to Palantir years ago as I advocated at the time (link to recently edited Blog post from 10 years ago).
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Do you not think Corbyn would have liked to do that but was unable to.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
There can be no fairness within the year when some schools have over-predicted results and some schools haven't.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
"...it was the Cameron government that “bundled” it up with the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in 2012, against the advice of civil servants.
The HPA - which sounds suspiciously similar to the newly proposed National Institute for Health Protection - was properly devolved and had dedicated responsibility for protecting England from infectious diseases and environmental hazards before the merger." (Telegraph)
We now have a Conservative government undoing the work of itself.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
Perhaps they should have moved away from traditional grading completely, instead of going to A-E, they could have gone 1-10, rank them by percentile, or something like the university, third, 2:2, 2:1, first instead. It would have disadvantages as well but takes away the comparisons with previous years issue.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
When was Johnson on holiday? He seemed to be doing his job yesterday morning on live TV.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Do you not think Corbyn would have liked to do that but was unable to.
Corbyn was weak and gave in to Starmer etc who called this completely wrong.
Earlier in the process Corbyn was actually smartly ordering a whipped abstention on key votes to facilitate Brexit and respect the referendum. He stopped doing that which helped make May weak but Johnson strong.
Once Johnson came back with his deal the smart thing to do would have been to say that a deal is better than no deal so Labour would abstain on the vote and then it would have gone through. He could then have turned his attacks on what he would change in the future and "Get Brexit Done" would have been neutralised.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
If they'd had Kier Starmer or similar they could have done the GNU leading to who-knows-what outcome, although I guess you can also argue that if that had been a possibility Boris wouldn't have amputated a chunk of his majority and handed it over to the opposition.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
When was Johnson on holiday? He seemed to be doing his job yesterday morning on live TV.
It starts today I believe. Scotland. Rumours of camping.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
No. It goes beyond that. The system has demonstrated it is fundamentally flawed. Civil Servants of low grade should not be running exams.
This has got to lead to fundamental reform if anyone is to have confidence in the exam systems.
The only problem is nobody in government has either the imagination or executive ability to carry such reform through. And worse, some think they do and are wrong.
Gove "fixed" it once...
The irony being of course that most of his plans worked in the opposite way to his intentions.
So either his plans were stupid and ill thought through, or OFQUAL and the DfE ran rings round him because they are cleverer than him.
Either are possible.
Have a good morning.
The Cummings/Gove reforms to seem to have failed by their own metric of restoring academic rigour and credibility.
On that note, most of Fox Jr's contemporaries had a remark of at least one exam, often with quite an upgrade as a result. When did this become a thing? I don't recall it happening at all when I took my O and A levels in the early eighties.
There were no remarks and no appeals, you got what you got and if you didn't like it you had to resit the exam the following year.
I wonder how much higher overall grades each year are after all the appeals than the initially announced number.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
And as previously posted, the algorithm has not achieved that -- at least not at the level of individual subjects -- and the aim was chimeric anyway because historically there has long been wide variation.
Of course; it is a flawed measure in any event. But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
Ash, Aaron and Stats For Lefties went down the rabbit hole as I did but unfortunately they're still stuck down there, I've had to dig myself out.
The truth is - and I've come to accept this post the election - is that we went in with the wrong leader and the wrong policies.
I supported the leader at the time (less since) and many of the policies but we simply have to accept as a party that the electorate are not where we are.
That doesn't mean abandoning our principles and becoming Tory-lite again, I passionately believe that will not result in a victory either.
We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want and how we appeal to voters we've lost not only between 2017 and 2019 but also the voters we've lost since 2005.
Corbyn himself torpedoed any chance of success I think (from hindsight) with his response to the Russian poisonings. I think up until then Labour still polled relatively well and whilst he was still polling badly, it wasn't the -60 he polled soon after that.
Frankly, he was a bad leader, with bad policies and a completely dysfunctional advisory team who evidently didn't have a clue what they were doing. He should have quit after 2017 and we should have had Keir take over then.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It was certainly a core part of Thatcherism, probably its best part imo, but to be honest really don't see it in the modern day Tory party.
If it is a genuine priority for the Tories then they are failing as their own reports show increasing divides and declining social mobility over the last decade.
Corbyn was electoral poison. The polls had been telling everyone that for a long, long time, so it’s no surprise that when Labour failed to listen the voters told us again - and this time at the ballot box.
But it wasn’t just Corbyn himself. It was those he brought in to advise him, the ridiculously weak shadow cabinet, and the media outliers like Owen Jones, Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar all over the TV screens. If the Tories could have designed an opposition from scratch, it’s hard to think what they would have changed about Corbyn Labour.
So now the party has a massive rebuild to go through. The one thing to remember is this: in the last internal Momentum election, held in the spring, 8,500 people voted. Keir Starmer was elected by 276,000 Labour members.
The far-left is furious and it is very, very loud. But it is a rump.
An old picture of Derek Robinson standing on a wooden box, megaphone in hand, shouting nonsense at a few hundred like minded militants sums it all up for me. That was Corbyn forty years on, preaching to the converted.
I don't know much about Bastani's background, but the working class warriors that are Jones and Sarkar have never had to do a day's graft in their lives.
Red Robbo was right about one thing: the need for investment in the car industry, like the Germans got at the time.
The problems of the British motor industry in the Seventies was more than unions. Bad new designs, ageing older designs, poor quality control etc.
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
Ford were able to produce vehicles which people wanted to buy.
Whereas BL didn't.
Its hard to imagine Bodie and Doyle driving anything from Longbridge.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
There can be no fairness within the year when some schools have over-predicted results and some schools haven't.
There could have been better means of adjusting for that, which Ofqual considered and discarded. As they discarded all the work on predicted results.
The 1.02 of the last few days has dried up. It is now 1.01 on Betfair against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump being nominated at the conventions this week and next. You can still get 1.04 against Mike Pence being Republican VP nominee, even though the buzz around Nikki Haley seems to have gone away.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Ash, Aaron and Stats For Lefties went down the rabbit hole as I did but unfortunately they're still stuck down there, I've had to dig myself out.
The truth is - and I've come to accept this post the election - is that we went in with the wrong leader and the wrong policies.
I supported the leader at the time (less since) and many of the policies but we simply have to accept as a party that the electorate are not where we are.
That doesn't mean abandoning our principles and becoming Tory-lite again, I passionately believe that will not result in a victory either.
We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want and how we appeal to voters we've lost not only between 2017 and 2019 but also the voters we've lost since 2005.
Corbyn himself torpedoed any chance of success I think (from hindsight) with his response to the Russian poisonings. I think up until then Labour still polled relatively well and whilst he was still polling badly, it wasn't the -60 he polled soon after that.
Frankly, he was a bad leader, with bad policies and a completely dysfunctional advisory team who evidently didn't have a clue what they were doing. He should have quit after 2017 and we should have had Keir take over then.
"We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want"
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Broadly consistent at a population level. For given individuals, arbitrarily all over the place.
Yes. But that’s why they took into account (a) prior work and (b) school ranking of individuals.
They only took into account prior work at a group regional level. They ignored it at an individual level.
Ash, Aaron and Stats For Lefties went down the rabbit hole as I did but unfortunately they're still stuck down there, I've had to dig myself out.
The truth is - and I've come to accept this post the election - is that we went in with the wrong leader and the wrong policies.
I supported the leader at the time (less since) and many of the policies but we simply have to accept as a party that the electorate are not where we are.
That doesn't mean abandoning our principles and becoming Tory-lite again, I passionately believe that will not result in a victory either.
We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want and how we appeal to voters we've lost not only between 2017 and 2019 but also the voters we've lost since 2005.
Corbyn himself torpedoed any chance of success I think (from hindsight) with his response to the Russian poisonings. I think up until then Labour still polled relatively well and whilst he was still polling badly, it wasn't the -60 he polled soon after that.
Frankly, he was a bad leader, with bad policies and a completely dysfunctional advisory team who evidently didn't have a clue what they were doing. He should have quit after 2017 and we should have had Keir take over then.
"We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want"
A job.
What do you think the unemployment rate will be in 2024? I expect it will be under 6%
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It was certainly a core part of Thatcherism, probably its best part imo, but to be honest really don't see it in the modern day Tory party.
If it is a genuine priority for the Tories then they are failing as their own reports show increasing divides and declining social mobility over the last decade.
The Conservatives morphed into a party of smug haves under Cameron though there has always been that element in the party along with the social mobility supporters.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
How can you support equality of opportunity while Eton and the like exist, it’s just lip serving bollocks
The Tories have been in power for 32 of the last 50 years. If they believe in equality of opportunity they have failed utterly to deliver it.
Comments
Scotland can do what Scotland does, why should the rest of us pay any attention? Another important lesson of Covid is that the UK is now a loose confederacy of four states that do whatever they please in most areas of domestic policy. If we think they're wrong we should just do something completely different.
To be fair to them, clever kids who couldn't be arsed with mocks can hardly be faulted for not having the foresight to see a plague (and the authorities' reaction to it) rocking up at precisely the moment that meant it would wipe out all their exams.
It follows from this that any procedure for awarding grades has to be unfair if it is to be accurate, because life is unfair. Take 10 candidates all exactly equally capable of getting A* in an exam. In the real world 2 or 3 of them will always underperform, because we all have bad days in general and have all had exam disappointments in particular. There is not much of a countervailing tendency to outperform, because generally speaking we all have shit days about 100x as much as exceptionally good ones, and specifically the A* cohort can't outperform anyway because there is nowhere to go. So an accurate algorithm must randomly and unfairly mark down 2 of the 10 candidates, or it ceases to be accurate.
In any event, this year’s results have no integrity, directly as a result of prioritising overall average grades over any other consideration - apparently to the extent of arbitrarily penalising random individuals, with the unfairness skewed towards poorer areas.
I don’t think anyone was attacking private school children, but rather pointing out factors (smaller class sizes, for example) which overall tend to skew the algorithm in their favour. That doesn’t mean they won’t also be at risk of arbitrary negative grading, of course.
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
So either his plans were stupid and ill thought through, or OFQUAL and the DfE ran rings round him because they are cleverer than him.
Either are possible.
Have a good morning.
Just as well we got rid of those unelected metropolitan elites.
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
The metaphor of a castle wall with a breach in it always sucked anyway
It wasn't the unions that invented the Allegro.
You can easily see from
https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level-results-2020-the-main-trends-in-grades-and-entries/
that this year is no exception in having wide and unexplained variation between subjects, even after the algorithm has done its work.
The schools provided two sets of information which were intimately connected: 1) individual centre-assessed grades for each pupil for each subject and 2) a top-to-bottom pupil league for each subject based on 1).
2) has been retained and matched against the algorithm (which seeks to keep standards broadly consistent to previous years at that particular school).
As I posted yesterday, if you think the outcomes are unfair, you are saying either that grades should NOT be consistent with prior years (i.e. there should be grade inflation) or that the teacher rankings were innacurate. (If you are alleging the latter then bear in mind that this works both ways).
Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
On that note, most of Fox Jr's contemporaries had a remark of at least one exam, often with quite an upgrade as a result. When did this become a thing? I don't recall it happening at all when I took my O and A levels in the early eighties.
Brexit played a major factor too.
But I would suggest the most important factor is one very little mentioned which is the changing housing market up here.
Mr Johnson has committed to a second list of peerages after several financial backers failed to make the list including Peter Cruddas and Johnny Leavesley, as well as former Tory MEP Dan Hannan.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/08/15/tom-watson-line-receive-peerage-nomination-sir-keir-starmer/
People joke that government is slow - it is, but that’s because problems are much more complex than in the private sector.
My point was that Robinson's rhetoric was echoed forty years later by Corbyn's crowd. Few were listening on either occasion.
My neighbour was a Shop Steward at a supplier to Longbridge and rubbed shoulders with Robbo. His view was Robinson was more interested in a Soviet style overthrow of the then Labour Government than saving industry Jobs.
Militant trade unionists and politicians have come and gone. In my lifetime there have only been two genuine heroes that have cut through to the working classes. Both were Conservatives, Thatcher and Johnson. Not that I personally ever saw the attraction in either.
Abolishing Eton and the like (as you imply) is a negative approach. I’d rather work hard to remove any road blocks that restrict the ability of talented people from modest or challenged backgrounds to achieve their full potential. That’s far more productive than the envious emotional response you espoused
(this should not be taken as a defence if the current system which is not working effectively because it has been corrupted by politicians)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1859604277/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_J2ooFbQCCHWHE
The same could be written about many other British industries over the postwar, pre EEC era.
Here`s my beef: I know - as a fact, through conversations with teachers and the deputy head - that when the school learned from Ofqual that it had to come up with exam predictions based on actual evidence that the school panicked that it had insufficient evidence to support top grades for some of the pupils they regarded as clever. Especially those which didn`t try hard in the mocks. And those parents would be unhappy.
So the school introduced lockdown work which could be used to bolster their assessments if needed and, importantly, introduced additional pieces of "evidence" including IQ (cognitive ability test) test scores. I`m annoyed because my daughter, through the rankings, will have been disadvantaged by this for certain and I don`t think this is fair when whe worked her nuts off to do well in the mocks (note: "well" for my daughter means a 5 or 6 not a 8 or 9 grade).
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election
The original Paul Hughes penned ADO16 concept didn't look terrible either although it obviously had some Peugeot influences. The financial disaster of the BMC/Leyland merger scuppered further much needed development.
Legend has it that the challenging rotund shape came from a mistake in the pressing tools for the panels but as the mission statement at The Plughole of Despair was "That'll have to do." they went ahead and moved to production anyway.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/15/phoney-depression-coming-close-soon-enough-will-real-painful/
Spoiler: It wont last once the furlough ends.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
From Ofqual’s own paper explaining their process:
... We proposed an approach that placed more weight on statistical expectations - determining the most likely distribution of grades for each centre based on the previous performance of the centre and the prior attainment profile of this year’s students. Then using the submitted rank order to assign grades to individual students in line with this expected grade distribution. We noted that the likely result of this approach would be that the final calculated grades received by centres would more often differ from those submitted...
So they retained rank order predictions, and statistically minimised any input from predicted grades.
Grading to a curve is prehistoric claptrap. What links the success of the Parthian Empire, the creators of Instagram and Isombard Kingdom Brunel? None of them were graded on a curve which neglects super genius.
The real answer is DfE should have used machine learning quantum AI to determine based on the Facebook profile of students what their grades would be. Whole thing should have been outsourced to Palantir years ago as I advocated at the time (link to recently edited Blog post from 10 years ago).
Most of the criticism relates to the Town houses which are operated at a surplus to support the Foundation’s charitable activities.
Sounds an ambitious timescale.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/08/15/matt-hancock-scrap-failing-public-health-england-13134454/?utm_source=upday&utm_medium=referral
... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable.
There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year.
The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
The HPA - which sounds suspiciously similar to the newly proposed National Institute for Health Protection - was properly devolved and had dedicated responsibility for protecting England from infectious diseases and environmental hazards before the merger."
(Telegraph)
We now have a Conservative government undoing the work of itself.
Earlier in the process Corbyn was actually smartly ordering a whipped abstention on key votes to facilitate Brexit and respect the referendum. He stopped doing that which helped make May weak but Johnson strong.
Once Johnson came back with his deal the smart thing to do would have been to say that a deal is better than no deal so Labour would abstain on the vote and then it would have gone through. He could then have turned his attacks on what he would change in the future and "Get Brexit Done" would have been neutralised.
I wonder how much higher overall grades each year are after all the appeals than the initially announced number.
But for inter-year fairness to have been prioritised in designing the algorithm, when this year was clearly going to be a historical anomaly, was entirely unnecessary. It introduced an extra set of randomness, not related to any individual student’s performance, without any real justification.
Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
The truth is - and I've come to accept this post the election - is that we went in with the wrong leader and the wrong policies.
I supported the leader at the time (less since) and many of the policies but we simply have to accept as a party that the electorate are not where we are.
That doesn't mean abandoning our principles and becoming Tory-lite again, I passionately believe that will not result in a victory either.
We need to work out what the electorate of 2024 is going to want and how we appeal to voters we've lost not only between 2017 and 2019 but also the voters we've lost since 2005.
Corbyn himself torpedoed any chance of success I think (from hindsight) with his response to the Russian poisonings. I think up until then Labour still polled relatively well and whilst he was still polling badly, it wasn't the -60 he polled soon after that.
Frankly, he was a bad leader, with bad policies and a completely dysfunctional advisory team who evidently didn't have a clue what they were doing. He should have quit after 2017 and we should have had Keir take over then.
Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
If it is a genuine priority for the Tories then they are failing as their own reports show increasing divides and declining social mobility over the last decade.
Whereas BL didn't.
Its hard to imagine Bodie and Doyle driving anything from Longbridge.
The 1.02 of the last few days has dried up. It is now 1.01 on Betfair against Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump being nominated at the conventions this week and next. You can still get 1.04 against Mike Pence being Republican VP nominee, even though the buzz around Nikki Haley seems to have gone away.
A job.