Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
For the A-level course itself you are correct, but for University? My highest offer was CC. The only people I knew who needed As were those foolish enough to try for Cambridge.
This is what I meant, I am sorry for my clumsy use of language as usual.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because they produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
"In the last two years, Sweden had fewer all-cause mortalities than their Nordic neighbors."
Sweden had the lowest number of deaths since 1977 in 2019. A mild flu season partly.
This paper argues that what they call "this dry tinder" of people, old, ill and frail, may help explain why Sweden virus death/100K is higher than Denmark and Finland despite the light lockdown.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
It’s a number you can multiple by itself in order to get back the number you started with.
"In the last two years, Sweden had fewer all-cause mortalities than their Nordic neighbors."
Sweden had the lowest number of deaths since 1977 in 2019. A mild flu season partly.
This paper argues that what they call "this dry tinder" of people, old, ill and frail, may help explain why Sweden virus death/100K is higher than Denmark and Finland despite the light lockdown.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And that's without taking account that far more people do A levels now than in the 1970s and 1980s which would bring the average ability level down.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
And those who got AAA back in the day were a class act.
A guy I was at school with got AAAA in Maths, Further Maths (is that still a thing?), Physics and Chemistry. He went to Cambridge and then spent his adult life on the dole and cheating at dominoes in various pubs.
I got ABBD in 1985 which i reckon was a good effort. The D was English as I had no formal education in written English until I was 13 and struggled mightily with it.
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.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
Yet we're told that fairness within a year is vital.
That goes if you accept the over predictions along with the accurate predictions.
Aside from encouraging further over predictions in future years.
The approach taken prioritizes the integrity of the 2020 results as a whole - compared to previous years - at the expense of integrity and fairness for individual kids in 2020. It elevates the macro over the micro. The price of this is the individual injustices and the plans wrecked this year. The benefit is that the 2020 results are not in aggregate devalued by above trend inflation. I'm saying that imo the price exceeds the benefit.
The number of plans being wrecked this year I suspect will turn out to be minimal.
The universities have places to fill and filled they will be.
Now if you're willing to accept a huge dollop of grade inflation ** then lets be honest about it and continue it for future years.
Because its the pupils of 2021 onwards who are losing out in their education far more than the pupils of 2020.
** I sense you believe higher grades for all would be a step on the road to the New Jerusalem.
There is much gone awry with your suspecting and sensing in this case.
This is an exceptional year and exceptional things are being done. For example, the government is paying us to stay at home and also to go out for dinner. In this context to accept a bit of aggregate one-off exam grade inflation to avoid thousands of kids getting screwed by an algorithm - some of them very badly and most of them from state schools - does not to me seem outrageous.
And it might surprise you but on the general point of exams I favour grades being awarded relatively. Top 10% in the country get As, next 25% Bs etc. That or forget about grades and just give the actual mark and the percentile you're in.
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.
Labour's vote actually fell by 4 million from 1997 to 2005 - ie from 13.5 million to 9.5 million. Effectively 30% of those inclined to vote Labour in 1997 were no longer prepared to do so by 2005. In 2001the sense of disillusionment was mainly reflected in the national turnout collapse to below 60%. By 2005 many had switched to the LibDems under Charles Kennedy - and quite a few had returned to the Tories.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
The issue is that teachers systematically overestimate results from year to year
They do not over-estimate, they say what they think pupils should get based on the work they have done. Then some pupils do not perform as well as expected.
As with election results vs opinion polls, one can ask the heretical question whether the outcome is actually more representative. Exams (like elections) are influenced by how people's health is on the day, whether they got a decent sleep and level of motivation. There's a case for saying that continuous assessment is a better guide.
I'd definitely have done worse with continuous assessment, since (like Johnson, I think) I didn't have much appetite for studying detail in those days, and relied on a last-minute splurge of effort. But I'm not concvinced I was really as good as schoolmates who studied persistently and then blew up on the day. The problem with continuous assessment is of course comparability and expectations among the teaching staff, which inevitably will vary even given absolute dedication to get it right, so you end up depending on the attitude of your teacher.
"In the last two years, Sweden had fewer all-cause mortalities than their Nordic neighbors."
Sweden had the lowest number of deaths since 1977 in 2019. A mild flu season partly.
This paper argues that what they call "this dry tinder" of people, old, ill and frail, may help explain why Sweden virus death/100K is higher than Denmark and Finland despite the light lockdown.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
For the A-level course itself you are correct, but for University? My highest offer was CC. The only people I knew who needed As were those foolish enough to try for Cambridge.
Yes, I meant for entry on to A levels, not to university.
Quite bemused by the condemnation here of the somewhat pejoratively labelled “grade inflation”. Being a Governor of a maintained, non-selective school I spend many a happy hour working to hold our Headteacher to account on objectives which, primarily, focus on genuine* improvement of outcomes as measured by progress. It would be a funny old world if we declared that year-on-year improvement is to be frowned upon.
* to be fair to the Gove reforms, they did drive out some of the more spurious improvements achieved by gaming the system...
It would also be a funny old world if we greeted the CPI figure each month by celebrating the fact that groceries and petrol are inherently 1.1% better than they were this time last year.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
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.
Labour's vote actually fell by 4 million from 1997 to 2005 - ie from 13.5 million to 9.5 million. Effectively 30% of those inclined to vote Labour in 1997 were no longer prepared to do so by 2005. In 2001the sense of disillusionment was mainly reflected in the national turnout collapse to below 60%. By 2005 many had switched to the LibDems under Charles Kennedy - and quite a few had returned to the Tories.
This is a bit misleading though, because the voters Labour lost didn't massively impact Labour's ability to win elections. They lost them in seats with large majorities already, you might conclude.
That is why despite getting 40% in 2017, we still did pretty badly. Massive majorities in London and Liverpool don't help.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
I never saw that question or replied to it did I?
To answer the question I support it (and the rest of the sector) existing because I believe free competition ultimately improves all. I believe if education became state schools only then education overall would get worse not better.
In a competitive market extreme edge cases like that will help a tiny proportion of pupils who go to it, paid for by their parents, but the school will seek to be the best it can be to maintain its premium. Any innovations the schools like that come up with can and should be looked at by the much bigger state sector and adopted where appropriate.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Finally people should have by principle the right to pay for what they want to do ... And I see no downside to it at all.
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.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
I'm not so sure about this. If you have candidates for job X who both have 2:1 degrees from one of the new universities, but one has ABC at A level and the other one has BCD, the former would have a clear edge. In my experience of employing graduates, A levels still count, especially when degrees are from, shall we say, less famous universities.
Yes they count a fair bit til mid twenties, should be irrelevant only by about 30 when sensible employers will judge on job performance not school performance.
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.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
I'm not so sure about this. If you have candidates for job X who both have 2:1 degrees from one of the new universities, but one has ABC at A level and the other one has BCD, the former would have a clear edge. In my experience of employing graduates, A levels still count, especially when degrees are from, shall we say, less famous universities.
Yes they count a fair bit til mid twenties, should be irrelevant only by about 30 when sensible employers will judge on job performance not school performance.
I think based on my experience, after one job it makes no difference. But that's just me.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
“State schools are a necessary evil, and we should work towards a society that has no need of them”
Discuss...
What is the implication of this, we all pay?
I am not suggesting we tomorrow get rid of Eton at all, I am just saying that in principle I oppose its existence, as I do all private schools.
The solution though - unlike the cultists on Twitter - is to make state schools better, not pull private schools down.
There are many things in life we expect people to pay for unless they really can’t afford it; basic things like food, shelter, clothing and so on.
Health costs we agree to fund centrally as a type of insurance given that the needs vary so wildly (and those with the greatest need are often those with the least ability to pay. Education is a known and predictable cost, so why is it not treated like the others? Therefore state schools ought to be abolished.
It’s not a very good argument (I’m sure you can see several holes in it) but it is no worse than the argument that we should somehow try to stop people using their resources to improve the chances of their offspring, an attempt which runs counter to millions if not billions of years of evolutionary instinct.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
To have seen a whole science, culture even, develop while being knowledgeable about it must have been fascinating.
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello" 20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
Quite bemused by the condemnation here of the somewhat pejoratively labelled “grade inflation”. Being a Governor of a maintained, non-selective school I spend many a happy hour working to hold our Headteacher to account on objectives which, primarily, focus on genuine* improvement of outcomes as measured by progress. It would be a funny old world if we declared that year-on-year improvement is to be frowned upon.
* to be fair to the Gove reforms, they did drive out some of the more spurious improvements achieved by gaming the system...
It is a bit of both, but your are right too many people assume that the teaching methods and quality, and student skills at 18 has stayed the same since 1960, and only the grades have increased. This seems absurd when we think how much transport, computer science, communication, sport, materials tecnology, etc has improved over the years.
What is certain, is that the depth of sylabus for A-levels has decreased over the years and the speed at which topics are covered in the first year at uni is much slower. I have direct evidence for this in maths between 1986 to 1997. When I discussed this with lecturers who taught throughout this period, one pointed out that because the students were taught less in their A-levels compared to 10 years before, does not mean they are any less intelligent.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
Basic market economics
If you believe in private education you dont believe in equality of opportunity.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
One of the reasons for the high pass rate is that most schools will discourage anyone likely to fail from continuing with the course, but I take the rest of your point.
But a far wider spectrum of pupils now sit A Levels when compared with the 60s and 70s. Even in Grammar Schools only the more academic - ie the A formers - tended to take them . Most B formers left scholl post-O levels. Re- Oxbridge entrance A Level grades appeared then to be much less important. Applicants who passed the Entrance Exam were only required to obtain two A level passes thereafter.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
I never saw that question or replied to it did I?
To answer the question I support it (and the rest of the sector) existing because I believe free competition ultimately improves all. I believe if education became state schools only then education overall would get worse not better.
In a competitive market extreme edge cases like that will help a tiny proportion of pupils who go to it, paid for by their parents, but the school will seek to be the best it can be to maintain its premium. Any innovations the schools like that come up with can and should be looked at by the much bigger state sector and adopted where appropriate.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Finally people should have by principle the right to pay for what they want to do ... And I see no downside to it at all.
You forgot the most important reason.
Private schools show what can be done. But isn't. If they didn't exist, the True Believers in the current state system would declare Mission Accomplished. International comparisons would be shrugged off with "different culture" excuses.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
To have seen a whole science, culture even, develop while being knowledgeable about it must have been fascinating.
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello" 20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
Let's not do the 'should 'goto' be allowed' debate eh kids?
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
To have seen a whole science, culture even, develop while being knowledgeable about it must have been fascinating.
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello" 20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
For the last 30 years "The first program someone learns in a new computer language is 'print "Hello World"'".
The seem to have forgotten that for very most people who first met a computer in the 80's was your program above.
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.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
I'm not so sure about this. If you have candidates for job X who both have 2:1 degrees from one of the new universities, but one has ABC at A level and the other one has BCD, the former would have a clear edge. In my experience of employing graduates, A levels still count, especially when degrees are from, shall we say, less famous universities.
Yes they count a fair bit til mid twenties, should be irrelevant only by about 30 when sensible employers will judge on job performance not school performance.
I think based on my experience, after one job it makes no difference. But that's just me.
One "significant" job post university takes you up to mid twenties!
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
I had a similar experience at Imperial: a short lecture to the whole group up for “interview” on how much better they were than Oxford/Cambridge (delete as applicable) and then made us all a CC offer on the spot. I used to joke that the most difficult question on my Imperial interview was “tea or coffee?”.
Why did they do it? We were candidates with realistic chances of getting into Oxbridge, probably based on O-level results, (and in those days the application was on paper and you had to list the universities in order of preference, an order they got to see) and they wanted us to go there instead.
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.
Labour's vote actually fell by 4 million from 1997 to 2005 - ie from 13.5 million to 9.5 million. Effectively 30% of those inclined to vote Labour in 1997 were no longer prepared to do so by 2005. In 2001the sense of disillusionment was mainly reflected in the national turnout collapse to below 60%. By 2005 many had switched to the LibDems under Charles Kennedy - and quite a few had returned to the Tories.
This is a bit misleading though, because the voters Labour lost didn't massively impact Labour's ability to win elections. They lost them in seats with large majorities already, you might conclude.
That is why despite getting 40% in 2017, we still did pretty badly. Massive majorities in London and Liverpool don't help.
No - even in 2001 Labour's vote began to fall sharply in their heartland - Red Wall - seats. At the time, it was limited to such voters sitting on their hands rather than switching to other parties.
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.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
Is there anything you accept the Tories have failed on?
Yes.
For example
I opposed the Tories ever having a commitment to lower net immigration to the tens of thousands.The Tories objectively failed to meet that commitment, which I am glad about.
I oppose the Green Belt and think it should be abolished and dislike the Tories protection of it.
I think the planning system is a disgrace and reforms to that to date have been tinkering at the edges. I approve of the commitment to wholescale reform it but I expect that to end up neutered.
I think the future of transportation is electric vehicles so recharging points are the most significant investment needed - I don't think enough has been done about this to date.
The Tories (especially Dr Fox) were crazy to prioritise talks with the USA before free trade agreements with nations we had one with under the EU like Switzerland etc were rolled over. Still seems to be an issue with this under this government.
I comprehensively and regularly opposed May so the less said about her the better.
Our tax system is still far too complex and should be simplified and cut more. Tax rates are too high and to the right of the Laffer Curve still at many points I believe.
Care homes are a long-term issue that solutions keep getting mooted for but nothing is happening.
The young are punitively taxed compared to the old.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
To have seen a whole science, culture even, develop while being knowledgeable about it must have been fascinating.
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello" 20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
Let's not do the 'should 'goto' be allowed' debate eh kids?
If it's in the syntax, it's allowed. That doesn't mean that it is good programming style.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
I never saw that question or replied to it did I?
To answer the question I support it (and the rest of the sector) existing because I believe free competition ultimately improves all. I believe if education became state schools only then education overall would get worse not better.
In a competitive market extreme edge cases like that will help a tiny proportion of pupils who go to it, paid for by their parents, but the school will seek to be the best it can be to maintain its premium. Any innovations the schools like that come up with can and should be looked at by the much bigger state sector and adopted where appropriate.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Finally people should have by principle the right to pay for what they want to do ... And I see no downside to it at all.
You forgot the most important reason.
Private schools show what can be done. But isn't. If they didn't exist, the True Believers in the current state system would declare Mission Accomplished. International comparisons would be shrugged off with "different culture" excuses.
That's another way of expressing what I was thinking with my primary reason.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
Basic market economics
If you believe in private education you dont believe in equality of opportunity.
If you believe in socialism you don't believe in private education or really the private sector full stop.
Private schools offer scholarships and most outstanding education
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
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.
Or they've succeeded in delivering it. This country has far more equality of opportunity than the overwhelming majority of the world.
Having more equality of opportunity than dictatorships, plutocracies and countries emerging from endemic poverty is not a huge achievement.
It is as countries can regress into those - the USA is becoming a plutocracy as it stands and its democracy is under threat with the attacks on the USPS and voter suppression etc
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
You don't judge equality of opportunty in the UK based on what is happening elsewhere You judge it on how it has developed within the UK. And the truth is that after a post-war surge it has now stalled. We remain a country where the second rate offspring of wealthy parents have far better life chances than bright children from poorer demographics. You only have to look at the current cabinet to see that.
That isn't the truth. The truth is the Conservatives have done a good job at boosting equality of opportunity.
Let us take one excellent metric - the proportion of the country that own their own home. If there is equality of opportunity then the proportion of home owners should go up.
In 1979 owner occupied homes were below 12 million, by 1997 that had increased to nearly 17 million, a dramatic increase in equality of opportunity.
Unfortunately that increase of opportunity slowed and stalled under Labour but in recent years the actions of the Tories have meant that owner occupier rates have been going back up again.
I congratulate you on your highly selective use of data in order to avoid confronting Tory failure.
I congratulate you on your non selective use of zero data in order to fabricate claims of Tory failure.
Is there anything you accept the Tories have failed on?
Yes.
For example
I opposed the Tories ever having a commitment to lower net immigration to the tens of thousands.The Tories objectively failed to meet that commitment, which I am glad about.
I oppose the Green Belt and think it should be abolished and dislike the Tories protection of it.
I think the planning system is a disgrace and reforms to that to date have been tinkering at the edges. I approve of the commitment to wholescale reform it but I expect that to end up neutered.
I think the future of transportation is electric vehicles so recharging points are the most significant investment needed - I don't think enough has been done about this to date.
The Tories (especially Dr Fox) were crazy to prioritise talks with the USA before free trade agreements with nations we had one with under the EU like Switzerland etc were rolled over. Still seems to be an issue with this under this government.
I comprehensively and regularly opposed May so the less said about her the better.
Our tax system is still far too complex and should be simplified and cut more. Tax rates are too high and to the right of the Laffer Curve still at many points I believe.
Care homes are a long-term issue that solutions keep getting mooted for but nothing is happening.
The young are punitively taxed compared to the old.
The BBC poll tax still exists.
A poll tax is by definition a tax per person. BBC/TV license fee is by household so whatever it is, good or bad, it cannot be a poll tax.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
One of the reasons for the high pass rate is that most schools will discourage anyone likely to fail from continuing with the course, but I take the rest of your point.
But a far wider spectrum of pupils now sit A Levels when compared with the 60s and 70s. Even in Grammar Schools only the more academic - ie the A formers - tended to take them . Most B formers left scholl post-O levels. Re- Oxbridge entrance A Level grades appeared then to be much less important. Applicants who passed the Entrance Exam were only required to obtain two A level passes thereafter.
Worcester College (Oxford) has, in effect, announced a reversion to this system. Everyone offered a place will get one, regardless of their A-level result. It's possible they were all expected to achieve their grades anyway, so there won't be a sudden surplus to accommodate. This year there will be a distinct down-turn in overseas students so most other universities could easily do the same - and probably will in order to balance their books. When this happens everyone will be happy and the furore will go away.
Herculean efforts should have been made to enable students to sit their exams this year, in order to avoid this mess. Those not doing exams this year could have remained at home in order to create space for those who were.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Private education drains the state educational system of the most valuable resource: Teachers.
Hmmm - you live in a world where people spending money in a market with flexible supply (teaching courses are rarely empty) doesn't result in an increase in capacity?
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
xkcd
Oh, I see.
I can`t help being a little disappointed.
We should seek to triangulate chb's password. Presumably if his username is a password, his password is a username...
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
The algorithm is the wrong answer to the wrong question, and the Government are rightly being awarded a U.
The point of university offers and A-level results in response to those offers is to appropriately and accurately differentiate between individuals in the cohort. The average ability in the cohort is only relevant as far as the level of the ability in that cohort reads across to the ability to cope with the university work (and the specific individuals difference from that average is also crucial).
The Government have trotted out a system which fails to have any plausibility in accurately differentiating individuals and instead ascribes a guess that the average won’t have appreciably changed and forces an overall result across the cohort to match that. Failing in every respect for the individuals and universities.
And now universities (who cannot offer places to all their offers) are tied in to this failed output, the administration is done, the accommodation is in train, and teenagers who “failed” to get A*AA but got AA*A (different subject order) have lost places due to not getting their exact results in exams they didn’t take and grades that didn’t reflect the results they didn’t get.
What an inextricable and total omnishambles. Utter failure.
I studied computer science at a leading university and managed degree-level computational mathematics with a 'C' (in Maths) at A level (early 1980s grading system).
Another Computer Scientist!
Me too. Actually, when I went to (Copenhagen) University, you couldn't take computer science separately - it had to be "Mathematics (with computer science"). I quickly discovered that I couldn't get a job as a mathematician except in teaching or insurance, neither of which appealed to me, so I quietly dropped the "mathematics" bit as soon as I'd taken my PhD. I'd struggle to work out a square root these days.
To have seen a whole science, culture even, develop while being knowledgeable about it must have been fascinating.
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello" 20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
Let's not do the 'should 'goto' be allowed' debate eh kids?
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.
Labour's vote actually fell by 4 million from 1997 to 2005 - ie from 13.5 million to 9.5 million. Effectively 30% of those inclined to vote Labour in 1997 were no longer prepared to do so by 2005. In 2001the sense of disillusionment was mainly reflected in the national turnout collapse to below 60%. By 2005 many had switched to the LibDems under Charles Kennedy - and quite a few had returned to the Tories.
Yes - I accepted of course that Blair lost votes but his seat totals and majorities endured much better in FPTP. My suggestion would be that many of the early votes lost were from more left-wing voters in their safer seats. I think the centrists probably stayed with Blair much longer - hardly surprising as his main pitch was always to the centre and no leader since has come close to his achievement in this respect.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
I think of him as Comment Horse Battery due to the prolific nature of his posting when the polls are out.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
I was not impressed by the general standard of A Level teaching at my Grammar School , and from my own experience as a teacher in the 1980s I fully accept that some improvement has occurred.I recall that back in the early 70s we were never provided with 'model answers' in respect of atempts made at past exam questions. That had changed by the 80s and become pretty routine. I have no doubt though that the key explanation for the subsequent rampant grade inflation is to be found in the changed assessment system from relative marking to absolute marking.If we still had a system whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% , the credibility of the qualification would have been preserved.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
Basic market economics
If you believe in private education you dont believe in equality of opportunity.
If you believe in socialism you don't believe in private education or really the private sector full stop.
Private schools offer scholarships and most outstanding education
You do not have to "believe in socialism" to believe that privat education is counter productive.
Not all 10/11 year olds are have been optimised by their parents to get a scholarship. Education should not be based on this type of lottery. There are very many 10/11 year olds who do not get a scholarship but can and should end up with excellent under-graduate and post-graduate results.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
The algorithm is the wrong answer to the wrong question, and the Government are rightly being awarded a U.
The point of university offers and A-level results in response to those offers is to appropriately and accurately differentiate between individuals in the cohort. The average ability in the cohort is only relevant as far as the level of the ability in that cohort reads across to the ability to cope with the university work (and the specific individuals difference from that average is also crucial).
The Government have trotted out a system which fails to have any plausibility in accurately differentiating individuals and instead ascribes a guess that the average won’t have appreciably changed and forces an overall result across the cohort to match that. Failing in every respect for the individuals and universities.
And now universities (who cannot offer places to all their offers) are tied in to this failed output, the administration is done, the accommodation is in train, and teenagers who “failed” to get A*AA but got AA*A (different subject order) have lost places due to not getting their exact results in exams they didn’t take and grades that didn’t reflect the results they didn’t get.
What an inextricable and total omnishambles. Utter failure.
Accurately differentiating between individuals in a cohort isn't an exact science. Even life itself, a far more rigorous test, occasionally misallocates the wrong person to the wrong job. The solution in this exceptional year will be for the government to allow universities to admit extra students who didn't quite make their grades, and they will, of course, be eternally grateful.
Herculean efforts should have been made to enable students to sit their exams this year, in order to avoid this mess. Those not doing exams this year could have remained at home in order to create space for those who were.
As an ex-teacher I wholly agree - although the same seems to have occurred in many other countries. I do not think schooling for exam classes should ever have been fully suspended. It would have beend possible in most schools to organise lessons for the numbers of students affected - years 10-13 with much smaller groups and judicious deployment of staff. At my old school we could have organised such a programme providing classes in morning and afternoon shifts with maybe a week-end's planning. The failure to do this was a massive failure of will on the part of the profession and the government.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
I had a similar experience at Imperial: a short lecture to the whole group up for “interview” on how much better they were than Oxford/Cambridge (delete as applicable) and then made us all a CC offer on the spot. I used to joke that the most difficult question on my Imperial interview was “tea or coffee?”.
Why did they do it? We were candidates with realistic chances of getting into Oxbridge, probably based on O-level results, (and in those days the application was on paper and you had to list the universities in order of preference, an order they got to see) and they wanted us to go there instead.
I chose Imperial over Cambridge - for the very elevated reason that I wanted to be in central London. It was an error. One of my countless.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Private education drains the state educational system of the most valuable resource: Teachers.
Hmmm - you live in a world where people spending money in a market with flexible supply (teaching courses are rarely empty) doesn't result in an increase in capacity?
Eh, there is a shortage of STEM teachers, and there has been since the start of the 90's. The fact that "teaching courses are rarely empty" simply shows that there are more 18 year olds who wand to do a teaching degree than there are places for 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 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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
The vast majority of young people start their working lives with zero or negative wealth, i.e. significant debts, so for them its all about future income.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
In my day (mid-seventies) it was so you'd qualify for a grant. My formal Oxford offer was 2Es.
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
It's from XKCD, it's a comic strip about choosing a strong password.
In general people choose complicated passwords that are easy to guess, when if they chose four English words that are unrelated it would be easier to remember and harder for a computer to guess.
The example they used was CorrectHorseBatteryStaple. Unfortunately I could not fit the Staple.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
Britain has a high proportion of personal debt. That means that personal wealth as a statistic will be skewed downwards beacuse of it, compared to contries with lower personal debt.
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
My offer to do Computer Science BSc was 2 passes. No, it was a Russell Group university.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
I had a similar experience at Imperial: a short lecture to the whole group up for “interview” on how much better they were than Oxford/Cambridge (delete as applicable) and then made us all a CC offer on the spot. I used to joke that the most difficult question on my Imperial interview was “tea or coffee?”.
Why did they do it? We were candidates with realistic chances of getting into Oxbridge, probably based on O-level results, (and in those days the application was on paper and you had to list the universities in order of preference, an order they got to see) and they wanted us to go there instead.
I chose Imperial over Cambridge - for the very elevated reason that I wanted to be in central London. It was an error. One of my countless.
Very similar here. Except it was an unconditional offer (2 Es - quite possibly due to being an earlier year) and they said it was to take any pressure off us. I had been considering an Oxford application, and my Physics teacher said “...has the spark I associate with successful Oxbridge applicants.”
This wasn’t good enough for the Head of English at my school, who was in charge of our Oxbridge applications (the school had set up a system to co-ordinate and assist the Oxbridge applicants, under the supervision of our Head of English). His comment to me as he dissuaded me was, “Well, ‘spark’ doesn't sound very strong to me. Best not to go ahead with your application.”
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
Look at music! And PBers will note history did worse than physics; worse in terms of sudden jumps in performance, that is.
Even beyond the current uproar that just highlights what a ridiculous mess A Level grading has become over the last 30 years. I sat A Levels myself in the early 1970s and was teaching them from the mid-1980s. Nowadays some 98% of pupils sitting the exams manage to pass - ie to obtain at least an E grade. A grades or higher have been awarded to 25% - 27% - a figure likely to have increased significantly this year due to the ongoing fiasco. Until the late 1980s a system of relative marking was used whereby A grades were restricted to the top 10% sitting the exam with a further 15% being awarded a B grade. Therefore, 75% of pupils did no better than a C grade. Moreover, 30% failed to pass the exam and were given an O Level pass - or nothing at all. In other words, 30% of pupils failed to obtain even a grade E pass - compared with just 2% in recent years. It also means that pupils awarded - say - BCC grades prior to the late 80s could not unreasonably expect AAA today!
Your're right, but it's also because A-level teaching has improved significantly since the 1970s. I agree that there has been grade inflation. But the accountability mechanisms now in place (Ofsted, performance tables etc.) have put significant pressure on sixth forms and colleges to improve the rigour and quality of A-level teaching. When I first started teaching, back in the '80s, there was no real comeback if half your students failed or left the course early - as many did.
Is it not also the case that back then the entry requirements were lower?
No.
Somebody mentioned above they'd got into Computer Science at a good uni with much lower grades than any course I applied to.
From memory my offer was BBC.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
In my day (mid-seventies) it was so you'd qualify for a grant. My formal Oxford offer was 2Es.
Yes, there was that - IIRC the *minimum* for *entry* into a university was 2 passes.
But why give such low offers? If you have a AAB predicted candidate, even offering them CCC seems low....
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.
Mmm. Exceptional grade inflation in this exceptional year deemed a greater evil than thousands of (mainly) state school kids receiving grades lower than they could reasonably have hoped for if they had been able to sit the exams. This is the value judgment made and I'm not sure about it at all.
Next year's pupils will be exceptional as well - they've had their education disrupted not just their exams.
So why should they be treated differently to the 2020 pupils ?
If you accept massive grade inflation in 2020 then it has to be accepted for future years as well.
No it doesn't. 2020 is forever asterisked. It's a value judgement and I think I'd make it differently. I'd live with anomalous overall marks for the pandemic year in order to minimize the individual injustices to individual kids in the pandemic year.
I can just see people in 2030 or later chatting at the bar about how numpties got inflated grades in 2020 and how terrible it was or interviewers thinking , oh they took GCSE's in 2020 they must be thick , and binning application.
Apart from as a conversation point, 2 years or so after the event no-one cares about A level grades. If you went to Uni, then it's the degree. If you didn't, it's your track record.
I'm not so sure about this. If you have candidates for job X who both have 2:1 degrees from one of the new universities, but one has ABC at A level and the other one has BCD, the former would have a clear edge. In my experience of employing graduates, A levels still count, especially when degrees are from, shall we say, less famous universities.
Yes they count a fair bit til mid twenties, should be irrelevant only by about 30 when sensible employers will judge on job performance not school performance.
I think based on my experience, after one job it makes no difference. But that's just me.
One "significant" job post university takes you up to mid twenties!
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Private education drains the state educational system of the most valuable resource: Teachers.
Not at all. Supply and demand means that improving demand ultimately improves supply too.
This argument only works if there is a flexible supply and demand system in place. The supply of teachers is not at all a flexible system. Similar with doctors.
The takeaway from that story is of code obscenely optimised to hardware. Any modification to the hardware - even a deterioration in the performance of a motor - would break such code irretrievably.
I am sorry @Stocky is so disappointed by my username, I do like how it's obscure though and only a few have correctly guessed its context. I like to think they are similar people to me.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
The vast majority of young people start their working lives with zero or negative wealth, i.e. significant debts, so for them its all about future income.
By 39 most still own a property or at least have taken out and started to repay a mortgage on one which is what really matters in asset terms.
Student debt is cancelled ultimately anyway if not fully repaid
I would like to think I am rubbish at exams but far better on the application and detail, so although I did terribly in my exams in particular case it does not impact my ability to be good at my job.
Why “correct horse battery” CHB? Is it some obscure literary reference, perhaps from Practical Horseman or Beastiality Today?
It's from XKCD, it's a comic strip about choosing a strong password.
In general people choose complicated passwords that are easy to guess, when if they chose four English words that are unrelated it would be easier to remember and harder for a computer to guess.
The example they used was CorrectHorseBatteryStaple. Unfortunately I could not fit the Staple.
I like the principle but online password criteria would mostly rule out CorrectHorseBatteryStaple. Too many characters, no numbers or special characters.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
Basic market economics
If you believe in private education you dont believe in equality of opportunity.
Indisputably a true statement. The supporters of private education who I tip my hat to are those who man up and face this. Who say that, yes, it violates the principle of equal opportunities and, yes, it hampers social mobility, but that in their opinion this is a price worth paying for the things it delivers.
But such people are in my experience few and far between. Far more common is the disingenuous, issue-avoiding platitude: "I'm not a fan of private schools but they only exist because of the failures of the state system. Fix that and the problem goes away." Grrr to this. It's a shallow and/or bad faith argument.
Herculean efforts should have been made to enable students to sit their exams this year, in order to avoid this mess. Those not doing exams this year could have remained at home in order to create space for those who were.
Perhaps.
But any attempts to hold exams would have set off a different set of whining - "its not safe", "groups x,y and z will be disadvantaged", "pupils haven't been properly prepared".
And anyone who got lower than their predicted grade would have demanded a higher 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.
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
The vast majority of young people start their working lives with zero or negative wealth, i.e. significant debts, so for them its all about future income.
By 39 most still own a property or at least have taken out and started to repay a mortgage on one which is what really matters in asset terms.
Student debt is cancelled ultimately anyway if not fully repaid
At age 39 people still need to earn another 750k-£1m or so to take them through to life expectancy. Their property wealth is nowhere near sufficient.
And a lot of student debt is not written off, only tuition fee debt is.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Private education drains the state educational system of the most valuable resource: Teachers.
Hmmm - you live in a world where people spending money in a market with flexible supply (teaching courses are rarely empty) doesn't result in an increase in capacity?
Eh, there is a shortage of STEM teachers, and there has been since the start of the 90's. The fact that "teaching courses are rarely empty" simply shows that there are more 18 year olds who wand to do a teaching degree than there are places for them.
It is also important to point out that a teaching degree or PGCE is a qualification that opens more doors than purely classrooms. Anything that involves preparing and presenting to an audience, for example. Or working with children or vulnerable adults. It has a wide range of transferable skills many of which gain a much higher rate of pay and much less hassle. So teaching course full does not equal adequate supply of teachers
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
The vast majority of young people start their working lives with zero or negative wealth, i.e. significant debts, so for them its all about future income.
By 39 most still own a property or at least have taken out and started to repay a mortgage on one which is what really matters in asset terms.
Student debt is cancelled ultimately anyway if not fully repaid
At age 39 people still need to earn another 750k-£1m or so to take them through to life expectancy. Their property wealth is nowhere near sufficient.
And a lot of student debt is not written off, only tuition fee debt is.
In the South East average house prices are regularly in the £500k to £1 million bracket so wrong.
Of course only a minority of the population even at 18 go to university, most by 50 own a property.
The UK is very prosperous still due to our property ownership
The algorithm is the wrong answer to the wrong question, and the Government are rightly being awarded a U.
The point of university offers and A-level results in response to those offers is to appropriately and accurately differentiate between individuals in the cohort. The average ability in the cohort is only relevant as far as the level of the ability in that cohort reads across to the ability to cope with the university work (and the specific individuals difference from that average is also crucial).
The Government have trotted out a system which fails to have any plausibility in accurately differentiating individuals and instead ascribes a guess that the average won’t have appreciably changed and forces an overall result across the cohort to match that. Failing in every respect for the individuals and universities.
And now universities (who cannot offer places to all their offers) are tied in to this failed output, the administration is done, the accommodation is in train, and teenagers who “failed” to get A*AA but got AA*A (different subject order) have lost places due to not getting their exact results in exams they didn’t take and grades that didn’t reflect the results they didn’t get.
What an inextricable and total omnishambles. Utter failure.
How do you accurately differentiate between pupils when they will have had their grade predictions made differently ?
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.
Agree it predates the Johnson era, it probably reflects modern society and the economy. Society has moved the job of parents of teenagers and young adults from equipping them for independent life, to protecting and managing them. On the economy the declining GDP growth rates mean we are more preoccupied by who gets what share of the pie, and protecting our own interests, than by growing the pie, which allows for more relative redistribution.
Latest figures show the UK is more equal than Sweden as more people in the UK own their own homes and UK homes are worth more on average
That is wealth inequality rather than income inequality which is what most people look at.
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
Wealth inequality is far more relevant than income inequality, if you lose your job you lose most of your income but not most of your assets.
The vast majority of young people start their working lives with zero or negative wealth, i.e. significant debts, so for them its all about future income.
By 39 most still own a property or at least have taken out and started to repay a mortgage on one which is what really matters in asset terms.
Student debt is cancelled ultimately anyway if not fully repaid
At age 39 people still need to earn another 750k-£1m or so to take them through to life expectancy. Their property wealth is nowhere near sufficient.
And a lot of student debt is not written off, only tuition fee debt is.
In the South East house prices are regularly in the £500k to £1 million bracket so wrong.
Of course only a minority of the population even at 18 go to university, most by 50 own a property.
The UK is very prosperous still due to our property ownership
You are utterly delusional if you think the average 39 year old is more reliant on property wealth than their future earnings.
I notice Philip never actually answered why he supports Eton existing, he just went onto deflect.
Why do you support Waitrose or M & S or the Ritz hotel or Mercedes Benz or Rolls Royce or Oxford and Cambridge existing either? Because the produce high quality services and products.
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
And if you have money you can avoid all of this and go to a school which will give you connections and a better chance of getting into a good Uni.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
If Tesco produced as good or better products than Waitrose, Waitrose customers would go to Tesco and prices would rise their accordingly and Tesco customers would then go to Waitrose whose prices would fall accordingly.
Basic market economics
If you believe in private education you dont believe in equality of opportunity.
Indisputably a true statement. The supporters of private education who I tip my hat to are those who man up and face this. Who say that, yes, it violates the principle of equal opportunities and, yes, it hampers social mobility, but that in their opinion this is a price worth paying for the things it delivers.
But such people are in my experience few and far between. Far more common is the disingenuous, issue-avoiding platitude: "I'm not a fan of private schools but they only exist because of the failures of the state system. Fix that and the problem goes away." Grrr to this. It's a shallow and/or bad faith argument.
Only the left believe that parents should not be allowed to spend their money in the way they want to. The left want everyone to be equally disadvantaged. its politics to the lowest common denominator.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Private education drains the state educational system of the most valuable resource: Teachers.
Not at all. Supply and demand means that improving demand ultimately improves supply too.
This argument only works if there is a flexible supply and demand system in place. The supply of teachers is not at all a flexible system. Similar with doctors.
I recall a conversation, where I proposed that the number of places for studying medicine at university should be increased to match the number required by the NHS. The NHS requirement is known well in advance....
I mean I always knew some of the FBPE lot on Twitter were a bit out of touch with reality, but writing to the Queen to try and overthrow a democratically elected government just so we can be in the European Union is a new level of deluded.
Comments
https://twitter.com/IanMurrayMP/status/1294931416648683520?s=20
https://twitter.com/IanMurrayMP/status/1294931417743478785?s=20
Same as an outstanding academy or comprehensive or grammar school compared to an inadequate or requires improvement state school
The old and the sick are going to die of something at some point.
😀
This is an exceptional year and exceptional things are being done. For example, the government is paying us to stay at home and also to go out for dinner. In this context to accept a bit of aggregate one-off exam grade inflation to avoid thousands of kids getting screwed by an algorithm - some of them very badly and most of them from state schools - does not to me seem outrageous.
And it might surprise you but on the general point of exams I favour grades being awarded relatively. Top 10% in the country get As, next 25% Bs etc. That or forget about grades and just give the actual mark and the percentile you're in.
The solution to use your analogy, is to ensure that Tesco has products that are as good as those offered at Waitrose, not to ban Waitrose from selling better quality products.
I'd definitely have done worse with continuous assessment, since (like Johnson, I think) I didn't have much appetite for studying detail in those days, and relied on a last-minute splurge of effort. But I'm not concvinced I was really as good as schoolmates who studied persistently and then blew up on the day. The problem with continuous assessment is of course comparability and expectations among the teaching staff, which inevitably will vary even given absolute dedication to get it right, so you end up depending on the attitude of your teacher.
But they're very unlikely to be killed by covid.
They brought in the interviewees in groups.
My group, form asking around was predicted all As and Bs (this was the early 90s, where AAA would get you into Oxbridge). Everyone in the group got offers like this.
A friend who was in an interview group with lower predicted grades was given an offer which was in line with what you would expect from that university.
Any idea on why they did the silly low offers thing?
That is why despite getting 40% in 2017, we still did pretty badly. Massive majorities in London and Liverpool don't help.
To answer the question I support it (and the rest of the sector) existing because I believe free competition ultimately improves all. I believe if education became state schools only then education overall would get worse not better.
In a competitive market extreme edge cases like that will help a tiny proportion of pupils who go to it, paid for by their parents, but the school will seek to be the best it can be to maintain its premium. Any innovations the schools like that come up with can and should be looked at by the much bigger state sector and adopted where appropriate.
Plus of course voluntarily paying for education reduces the drain on the state educational budget.
Finally people should have by principle the right to pay for what they want to do ... And I see no downside to it at all.
Health costs we agree to fund centrally as a type of insurance given that the needs vary so wildly (and those with the greatest need are often those with the least ability to pay.
Education is a known and predictable cost, so why is it not treated like the others? Therefore state schools ought to be abolished.
It’s not a very good argument (I’m sure you can see several holes in it) but it is no worse than the argument that we should somehow try to stop people using their resources to improve the chances of their offspring, an attempt which runs counter to millions if not billions of years of evolutionary instinct.
Basic market economics
Even the thrills of:
10 Print "Hello"
20 Goto 10
were great to me.
Now I work alongside people who have never known a pre-internet world.
What is certain, is that the depth of sylabus for A-levels has decreased over the years and the speed at which topics are covered in the first year at uni is much slower. I have direct evidence for this in maths between 1986 to 1997.
When I discussed this with lecturers who taught throughout this period, one pointed out that because the students were taught less in their A-levels compared to 10 years before, does not mean they are any less intelligent.
Re- Oxbridge entrance A Level grades appeared then to be much less important. Applicants who passed the Entrance Exam were only required to obtain two A level passes thereafter.
Private schools show what can be done. But isn't. If they didn't exist, the True Believers in the current state system would declare Mission Accomplished. International comparisons would be shrugged off with "different culture" excuses.
The seem to have forgotten that for very most people who first met a computer in the 80's was your program above.
Why did they do it? We were candidates with realistic chances of getting into Oxbridge, probably based on O-level results, (and in those days the application was on paper and you had to list the universities in order of preference, an order they got to see) and they wanted us to go there instead.
I oppose the Green Belt and think it should be abolished and dislike the Tories protection of it.
I think the planning system is a disgrace and reforms to that to date have been tinkering at the edges. I approve of the commitment to wholescale reform it but I expect that to end up neutered.
I think the future of transportation is electric vehicles so recharging points are the most significant investment needed - I don't think enough has been done about this to date.
The Tories (especially Dr Fox) were crazy to prioritise talks with the USA before free trade agreements with nations we had one with under the EU like Switzerland etc were rolled over. Still seems to be an issue with this under this government.
I comprehensively and regularly opposed May so the less said about her the better.
Our tax system is still far too complex and should be simplified and cut more. Tax rates are too high and to the right of the Laffer Curve still at many points I believe.
Care homes are a long-term issue that solutions keep getting mooted for but nothing is happening.
The young are punitively taxed compared to the old.
The BBC poll tax still exists.
Private schools offer scholarships and most outstanding education
https://xkcd.com/936/
https://xkcd.com/936/
Play nicely.
I can`t help being a little disappointed.
The algorithm is the wrong answer to the wrong question, and the Government are rightly being awarded a U.
The point of university offers and A-level results in response to those offers is to appropriately and accurately differentiate between individuals in the cohort. The average ability in the cohort is only relevant as far as the level of the ability in that cohort reads across to the ability to cope with the university work (and the specific individuals difference from that average is also crucial).
The Government have trotted out a system which fails to have any plausibility in accurately differentiating individuals and instead ascribes a guess that the average won’t have appreciably changed and forces an overall result across the cohort to match that. Failing in every respect for the individuals and universities.
And now universities (who cannot offer places to all their offers) are tied in to this failed output, the administration is done, the accommodation is in train, and teenagers who “failed” to get A*AA but got AA*A (different subject order) have lost places due to not getting their exact results in exams they didn’t take and grades that didn’t reflect the results they didn’t get.
What an inextricable and total omnishambles. Utter failure.
GOTO is for lightweights.
Not all 10/11 year olds are have been optimised by their parents to get a scholarship. Education should not be based on this type of lottery. There are very many 10/11 year olds who do not get a scholarship but can and should end up with excellent under-graduate and post-graduate results.
https://twitter.com/HTScotPol/status/1294954514789928960?s=20
A lot (most?) of the elites wealth in the UK is not held personally but in trusts so presumably doesnt filter through to the wealth figures. Debt is problematic as well, what do you do with people in debt? Are they zero or negative?
How are they even calculating peoples net worth? Even the govt wouldnt know mine, whereas from tax data they obviously know earnings.
Earnings are going to be far more reliable for comparisons by country.
Also if you are looking at the role of the current/recent govts in reducing inequality, it would be fair to say reducing wealth inequality is not something they can do much about during a term or two in office, it changes gradually over many decades, whereas income inequality is far more within their control.
In general people choose complicated passwords that are easy to guess, when if they chose four English words that are unrelated it would be easier to remember and harder for a computer to guess.
The example they used was CorrectHorseBatteryStaple. Unfortunately I could not fit the Staple.
I had been considering an Oxford application, and my Physics teacher said “...has the spark I associate with successful Oxbridge applicants.”
This wasn’t good enough for the Head of English at my school, who was in charge of our Oxbridge applications (the school had set up a system to co-ordinate and assist the Oxbridge applicants, under the supervision of our Head of English). His comment to me as he dissuaded me was, “Well, ‘spark’ doesn't sound very strong to me. Best not to go ahead with your application.”
But why give such low offers? If you have a AAB predicted candidate, even offering them CCC seems low....
Student debt is cancelled ultimately anyway if not fully repaid
But such people are in my experience few and far between. Far more common is the disingenuous, issue-avoiding platitude: "I'm not a fan of private schools but they only exist because of the failures of the state system. Fix that and the problem goes away." Grrr to this. It's a shallow and/or bad faith argument.
But any attempts to hold exams would have set off a different set of whining - "its not safe", "groups x,y and z will be disadvantaged", "pupils haven't been properly prepared".
And anyone who got lower than their predicted grade would have demanded a higher grade.
And a lot of student debt is not written off, only tuition fee debt is.
Anything that involves preparing and presenting to an audience, for example. Or working with children or vulnerable adults.
It has a wide range of transferable skills many of which gain a much higher rate of pay and much less hassle.
So teaching course full does not equal adequate supply of teachers
Of course only a minority of the population even at 18 go to university, most by 50 own a property.
The UK is very prosperous still due to our property ownership
Headline - 2 - lowest since mid-March, weekend or not.
7 Days - 2
Yesterday - 1
Apparently this was shocking, disgusting etc.
https://twitter.com/wjharte/status/1294812942148554753