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.
This is trite. Nobody other than the most extreme of ideologues with a taste for fantasy or totalitarianism wishes to enforce an equality of material life outcome on the population. It's a matter of how much inequality one is prepared to tolerate. And equality of opportunity is not some completely separate and distinct different type of equality that is good in contrast to other types which are bad. It's similar and related. Equality of opportunity is also a fantasy. Why? Because it is impacted by birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, and these can never be equal. So again it comes down to the same question. How much inequality (of any type) is one prepared to tolerate. And Tories have a pretty high threshold. They can bear quite a bit before they snap.
Legend has it that the challenging rotund shape came from a mistake in the pressing tools for the panels but as the mission statement at The Plughole of Despair was "That'll have to do." they went ahead and moved to production anyway.
Sounds suspiciously like the story of the rear end of one of the Jags.
It was meant to be flat, but the clay model drooped in transit and they modeled the panels from the clay.
Quite why none of the designers accompanied the clay is not clear...
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Two problems there.
One, my experience is that A Level cohorts of 15 or so can vary wildly from year to year. Did they get A*/9 at GCSE, or all scrape B/5? Are the big personalities swots or hearties? The big personalities can affect the attitude of the rest of the group. (The same happened when I taught at one of the most selective universities we have. You get good years and terrible years.)
Second, whole some unis have made heroic attempts to be flexible, they are working with caps and risks of fines imposed by the government if they over-recruit.
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.
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.
The best way out of this A-level mess (and one that gets HMG off the hook) is to tell the universities to pull their fingers out and get as many acceptances in the post as they can.
No student will waste time appealing their grade C if they've got into Cambridge or Hull anyway. It is university places that matter, not an unbroken string of A*s to impress grandma.
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.
Fairness within the year is achieved through school internal rankings.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
Another piece of incredible bullshit from the Ofqual explanation of their methodology, which explains the motivation behind this year’s fiasco: ... The maintenance of standards is fundamental to the role of Ofqual, as articulated in our statutory objectives. It is crucial for ensuring fairness to students – both in terms of students taking qualifications with different exam boards in the same year, and students taking the same qualifications over time. This year is no different to any other in this regard...
The idea that, in designing a standardisation algorithm, it should be a priority for this year’s results to be consistent with prior years, is unjustifiable. There was always going to be an asterisk against these results anyway, given that they are estimates. It was pretty obvious that priority ought to have been fairness within the year. The claim that this year “is no different to any other in this regard” is plainly absurd.
There can be no fairness within the year when some schools have over-predicted results and some schools haven't.
There could have been better means of adjusting for that, which Ofqual considered and discarded. As they discarded all the work on predicted results.
How do you know which work on predicted results is honest or not ?
The problem is that the predicted results were fundamentally flawed and so any grades based on them will be fundamentally flawed.
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.
Lol. Equality of opportunity. Lol.
At least your argument is better than the people who just ticked “like”.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Mike: "I get it repeatedly on my Twitter feed with all sorts of machinations being made to the 2017 general election results to try to prove how close Corbyn came to becoming Prime Minister."
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.
Fairness within the year is achieved through school internal rankings.
Clearly, it isn’t. They’ve both discarded any individual evidence (prior attainment and teacher grade predictions*) other than rank order, and given priority to unnecessary sources of statistical randomness.
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.
This is trite. Nobody other than the most extreme of ideologues with a taste for fantasy or totalitarianism wishes to enforce an equality of material life outcome on the population. It's a matter of how much inequality one is prepared to tolerate. And equality of opportunity is not some completely separate and distinct different type of equality that is good in contrast to other types which are bad. It's similar and related. Equality of opportunity is also a fantasy. Why? Because it is impacted by birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, and these can never be equal. So again it comes down to the same question. How much inequality (of any type) is one prepared to tolerate. And Tories have a pretty high threshold. They can bear quite a bit before they snap.
Labour were intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich as I remember.
Labour forgot about fairness and the Conservatives forgot about aspiration.
Its hard to imagine Bodie and Doyle driving anything from Longbridge.
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Indeed. Thank goodness Labour didn't see the wood for the trees. Conspiring to let May's deal pass would have been a masterstroke, instead they conspired to unite the Leave vote behind the Tories. Thanks guys!
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
Your question is tedious.
If person X believes the state system needs improvement then, by implication, X believes that the private sector is currently better. If this is the case, and X can afford it, why shouldn’t they spend money on giving their kids the best education available.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
But there needn't have been the same election in the same circumstances. The Labour leadership and how they acted created the circumstances.
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.
Wasn’t Cameron’s the best for a very long time though? So you are measuring from a peak rather than looking at the long term trend.
IIRC (but happy to be proved wrong) New Labour saw a massive widening in inequality
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
The entire series has just been released on Amazon Prime. I guess it is remastered from the original film, cos it looks great.
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Remain would have won, you mean. Maybe so. But that's going into counterfactual territory. Re GE19, the clear truth as I see it is that Corbyn went into an unwinnable election and proceeded to duly lose it - albeit in a 'crash and burn' style which we could have done without.
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.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
Your prejudice is showing
(The Tories are pro social mobility - co-opting the most talented and driven preserves the current structure.)
It's not prejudice, it's just good to understand what I'm up against. The Tory strategy has always been to allow just enough mobility to prevent any more.
Tories support equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. Social mobility is the sine qua non of that philosophy.
It's a nice slogan but I'm unclear as to which part of grade based on where you go to school is equality of opportunity.
They are making the assumption that cohorts at individual schools are broadly consistent one year to the next. That is a reasonable assumption.
The way to solve the problem would be for the universities to be creative on entry. In most cases, for high scorers, A levels matter until you have your degree results. That’s where the injustice could be done - it’s a staging post.
Broadly consistent at a population level. For given individuals, arbitrarily all over the place.
Yes. But that’s why they took into account (a) prior work and (b) school ranking of individuals.
They only took into account prior work at a group regional level. They ignored it at an individual level.
But will now consider it in an appeal, I believe. School ranking should also take it into account
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
When was Johnson on holiday? He seemed to be doing his job yesterday morning on live TV.
It starts today I believe. Scotland. Rumours of camping.
Johnson can only get one thing up and it’s not a tent
The headline finding is almost useless in and of itself. The question should be: what changed since 2017?
The robotic Theresa was replaced by Boris the showman and Corbyn's 2019 manifesto was an uncoordinated shambles.
Yes, both those points are correct. However, neither is the same as saying the problem was Corbyn personally, which was what the polls found. (So that raises another question: were poll respondents blaming Corbyn as shorthand for one of these other factors?)
I think it was a gestalt of factors rather than a single one. Boris looked better than TMay, in 2019 Corbyn was a proven election loser thanks to 2017, the British public has never liked Marxism since the 1970s and Corbyn put a lot of Marxists in post giving the Tories easy targets to attack.
Corbyn also showed almost zero interest in any current political topic of the time and was apparently more interested in preparing for the socialist utopia to come instead of offering an alternative to the govt of the day.
Come 2019 and what was on offer to the electorate? Nothing that was going to make their lives better.
I sort-of agree about there being multiple factors but that is not what the polls in OGH's header found. I think the polls are at best misleading and probably just wrong.
OGH's graph in the header suggests that Labour was more disliked than Brexit, but Brexit was a fact whereas Corbyn was a possibility so not really comparable IMO
Mike's graph is about those folk who changed their vote away from Labour between 2017 and 2019. Even the relatively small number who shifted over Brexit don't say why. For at least some it may have been a move to LDs, SNP and Greens to a more clearly anti Brexit party, particularly so in London and SE. Swinson for all her failures did increase the LD popular vote from 8 to 12%.
It does indicate that folk didn't like the Labour leadership, but not why. Mostly the novelty of Corbyn wore off as his toxicity and vacuity became clear.
Worth noting too that Corbyns best performance was a hundred seats worse than Blairs worst performance.
Bad as Corbyn was you have to go back to the 1970s to see Labour winning elections with one glaring exception - the one many Labour supporters and probably a big majority of members are wholly embarrassed by. But he was the only one who could take the public with him - the rest simply couldn't do it.
I joined the Labour Party in the mid nineties and voted New Labour in 1997 and 2001. I quit the party in 2003 because of 2 things: 1) the warmongering 2) the increased marketisation and privatisation of the NHS. With this it was not just the policy itself, but also that it was a betrayal of the 1997 pledge to abolish the internal market.
Iraq hangs like an albatross around the neck of Blair, and was in many ways part of the rise of Corbyn.
Blair's Iraq policy is the epitome of an unforced error. Wilson was very sympathetic to LBJ on social policy, but kept his distance over Vietnam. The recent BBC2 series on Iraq showed what a disaster the aftermath of the invasion turned out to be. Saddam was evil personified, and deserved removal but the way the Americans conducted things after 'victory' will be in the textbooks as an example of how not to do things!
I was passionately opposed to the Iraq war at the time, but when you have the entire force of the US government pressing you to join them it's s stretch to call it an unforced error. The UK is a lot less powerful relative to the US than it was during Vietnam in military and diplomatic terms (and is even more reliant on the US now, of course, post Brexit). We could have stayed out of the Iraq misadventure, and should have, but the US would have punished us for it.
I've never thought Blair's policy was based around fear of US punishment. He thought that the World would be a much more dangerous place if US was completely isolated (but went ahead anyway), and thought that by offering complete support that wouldn't happen.
Simpler than that: Blair believed what he was saying. Remember that before Iraq, Tony Blair had undertaken several military interventions, for instance in Sierra Leone and Kosovo.
Sort of...I tend to look back to the relationship with Clinton which was very strong and with whom Blair was very sympatico. Clinton advised his friend that with Bush and his team 'you're either with them or against them, there's no middle way'. Blair accepted, understandably enough that a UK foreign policy of opposition to the US was inconceivable, so he gave his support and gave it unconditionally. This is consistent with your view, Decrepit, and also the Guardian piece reporting the offer to Blair of 'a way out'.
He therefore has to accept the full blame for his Iraq policy. Never mind what Bush said, he could have aligned with the EU and European Leaders in adopting a measured approach but chose not to. OK the Tories would have hammered him for it and with a good deal of success because 'Europe' and the EU was no more popular then than it is now. But it would have been the right policy, he could have carried it and his reputation would not have suffered the massive blow which it was dealt by his disatrous Iraq policy.
A-level anecdatum... I've had one of my French A-level tutees slide into my Insta DMs. She was predicted AABB (and I think she would have got A* in French had she sat the exam) but got BBCC. Apparently her father is on the darkweb trying to find out how to build a car bomb. The rage is real...
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Indeed. Thank goodness Labour didn't see the wood for the trees. Conspiring to let May's deal pass would have been a masterstroke, instead they conspired to unite the Leave vote behind the Tories. Thanks guys!
Frustratingly I do believe at one point this was the strategy but Corbyn being the useless leader he was, was advised against it and took the advice
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.
The best way out of this A-level mess (and one that gets HMG off the hook) is to tell the universities to pull their fingers out and get as many acceptances in the post as they can.
No student will waste time appealing their grade C if they've got into Cambridge or Hull anyway. It is university places that matter, not an unbroken string of A*s to impress grandma.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
OJ is on a twitter tear re private education today. Quite good. Hits the main points pretty skillfully without using lots of words. It's a skill.
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.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Remain would have won, you mean. Maybe so. But that's going into counterfactual territory. Re GE19, the clear truth as I see it is that Corbyn went into an unwinnable election and proceeded to duly lose it - albeit in a 'crash and burn' style which we could have done without.
No I don't think 2019 was unwinnable for any leader.
It's true to say Corbyn's unpopularity on Brexit and his personal unpopularity increased the majority hugely but a more popular Labour leader would have made it more likely Lib Dems would have picked up votes in their 100 most successful seats and the Tories feasibly could have lost via that route.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Remain would have won, you mean. Maybe so. But that's going into counterfactual territory. Re GE19, the clear truth as I see it is that Corbyn went into an unwinnable election and proceeded to duly lose it - albeit in a 'crash and burn' style which we could have done without.
Sure - but his position as Labour leader was integral to that election and the circumstances under which it was fought. If you take him out of thr equation, you have to change everything else as well.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
Your question is tedious.
If person X believes the state system needs improvement then, by implication, X believes that the private sector is currently better. If this is the case, and X can afford it, why shouldn’t they spend money on giving their kids the best education available.
I don't think the question itself is 'tedious'; the repetition of the theme is though.
The issue is how can the state system be brought to a condition where the expenditure on the alternative isn't worth it.
A-level anecdatum... I've had one of my French A-level tutees slide into my Insta DMs. She was predicted AABB (and I think she would have got A* in French had she sat the exam) but got BBCC. Apparently her father is on the darkweb trying to find out how to build a car bomb. The rage is real...
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
OJ is on a twitter tear re private education today. Quite good. Hits the main points pretty skillfully without using lots of words. It's a skill.
OJ's point is bollocks and is why people think Labour hates everyone.
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.
Fairness within the year is achieved through school internal rankings.
Clearly, it isn’t. They’ve both discarded any individual evidence (prior attainment and teacher grade predictions*) other than rank order, and given priority to unnecessary sources of statistical randomness.
* Unless you’re in a small year group.
They haven’t
Prior school performance delivers the shape of the curve
School internal ranking fits individuals to the curve
This will miss (a) outliers (b) cohorts where there is a much stronger intake (c) people where the school ranking doesn’t reflect their performance for internal reasons
Basically for most people in aggregate this will be ok. But you are going to hear a lot of whinging from teachers and pupils and parents.
But the answer is that universities should be flexible
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.
The best way out of this A-level mess (and one that gets HMG off the hook) is to tell the universities to pull their fingers out and get as many acceptances in the post as they can.
No student will waste time appealing their grade C if they've got into Cambridge or Hull anyway. It is university places that matter, not an unbroken string of A*s to impress grandma.
I really doubt any uni is going to be obsessing about results this year.
They're not going to leave courses unfilled given current financial circumstances.
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
The entire series has just been released on Amazon Prime. I guess it is remastered from the original film, cos it looks great.
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
I had a Maxi for a while. Plenty of room in the back for a growing family. Drove it to Rimini and back one year without problems.
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.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Remain would have won, you mean. Maybe so. But that's going into counterfactual territory. Re GE19, the clear truth as I see it is that Corbyn went into an unwinnable election and proceeded to duly lose it - albeit in a 'crash and burn' style which we could have done without.
I quite like the theory that there was a big Conservative majority due but it had been stuck in the pipeline since 2010.
Originally I wasn't really in favour of getting kids back to school but we must not understate the amount of kids who are having a terrible time not being there. Many are stuck in poor living conditions where they can't learn adequately and they are not eating properly. We're doing a massive disservice to them by keeping them away from school.
A-level anecdatum... I've had one of my French A-level tutees slide into my Insta DMs. She was predicted AABB (and I think she would have got A* in French had she sat the exam) but got BBCC. Apparently her father is on the darkweb trying to find out how to build a car bomb. The rage is real...
Why is she talking to you on Insta?
Under 18s don't email in my experience, Insta DM/WA/FB Messenger is just how they communicate. I am available for my tutees 24/7 so I have to use what they use.
Not followed the intricacies of the A level debate but heard somewhere that it was impossible for some students to get the top grade, simply because people in their school in previous years hadnt done well. If that is so, surely that couldnt stand up in court?
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.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
Your question is tedious.
If person X believes the state system needs improvement then, by implication, X believes that the private sector is currently better. If this is the case, and X can afford it, why shouldn’t they spend money on giving their kids the best education available.
I don't think the question itself is 'tedious'; the repetition of the theme is though.
The issue is how can the state system be brought to a condition where the expenditure on the alternative isn't worth it.
I agree with your second paragraph.
The question is tedious because it assumes that you can’t work to improve things without putting on a hair shirt. That’s a false assumption that is presented purely to make opponents look bad.
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
The entire series has just been released on Amazon Prime. I guess it is remastered from the original film, cos it looks great.
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
I had a Maxi for a while. Plenty of room in the back for a growing family. Drove it to Rimini and back one year without problems.
I misread that as “plenty of room in the back for growing a family” and my reaction was to think how uncomfortable it must have been!
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.
The best way out of this A-level mess (and one that gets HMG off the hook) is to tell the universities to pull their fingers out and get as many acceptances in the post as they can.
No student will waste time appealing their grade C if they've got into Cambridge or Hull anyway. It is university places that matter, not an unbroken string of A*s to impress grandma.
I really doubt any uni is going to be obsessing about results this year.
They're not going to leave courses unfilled given current financial circumstances.
I suspect that's right. Once one is into Uni or work/traineeship the actual mark matters not a jot. There are problems though around the edges; a Mainland UK girl was on the TV last night saying that she'd been accepted by Queens Belfast (which was where she wanted to go) with BCC but if she'd got ABB (I think) which was what was expected, she'd have get more financial support; flights home paid for, help with accommodation and so on. (If the grades quoted are wrong, it's the principle).
A-level anecdatum... I've had one of my French A-level tutees slide into my Insta DMs. She was predicted AABB (and I think she would have got A* in French had she sat the exam) but got BBCC. Apparently her father is on the darkweb trying to find out how to build a car bomb. The rage is real...
Why is she talking to you on Insta?
Under 18s don't email in my experience, Insta DM/WA/FB Messenger is just how they communicate. I am available for my tutees 24/7 so I have to use what they use.
Fair enough, just seems an odd place to me to get advice on your exams but what do I know! Very nice of you to to be so accessible
This is right. Boris still had to take the opportunity by being popular enough or not scary to people in the right places, and he had other opportunities as shown by Brexit (though this was also a weakness), but he would not have had the scale of opportunity open to him without Corbyn. I had thought enough people would dislike Boris intently enough that the opportunity would be less, but I was wrong.
So much of the Corbynite dissembling on the election seeks to avoid the inescapable point that, in the end, Corbyn was not able to overcome the challenges before him. Say those challenges were unfair if you want, say they were not possible to overcome (though this would go against their claims for years), but the simple fact is his job was to overcome the challenges, and in fact he made the challenges worse. Arrogantly so, in fact, since he's so in love with his image and sanctity.
Party supporters don't need to suddenly think Corbyn is a bad man or bad leader though. But they shouldn't have an issue with recognising that his approach under his leadership did not work, and spend less time convincing themselves it was not a problem and defending the sanctity of the former leader, and more time focusing on what to do now. It's a political party, not a religion, they don't need to maintain their othodoxy in the face of the facts.
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.
People are judged on the change they make to an organisation or even nation, not that they took over a good country in the first place. In very different ways I think Thatcher and Blair did help social mobility, since then it has been something to pay lip service to, mention in your first PM speech, but then completely ignore the challenges of fixing it and taking on the related vested interests who want to slow equality down.
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
The entire series has just been released on Amazon Prime. I guess it is remastered from the original film, cos it looks great.
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
I had a Maxi for a while. Plenty of room in the back for a growing family. Drove it to Rimini and back one year without problems.
I misread that as “plenty of room in the back for growing a family” and my reaction was to think how uncomfortable it must have been!
LOL. Could have done with a Maxi in student days. Had to make do with a Ford Popular.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Politically, this can go away in England by some high level sackings at the awarding bodies and the regulator.
I don't see any long term damage to key Government people. Johnson was on holiday so he will claim it had nothing to do with him. Williamson can claim he inherited a flawed system. No one remembers it was Cummings and Gove who broke the system.
When was Johnson on holiday? He seemed to be doing his job yesterday morning on live TV.
It starts today I believe. Scotland. Rumours of camping.
Johnson can only get one thing up and it’s not a tent
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.
I had a Maxi for a while. Plenty of room in the back for a growing family. Drove it to Rimini and back one year without problems.
The Landcrab was a great car that anticipated the Zafira/Picasso monospace trend by about 15 years. BL actually had a decent brand strategy by that point (Austin = innovation, Morris = conventional Ford fighters) but the costs and challenges of integrating all the various companies were just too much.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Indeed. Thank goodness Labour didn't see the wood for the trees. Conspiring to let May's deal pass would have been a masterstroke, instead they conspired to unite the Leave vote behind the Tories. Thanks guys!
He might have wanted it, but he couldn't be seen to allow it, and I think in the end the problem was those Labour MPs who did state they accepted we had to leave mostly kept getting cold feet and by the time they'd grown some balls and voted that way things had progressed too far, with Boris in place and wanting an election.
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
This is right. Boris still had to take the opportunity by being popular enough or not scary to people in the right places, and he had other opportunities as shown by Brexit (though this was also a weakness), but he would not have had the scale of opportunity open to him without Corbyn. I had thought enough people would dislike Boris intently enough that the opportunity would be less, but I was wrong.
So much of the Corbynite dissembling on the election seeks to avoid the inescapable point that, in the end, Corbyn was not able to overcome the challenges before him. Say those challenges were unfair if you want, say they were not possible to overcome (though this would go against their claims for years), but the simple fact is his job was to overcome the challenges, and in fact he made the challenges worse. Arrogantly so, in fact, since he's so in love with his image and sanctity.
Party supporters don't need to suddenly think Corbyn is a bad man or bad leader though. But they shouldn't have an issue with recognising that his approach under his leadership did not work, and spend less time convincing themselves it was not a problem and defending the sanctity of the former leader, and more time focusing on what to do now. It's a political party, not a religion, they don't need to maintain their othodoxy in the face of the facts.
"If I quote YouGov polling at them all I get is a response that the pollster is full of Tories"
This alone sums up the Corbynites failure. The "demonisation" of a large part of the electorate simply for being Tories was a shocking part of their outlook. Those people were potential voters, not some nutters whose work could be discredited simply because of them being Tories.
Not to mention that some of them wouldnt have been Tories in the first place if Labour had offered something better to the nation.
A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Indeed. Thank goodness Labour didn't see the wood for the trees. Conspiring to let May's deal pass would have been a masterstroke, instead they conspired to unite the Leave vote behind the Tories. Thanks guys!
Frustratingly I do believe at one point this was the strategy but Corbyn being the useless leader he was, was advised against it and took the advice
Labour's membership was ultra Remain. And on top of that there was the PV crowd, the Campbells etc, and the MPs who were so Remain they defected and formed the Tiggers. It was Corbyn who held out against all this for a period of time before caving in and going with Ref2. Even that was not enough for many. So any letting of the Brexit deal through, actually facilitating the evil event, would have had to have been done on the sly. He would have had to secretly encourage a backbench leave "revolt" by the likes of Flynn & Co. Seems a bit far-fetched.
A-levels -- what is the kremlinology of the downgrading fiasco?
Good for Cummings and bad for the Blob, or bad for Cummings as the leading advocate of blind faith in weirdos and their algorithms?
Bad for Cummings. He claims to be largely responsible for the current incarnation of OFQUAL and the DfE (although that isn’t strictly true) and it’s the botching of his reforms that are partly to blame for the current shambles (although not wholly - cf the devolved regions).
Ultimately the blame for this fiasco will devolve on the government. They panicked and called off exams too early, then put in place a flawed replacement process, lied about what would happen, rejected expert advice warning them it wouldn’t work, failed to properly investigate their concerns instead working with an algorithm that when fed real data gave the wrong results, panicked and u-turned willy nilly when it became obvious nobody was buying their lies, and now appear to not even understand their own processes.
Meanwhile, schools did what they were told. Hard to see how that can be held against them except insofar as the orders were dumb - but many of us were pointing that out at the time.
I do not see how the exam regulators survive this. Teachers have known for years they were useless, but now everyone else knows it too. Their job is too maintain public confidence in assessments,’ and nobody with a brain has confidence in them to do that now.
Why does everyone assume the exams situation is a fiasco or a mistake? The Tories have favoured their own people (private school pupils) while fucking over their enemies (state school pupils who want to go to university - surely the group least likely to be Tories), while their new supporters in the red wall (people who think university is for pinkos) don't care. I'm sure that Cummings views it as job done. If you don't understand that the Tories' entire raison d'etre is to halt social mobility, you're just not paying attention.
The state school pupils aiming for the top universities are most likely to be aspirational lower middle/upper working class.
Those are slightly more likely to be Tory than the university educated middle classes who pay for private schools.
So, yes, it is clearly a cockup.
I doubt that. Most state school kids who go to university are middle class, kids of teachers and other professionals. And a lot of aspirant working class kids are from minorities, not big Tory voters. People who go private skew massively Tory.
Do you have figures to back this up?
Or like other conspiracy theorists, are you just making stuff up to back your ideas?
While I despise the government such theories are damaging. They risk leaving us looking at the wrong problem, which ironically is what the government themselves do because they are thick dogmatists.
This shows OFQUAL are hopelessly incompetent. And that fits with their performance over many years. I worked for exam boards where identical answers were graded two levels apart, where chief examiners in history lacked an understanding of basic chronology, where examiners in philosophy misidentified the categorical imperative as the work of Hume, and where laws were ignored.
And yet OFQUAL have done nothing. Not because they are corrupt as you imply, but because they are useless and lazy.
They are the problem and the solution is to sack them.
Trying to make political capital of a conspiracy means they might cling on to their jobs, and that would be a fucking disaster.
I am basing it on my own observation as a former comprehensive school pupil and current parent of kids at comprehensive schools, and knowledge of private school demographics from friends and colleagues. I am not generally a believer in conspiracy theories, but private education is a conspiracy that operates in plain sight.
I don't believe there is any deliberate conspiracy to benefit private schools; this is an indirect product of the algorithm. It is to do with the fact that very small cohorts have had their teacher estimates accepted. These small cohorts are in subjects such as music, classics, philosophy, modern foreign languages etc. Such subjects are more often taken by able students, and are much more prevalent in private schools, hence the indirect bias. But students in state schools/colleges who take these subjects have also benefited.
State schools frequently can't afford to offer unpopular subjects because their funding won't cover small class sizes. It's got nothing to do with who is clever and who isn't (if you think that state schools aren't full of clever kids then you need to take a look at your prejudices). Somebody must have figured out that the algo favoured private schools, but nobody thought that was a problem. It's a total fucking disgrace and tells you everything you need to know about how this country is run and for whose benefit.
Trouble with the conspiracy theory is that while private schools were favoured, academies did worse than comprehensives, so I'm inclined to think the problem was blind faith in algorithms to get the government out of the hole it dug when it cancelled exams in the first place.
Academies are comprehensives, just with a different form of bureaucracy attached to them. I don't think the Tories have any real interest in which of the two are screwed more, as long as their core constituency (private schools) are favoured. Interesting question for the "nothing to see here" crowd: can anyone name a prominent Tory donor whose kids are educated in the state sector?
OJ is on a twitter tear re private education today. Quite good. Hits the main points pretty skillfully without using lots of words. It's a skill.
OJ's point is bollocks and is why people think Labour hates everyone.
It's not a great point at all, since it feeds into a delusion that the same (or similar) options may be appropriate in one circumstance and not another circumstance, instead by implication suggesting we judge the actions as if proposed in a vaccuum. Criticising an opponent for plans that would increase the debt massively, then pointing out the debt is increasingly massively due to an extremely unusual emergency situation is not to say that the criticisms fo the first were somehow invalid. The government is making plenty of mistakes, but that it has increased the debt does not seem one of them when everyone agreed in principle to the actions which led to it.
A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
Unless Labour had a leader sane enough to let the Brexit deal through so that there never would have been a Brexit election.
Yes. I meant given that same election in those same circumstances - except amended for no Corbyn and a more moderate Lab manifesto.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
If Corbyn had quit after 2017 and we'd have had Keir then it's likely he'd have headed up a minority Government eventually when May's Government collapsed.
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
Indeed. Thank goodness Labour didn't see the wood for the trees. Conspiring to let May's deal pass would have been a masterstroke, instead they conspired to unite the Leave vote behind the Tories. Thanks guys!
He might have wanted it, but he couldn't be seen to allow it, and I think in the end the problem was those Labour MPs who did state they accepted we had to leave mostly kept getting cold feet and by the time they'd grown some balls and voted that way things had progressed too far, with Boris in place and wanting an election.
He could have been seen to allow it if he'd wanted to show true leadership and whip to get the deal through (a whipped abstention would be enough). He could have insisted he was against no deal so would back a deal (May's or Johnson's) but campaign to change it afterwards. He could have set the arguments on what to change in the future not the past.
It would have pissed off hardcore Remainers in his party, it might have led to Starmer resigning from the Shadow Cabinet, but he was strong enough to withstand that and a leadership challenge couldn't have gone through in time so it would have been a fait accompli.
It does occur to me, looking at it the A Levels fiasco that if it had turned out the other way round, and the Eton and the like pupils disadvantaged Gavin Willliamson would have been a backbencher by now.
They definitely used a Rover P6 and an SD1 and (I think but can't really remember) a TR7 (actually made in Solihull!). They did have more Capris and Granadas though.
The entire series has just been released on Amazon Prime. I guess it is remastered from the original film, cos it looks great.
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
I had a Maxi for a while. Plenty of room in the back for a growing family. Drove it to Rimini and back one year without problems.
I had a khaki coloured one in the Eighties and did a road trip to Cornwall camping. It was ugly but OK. The hatchback boot coming open doing 80 on a dual carriageway was the only real trouble...
A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”
I think a fair chunk of Tory MPs are quite sensible, but unfortunately Johnson's no tolerance of even token dissent (e.g Julian Lewis) has effectively turned them into a rubber stamp Parliament. I know that's normal for governments with large majorities, but normally MPs are more openly critical of the government on big issues.
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.
This is trite. Nobody other than the most extreme of ideologues with a taste for fantasy or totalitarianism wishes to enforce an equality of material life outcome on the population. It's a matter of how much inequality one is prepared to tolerate. And equality of opportunity is not some completely separate and distinct different type of equality that is good in contrast to other types which are bad. It's similar and related. Equality of opportunity is also a fantasy. Why? Because it is impacted by birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, and these can never be equal. So again it comes down to the same question. How much inequality (of any type) is one prepared to tolerate. And Tories have a pretty high threshold. They can bear quite a bit before they snap.
Labour were intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich as I remember.
Labour forgot about fairness and the Conservatives forgot about aspiration.
The Mandelson soundbite? Yes. New Labour were ultra keen to reassure Middle England that there was nothing to be afraid of.
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Not much talk of BTecs, but that sounds even worse:
While I'm here, on Priti Patel, migrants and France. I have a suspicion that there is a simple reason that some young, fit migrants choose not to stay in France but try to get here. My suspicion is that it is much harder to be invisible in France and to work illegally, cash in hand, as regulations on this in France are much more rigorously enforced. In the UK, it's a doddle to earn money outside of the scope of the authorities. I accept my theory may be nonsense, however.
I saw yesterday that Home Office had up some pretendy stuff that she visited Scotland. Must have been sneaked in and out in the boot of a Range Rover and complete news blackout. Unionists bricking even more now so that they don't even say they are coming to Scotland , just sneak in and out , Sunak last week now Patel.
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Grandson 2, at a Grammar School, doesn't seem, from what his father says, to have the amount of work I would have expected. Takes A Level next year. To be fair his father has high expectations of the amount of work.
It's not a great point at all, since it feeds into a delusion that the same (or similar) options may be appropriate in one circumstance and not another circumstance, instead by implication suggesting we judge the actions as if proposed in a vaccuum. Criticising an opponent for plans that would increase the debt massively, then pointing out the debt is increasingly massively due to an extremely unusual emergency situation is not to say that the criticisms fo the first were somehow invalid. The government is making plenty of mistakes, but that it has increased the debt does not seem one of them when everyone agreed in principle to the actions which led to it.
Boris (and hence the government) was committed before the pandemic. Boris lifted Labour's 2017 platform and implicitly opposed Cameron and May.
Labour's membership was ultra Remain. And on top of that there was the PV crowd, the Campbells etc, and the MPs who were so Remain they defected and formed the Tiggers. It was Corbyn who held out against all this for a period of time before caving in and going with Ref2. Even that was not enough for many. So any letting of the Brexit deal through, actually facilitating the evil event, would have had to have been done on the sly. He would have had to secretly encourage a backbench leave "revolt" by the likes of Flynn & Co. Seems a bit far-fetched.
Arguably he could have got away with it if he'd taken the position early, before the prospect of the government losing the initial vote was being seriously discussed. The Remainers would have been frustrated and some of them would have rebelled but they weren't really in a position to challenge him.
A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
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.
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.
This is trite. Nobody other than the most extreme of ideologues with a taste for fantasy or totalitarianism wishes to enforce an equality of material life outcome on the population. It's a matter of how much inequality one is prepared to tolerate. And equality of opportunity is not some completely separate and distinct different type of equality that is good in contrast to other types which are bad. It's similar and related. Equality of opportunity is also a fantasy. Why? Because it is impacted by birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, and these can never be equal. So again it comes down to the same question. How much inequality (of any type) is one prepared to tolerate. And Tories have a pretty high threshold. They can bear quite a bit before they snap.
Labour were intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich as I remember.
Labour forgot about fairness and the Conservatives forgot about aspiration.
The Mandelson soundbite? Yes. New Labour were ultra keen to reassure Middle England that there was nothing to be afraid of.
Not that many filthy rich in Middle England.
Plenty of them among Mandelson's mates though.
Not to mention all the Labour politicians who are now filthy rich.
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.
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.
It started with Thatcher and her "every man for themselves" and "dog eat dog" philosophies. She kick started the "I am all right Jack" attitudes.
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.
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.
An impressive level of optimism about what we can expect from 2021, 22, 23...
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Grandson 2, at a Grammar School, doesn't seem, from what his father says, to have the amount of work I would have expected. Takes A Level next year. To be fair his father has high expectations of the amount of work.
Current teenagers will be entering the wider world at a hard time, I do worry about their futures.
Is that real "England" or the usual "England = UK"
How is North England today malc?
(I hope that is not the case of the chart, as they is pretty dumb).
It was a serious question , it happens all the time, especially by UK people but foreigners as well as they are conditioned to it by how the UK is portrayed ( ie as England), they at least have an excuse. You only need look at NHS where they portray the English NHS as the de facto UK Health Service on a daily basis.
And people blinded by dislike of both Corbyn and "Boris Brexit" have yet to face the unpalatable fact that the latter WON the 2019 general election and would have done - albeit not by 80 seats - against any Labour leader.
If Corbyn had not become Labour leader it's more than likely that David Cameron would either still be PM or just replaced by either George Osborne or Yvette Cooper.
Remain would have won, you mean. Maybe so. But that's going into counterfactual territory. Re GE19, the clear truth as I see it is that Corbyn went into an unwinnable election and proceeded to duly lose it - albeit in a 'crash and burn' style which we could have done without.
I quite like the theory that there was a big Conservative majority due but it had been stuck in the pipeline since 2010.
That must have been very painful for them then. Just as well they got it out.
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.
And the year after, too. Guesstimate GCSE's as a basis for progress.
And the year after who will be getting GCSEs next year who have had their education disrupted.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
Grandson 2, at a Grammar School, doesn't seem, from what his father says, to have the amount of work I would have expected. Takes A Level next year. To be fair his father has high expectations of the amount of work.
Current teenagers will be entering the wider world at a hard time, I do worry about their futures.
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.
A fair few Conservatives are frustrated that the government seems to be more concerned about stopping grade inflation than about acknowledging what a stressful and bewildering year it has been for pupils. “So what if you are overgenerous with marks this year? Who cares?” storms one backbencher. “It’s not business as usual, so just go with what the teachers said they’d get, for Christ’s sake.”
Trouble is that this devalues the grades for everyone. No option now though in my view as this is the direction the Scots went.
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Marginally devaluing the grades for everyone is much fairer than dramatically devaluing the grades for a minority (by giving them a grade below what they should have got) in order to maintain the value for others. Its also no less "accurate" than giving out the wrong grades to the wrong people.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Comments
It was meant to be flat, but the clay model drooped in transit and they modeled the panels from the clay.
Quite why none of the designers accompanied the clay is not clear...
One, my experience is that A Level cohorts of 15 or so can vary wildly from year to year. Did they get A*/9 at GCSE, or all scrape B/5? Are the big personalities swots or hearties? The big personalities can affect the attitude of the rest of the group. (The same happened when I taught at one of the most selective universities we have. You get good years and terrible years.)
Second, whole some unis have made heroic attempts to be flexible, they are working with caps and risks of fines imposed by the government if they over-recruit.
No student will waste time appealing their grade C if they've got into Cambridge or Hull anyway. It is university places that matter, not an unbroken string of A*s to impress grandma.
Your man Johnson still wins. Not by 80 but he still gets a working majority. I'm sure as eggs about this.
The problem is that the predicted results were fundamentally flawed and so any grades based on them will be fundamentally flawed.
It’s still not good though
But Philip is right, Corbyn should have let the Brexit deal pass. May's deal would have split the Tory Party.
https://twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/876894066478329857
They’ve both discarded any individual evidence (prior attainment and teacher grade predictions*) other than rank order, and given priority to unnecessary sources of statistical randomness.
* Unless you’re in a small year group.
Labour forgot about fairness and the Conservatives forgot about aspiration.
If person X believes the state system needs improvement then, by implication, X believes that the private sector is currently better. If this is the case, and X can afford it, why shouldn’t they spend money on giving their kids the best education available.
IIRC (but happy to be proved wrong) New Labour saw a massive widening in inequality
Anyway, they drove a lot of Rovers/Triumph/Austin in the early series. Even a Maxi...
He therefore has to accept the full blame for his Iraq policy. Never mind what Bush said, he could have aligned with the EU and European Leaders in adopting a measured approach but chose not to. OK the Tories would have hammered him for it and with a good deal of success because 'Europe' and the EU was no more popular then than it is now. But it would have been the right policy, he could have carried it and his reputation would not have suffered the massive blow which it was dealt by his disatrous Iraq policy.
It's true to say Corbyn's unpopularity on Brexit and his personal unpopularity increased the majority hugely but a more popular Labour leader would have made it more likely Lib Dems would have picked up votes in their 100 most successful seats and the Tories feasibly could have lost via that route.
The issue is how can the state system be brought to a condition where the expenditure on the alternative isn't worth it.
Prior school performance delivers the shape of the curve
School internal ranking fits individuals to the curve
This will miss (a) outliers (b) cohorts where there is a much stronger intake (c) people where the school ranking doesn’t reflect their performance for internal reasons
Basically for most people in aggregate this will be ok. But you are going to hear a lot of whinging from teachers and pupils and parents.
But the answer is that universities should be flexible
They're not going to leave courses unfilled given current financial circumstances.
In the real world the UK is one of the best places in the world for equality of opportunity.
This piece was written to shut down the Johnson attack line in PMQs.
Tories: 42%; Labour 39%
The question is tedious because it assumes that you can’t work to improve things without putting on a hair shirt. That’s a false assumption that is presented purely to make opponents look bad.
The two who didn't are Chris Woakes and Jimmy Anderson.
(If the grades quoted are wrong, it's the principle).
So much of the Corbynite dissembling on the election seeks to avoid the inescapable point that, in the end, Corbyn was not able to overcome the challenges before him. Say those challenges were unfair if you want, say they were not possible to overcome (though this would go against their claims for years), but the simple fact is his job was to overcome the challenges, and in fact he made the challenges worse. Arrogantly so, in fact, since he's so in love with his image and sanctity.
Party supporters don't need to suddenly think Corbyn is a bad man or bad leader though. But they shouldn't have an issue with recognising that his approach under his leadership did not work, and spend less time convincing themselves it was not a problem and defending the sanctity of the former leader, and more time focusing on what to do now. It's a political party, not a religion, they don't need to maintain their othodoxy in the face of the facts.
(I hope that is not the case of the chart, as they is pretty dumb).
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.
The papers this weekend are not happy.
This alone sums up the Corbynites failure. The "demonisation" of a large part of the electorate simply for being Tories was a shocking part of their outlook. Those people were potential voters, not some nutters whose work could be discredited simply because of them being Tories.
Not to mention that some of them wouldnt have been Tories in the first place if Labour had offered something better to the nation.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/16/tory-mps-have-given-their-leaders-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-until-now
A sensible Tory!
If it pans out that way I won`t tell my daughter. I`ve kept her from all this shite and taken the stress on myself.
I worry about this cohort`s self-esteem whichever way this goes now. University places/Sixth Form places is secondary to the self esteem aspect in my view.
Covid is going to affect the education of several year groups.
The lucky year in all this are those who are getting their A levels now.
People are obsessing about the wrong thing.
It would have pissed off hardcore Remainers in his party, it might have led to Starmer resigning from the Shadow Cabinet, but he was strong enough to withstand that and a leadership challenge couldn't have gone through in time so it would have been a fait accompli.
https://twitter.com/LadySassington/status/1294931478141382657?s=09
To be fair his father has high expectations of the amount of work.
Lets say hypothetically there are 3 pupils whom a teacher thought were capable of getting an A so gave them all a predicted grade of an A. But in the real world had they say exams lets say that Pupil 2 may have choked in the exam and got a B instead. But the teacher ranked pupil 3 below pupil 2.
Teachers predictions: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: A
Had they sat exams: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: B; Pupil 3: A
Algorithm: Pupil 1: A; Pupil 2: A; Pupil 3: B
The exams may have given 2 As and 1 B, the algorithm may have given 2 As and a B but is the algorithm "fairer" or more accurate than the teacher's prediction? No. The teacher's predictions got 2 grades correct and 1 incorrect, the algorithm got 1 grade correct and 2 incorrect. You don't fix a mistake by making another mistake to balance it out as an average.
Via the algorithm Pupil 3 has seen their grade devalued from an A to a B unfairly which is far worse than having an A devalued to a slightly less valuable A.
Plenty of them among Mandelson's mates though.
Not to mention all the Labour politicians who are now filthy rich.
That goes if you accept the over predictions along with the accurate predictions.
Aside from encouraging further over predictions in future years.
More to the point, what is so terribly awful about grade inflation? We expect to live with a certain level of monetary inflation and indeed find it beneficial. 95% of the point of grades is to discriminate within year groups not between them so inflation is irrelevant, and if we wnt to use grades to discriminate between different years' achievements we can adjust for inflation just as we do with money before making comparisons. Where's the problem?
You only need look at NHS where they portray the English NHS as the de facto UK Health Service on a daily basis.
I feel like this is a really very bad way to respond to this.
Edit. Burns out.
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.