The left destroyed education long before the exams fiasco
‘The next generation cannot win back the time the lockdown has cost them.’
This article featured in Issue XI of our print magazine, which you can buy here. If you wish to, you can subscribe for future print issues here.
There is nothing more British than distrust of the political class. What better demonstration of this is there than the coverage of the recent examinations grading fiasco in August? In wake of the lockdown measures, the decision was made by the government to calculate examination results for A-levels (and initially GCSEs, also) by means of an algorithm, intended to predict how students may have performed had they sat their exams. The results soon gave way to outrage on the grounds of unfair treatment of disadvantaged pupils. Analysis suggested that those from the lowest socio-economic backgrounds were more likely to be awarded lower grades than those predicted by their teachers. To prove this correlation, many pointed to the fact that not a single student from Eton College was downgraded in any subject. The cause of this controversy was the fact that the algorithm factored into its calculations the past results of each student’s school.
A simple Google search for 'A-level results 2020' will reveal the sheer number of devastated students, angry with the government for its assumption that where one lives impacts the result one receives. The reality, however, is that to direct anger at this Tory government shows a lack of comprehension regarding the depth of this country’s disastrous long-held approach to education. Boris Johnson’s Government did not invent this assumption as a means of betraying working-class students. "Leftist engineering" (engineering being the deliberate and proper adjective) has been encouraged and enforced by the very teaching unions that media pundits, and some disgruntled students, say we should trust. They turn this assumption into an appalling reality! Every. Single. Year.
We all know the reality in the comprehensive school system; leftists encourage the rich to play the system and enrol their children at better-performing schools by moving into more expensive catchment areas, or by feigning religious practice. We almost never discuss the inequality in the content of education our better-performing schools offer compared with the worst that sustains such demand, especially between the majority of state schools and fee-paying ones.
The A-Level system has become so disreputable that some of our best schools are abandoning them. Many elite private schools and remaining grammar schools have abandoned A-levels in favour of the International Baccalaureate. For example, students at the prestigious Godolphin and Latymer School, or the academically selective Tonbridge Grammar School (which both offer the International Baccalaureate), study six subjects in depth, and are mandated to study English, mathematics, a foreign language and a science amongst them.
Many state school students, on the other hand, only offer students three A-Levels (four if they are lucky enough to attend a better performing state school). Even during the lockdown, the teaching unions’ own behaviour exacerbated this inequality. For its faults, at least the government attempted to get some children back to school before the summer holidays. A study by University College London found that seventy-one per cent of state school children had either zero, or merely one online lesson per day, while almost a third of those in private schools had been engaging in four or more online lessons daily. Such inequality forced on us by the government and teaching unions’ heavy hand is unforgivable.
The next generation cannot win back the time the lockdown has cost them.
The unions have once again kicked a rung off the ladder of the children they assert to want to enable to thrive. Not only have the left offered us incompetence, they have also served up hypocrisy with it. Enthusiasts for leftist educationalism often scoff at the attempts to introduce traditional subjects, such as Latin, which they dismiss as a 'dead language'. Of course, that must be why so many of these enthusiasts send their children to schools that can afford to offer it, by paying extortionate fees, so their children can learn just how 'dead' the Latin language really is.
I bet it is also more than likely their children will not be studying 'Media Studies', or other 'soft' A-Levels regularly offered in many state schools. Unfortunately, the wreckage is likely only to get worse.
Many of these same betrayed students, encouraged by the leftist atmosphere at the heart of modern education, will cry that the answer is to close down the private schools! On a common sense level, this answer is not a proper response at all, as forcing more children into state schools will mean the same amount to spend on an increased number of students, meaning less spending per pupil.
Of course, that rebuttal makes an obvious assumption; taxation will not rise. Those who propose this argument actively want to see spending rise, by increasing taxes on the rich. This is apparently justified under the title "progressive" taxation, or by borrowing, where the generations that follow us are made to pay for spending splurges they did not agree to.
Without an education system that accurately transfers knowledge about our past, the idea that a selective system forged in the past may be the answer will be rejected as a system of (and, so, for) the past. Instead, encouraged by leftist educational theory in the upper echelons of the educational establishment, we will get the same old demands; more splurging of cash on state schools.
Luckily for those aligned with these socialist ways of thinking, they have a government that is willing to listen to them. The lockdown has thrown any notion of austere public spending by the government into the wind. In the last official govern- ment statement of public finances in June of this year, the Public Sector Net Debt (excluding publicly owned banks) stood at £1,983.8billion. In that same month, our debt officially exceeded our GDP for the first time in nearly sixty years.
In other words, if the government wanted to raise public spending on education, nobody would notice under the eye-watering mountain of debt this country has now amassed.
The government has the perfect political excuse to raise spending too, using the "levelling up" agenda which Boris Johnson has been discussing since he won the "Conservative" Party leadership. In that regard, let us increase spending on state education and see where we are by the next general election. Let us see if more spending improves equality for state school students. If the past fifty or so years are anything to go by, the chance of this happening are highly unlikely.
No amount of spending can equal a system that entrenches inequality like the comprehensive system.
At the same time, we must not fall into the opposite error of the leftist attitude by supporting ideas of the past simply because they are of the past. For example, the "forward-thinking" proposal offered by the Labour Party in 2019 that university admissions should be made after students receive their results rather than before, is worth exploring. This could indeed prevent the use of unconditional offers by many universities, and more.
Of course, this article has only scratched the surface of the wreckage of our state education system; to cover it fully would take an entire magazine! The key to attempting a recovery it is to accept reality. As Gavin Williamson’s U-turn proved, there is no real distinction between the so-called ‘Blob’ and the Tories on education.
Both sides uphold your house price as the determinate for your educational chances, rather than your intelligence. Both sides gutted our education system of robust educational content across the curriculum. This isn’t a war of the Tories versus the teaching unions. It is a case of common sense versus educational dogma. It is a war of realism over idealism. It is a war of equality and inequality, and it is the left who are truly upholding inequality.
