One of the most controversial voices in British journalism, Phillips began her career as a scion of the left, as News Editor of the Guardian, Britain’s most influential liberal newspaper. She quickly became disenchanted with the lack of rigour in the left’s view and began to question all its holy grails. She has since become a columnist whom her former friends love to hate but have to respect. After writing for the Guardian she moved to the Observer and then the Sunday Times, leaving there to write for the right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail.
This article attacking the idea that in education ‘all must have prizes’ sums up much of her critique.
Surely, in the immortal words of John McEnroe, they cannot be serious? Alas, the latest pronouncement from those in charge of our exam system is truly beyond satire.
Their new idea for boosting examination success is to abolish the very idea of failure, along with the difference between the right and the wrong answer to a question.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has told those marking the school curriculum tests that ‘F’ for ‘Fail’ is to be replaced by ‘N’ for ‘Nearly’, and that maths questions are to be marked ‘creditworthy’ or ‘not creditworthy’ instead of correct or incorrect. A QCA spokesman said – apparently with a straight face – that if pupils don’t pass these tests it doesn’t mean they have failed, because they will have ‘nearly reached the target’.
This may seem ridiculous beyond parody (will the Conservatives now claim they ‘nearly’ won the Brent East by-election?). Tragically, however, it is merely the logical outcome of an education system which is steadily destroying the concept of achievement itself.
A-level standards have now become so degraded, with universities unable to distinguish between pupils obtaining vast numbers of top grades, that the Government has floated the preposterous suggestion of admission by lottery. Tomorrow Professor Steven Schwartz, the Government’s adviser on university admissions, is expected to propose that the universities lower the A-level grades required of children from sink schools.
This grossly unjust proposal reflects the neanderthal view that real intellectual achievement is a conspiracy against the working class. The Government has dismally failed to correct the appalling standards which act as the real bar to university for able pupils from many schools in poor areas. It also refuses to accept that many pupils at such schools understandably believe that a university degree is of less use than proper training for a skilled job.
Actual facts like these, however, can’t be expected to block the path of an ideological fixation. Professor Schwartz wants to set up a two-tier admissions procedure to shoe-horn into university the pupils that both he and the Government unfairly assume are discriminated against – a travesty that will destroy the worth of such qualifications altogether.
Labour’s obsession with identical educational achievement is strongly echoed by the entrenched belief in the education world that sheep must never be sorted from goats. Getting the correct answer or passing an exam is not as important as preventing pupils from having their feelings hurt.
Such political and education ideologues believe that the education system has failed if it fails anyone. That’s why the government wants half the population to have a university degree.
Schools Minister, David Miliband, condemns as elitist those who argue that only relatively few can benefit from a university education. Expect to hear a lot more of such ministerial class-war sneering as the university top-up fees argument rages. Yet top-up fees have only become necessary because successive governments have hugely expanded university numbers.
This expansion has itself reduced achievement and caused rampant exam grade inflation, as standards are lowered to funnel more students into higher education. Those who have blown the whistle on this corruption are either denounced or ignored. Only recently David Kent, a senior maths examiner, revealed how he was forced to lower the GCSE pass mark to avoid failing too many students because their performance was so poor.
The progressive loss of any reliable, objective measure of achievement, along with a widening choice of soft subjects, means that ever more students are apparently qualified for university but with ever less knowledge. The result is not just an explosion of absurd degree courses, but the standard of proper subjects is also being forced downwards.
Universities are now heavily into remedial work for the many students who haven’t learnt enough to keep up. But since these institutions receive funds in proportion to the numbers getting good degrees, the standard of those qualifications is going down.
These students can’t do the work because the A-level has been dumbed down. That’s because the GCSE, the exam ‘no-one could fail’, has in turn been of such a low standard: and the reason for that was to give the majority of 16-year-olds a qualification.
The futility of that particular aim was shown up by last week’s OECD figures which revealed Britain’s dismal international education performance at 16, despite many more students going to university.
Against the background of our ruined A-levels, Professor Schwartz is expected to propose US-style intelligence tests as a university entrance requirement. But crucially, such tests do not require evidence of an appropriate level of knowledge.
This is a proposal that has nothing to do with concern over education standards, and everything to do with forcing up the proportion of working-class students. Indeed, the universities will only be able to charge top-up fees if they prove they are taking more children from poor schools.
In this way, ministers will effectively put a gun to the universities’ heads to reduce standards, in order to promote the government’s programme of crude social engineering at the expense of academic rigour. And to cap this destruction of the education system, students will be forced to pay for the privilege.
The mess in which the government is in over top-up fees is deepening into wild incoherence. Thus the Education Secretary Charles Clarke lets it be known that he will exempt the poorest students – while the Prime Minister confides that he is most worried about resistance from the middle classes.
Such political pain is particularly pointless, since top-up fees will solve nothing. They will need to be set far higher if the universities are to stave off bankruptcy. They will tighten still further the government’s grip on the universities’ windpipes. And they will be subsidising useless degree courses and declining educational achievement.
The collapse in education and the corruption of the universities can only be halted if these institutions are set free from government control. That would mean they would have to charge fees. Fair access could be ensured by channelling higher education funds into weighted vouchers which could then be topped up, supplemented by scholarships and bursaries. Putting power into the hands of education consumers would spell an end to meaningless degree courses and create more pressure for high quality vocational training.
Those who say this is elitist are themselves responsible for making qualifications at every stage increasingly worthless. In fact they are the real elitists, since their charge that it is wrong to deprive people of a university education reveals that they think any other qualification is demeaning and without merit.
The Prime Minister insists he will not be deflected over top-up fees. He thinks he is being radical by introducing the market into higher education. He does not realise that his whole education policy is utterly wrong and misguided, hijacked by the very ideology of levelling down that he appears to imagine he is opposing.
Tony Blair made education reform the litmus test of his government’s success. With his policy descending into farce, he will doubtless continue to delude himself that he is ‘nearly’ becoming ‘creditworthy’. The rest of us may conclude instead that he has simply failed.