For me a lot of the debates around education on here really miss that point – exams as a method of assessing ability are useless. They are good for indicating whether a student can go on to pass harder exams – and then ultimately for choosing the ones who are best at exams to then teach children to pass more exams – and then those that are taught well to pass exams can go on to do harder exams, and…..

I’d go one further; how is it in any way possible to compare the actual abilities of students based on a testing system that primarily measures how fast somebody can write?

I’d be interested to know if anybody ever toyed with the idea of scrapping exam times altogether.

“There are studies emerging which suggest that a higher education (at degree level) can be one of the important elements that can lower the risk of cognitive decline (memory loss, dementia etc) later in life.”

Don’t suppose you can tell me more or point me in the right direction? (onajev@gmail.com)

MT,

This isn’t just about pushy heads.

Your take on qualification weighting is bang on, but the reason the right have no counter argument is that they have a peculiar obsession with the (comparatively) poor mathematical ability of British pupils on a global scale, and strongly believe in addressing it. As I understand it, skewed marking arrangements have existed for some time and it’s possible to sit the foundation version of Maths GCSE where even a 100% score gets you a grade C. It didn’t drive up participation at A Level.

Ideally, the right would love a D in A Level Maths to be publically regarded as equivalent to an B in French; there’s just no damn way in hell (excuse me..) that any kids having to sit those exams will ever shoot themselves in the foot by choosing subjects where they know they are weak.

Tories also tend not to comprehend the nature of a scientist. Probably because so many of them did PPE at Oxford and can barely calculate VAT. Like musicians, a mathematician is born not made.

For the record, I dropped Maths when I was 16. When I left school at 18 I got a job training as a fund accountant with 3 A Levels in arts subjects. Nothing close to what I’m doing now, but it gave me valuable, practically applicable accounting skills that school never did.

The Tory draft education manifesto makes for some interesting reading too. Underling most of the policy initiatives is a fundamental belief that it is ‘power’ rather than wealth that should be redistributed. This can be open to the rather obvious rebuttle that money is power. A selective use of evidence inevitably follows many of the paper’s more strident remarks, although some are well founded. It is regrettable that sensible observations on falling attainment in the more academic subjects are wrapped up in the same sentence with tenuous links to social ills or classroom violence.

Truancy levels “up by more than a third, despite government spending of over £1 billion to combat it” carries an unfounded deduction of cause and effect. A “post hoc ergo propter hoc” argument will often be reliant on logical fallacy, and some of the manifesto’s comments would simply be offensive to many in the teaching profession, such as a need for schools with teachers “who know children’s names”.

The reoccurring subtext carries a desire to redefine an epoch of history in the Conservatives’ own image, and a “post bureaucratic age” is as easy to sell now as “class sizes under 30″ was in 1997. The attainment gap between rich and poor students in the coming Cameroon era is promised to be closed by higher standards and increased choice (as well as ‘shaking things up’), but with the self-confessed reluctance to act on the part of a future Tory government, it is difficult to foresee consequences if indeed they arise.

“The success of our plan to mend Britain’s broken society depends less on the actions that a Conservative government will take to give people more power and more on society’s response”

I never fail to smirk any time they begrudgingly use the “S” word.

The more we pile on objectives and aims for schools that are nothing to do with educating, the more seriously they fail to educate. The accumulation of ever vaguer aims is the recipe for bureaucracy.