A-level results week. Kill me now. One of mine is getting hers and I say: “Don’t worry, none of it matters.” But then I am not a tiger mother. My book Sloth Mothering: How Not to Give a Monkeys is bound to sell brilliantly.
Still, she cares, because the teachers – who are burning out faster than they can be trained – care, because this is how they, too, are measured. The system is insane. No one needs miraculous grades unless they want to go to some super-duper college, because it is a buyer’s market. Many universities would probably admit my cat if it could pay international-student tuition fees. One college even sent my daughter chocolate lollipops to woo her. She didn’t know where the place was, but must have ticked a box on the Ucas form to shut everyone up.
She doesn’t really know where anywhere is. I think geography fell out of the curriculum at some point, or she was ill the day they did England. She does, however, know an awful lot about Mao Zedong. She is at John McDonnell level at least, I would say. And Mao seems very appropriate, not only for what has been in the education system, but what is going on now.
Remember, Michael Gove wrote in 2010: “Like Chairman Mao, we’ve embarked on a Long March to reform our education system.” It is 2019, so let’s see where that long march has got us. Ofqual has said it is likely that two out of five teenagers who have sat essay-based A-levels may by awarded the “wrong” grade because of inconsistent marking; subjects such as English and history are particularly affected because of the subjectivity of the marker. Experts talk of a “crisis of confidence”. The long march falters. A-levels are no longer the gold standard.
All this was done in the name of “standards”. Wussy subjects such as art and sociology were deemed almost worthless. Languages disappeared. English has been turned into a series of grammatically correct, imaginatively dead exercises. AS-levels came in with my first child and went out with my youngest. Bright kids used to take four A-levels; now it is back to three.
When I have asked teachers what is happening, often they reply that they are waiting to be told themselves. The academisation of state schools – an attempt to ape the discipline and ambition of private schools, but without their vast resources – tramples on. Free schools are in meltdown, many failing to meet “standards” and haemorrhaging millions of pounds. Some standards are more equal than others.
The blob – Gove’s disparaging nickname for the educational establishment and his many critics in it – has been well and truly undermined. Parts of this were done without consultation. It is rather like me breaking into an operating theatre and saying: “Give me a scalpel; I could hack that.” Who needs knowledge and experience?
Any kid who has survived this incessant mucking about has done well. Of course, while Gove was beginning his cultural revolution of turning back time, that edgelord Dominic Cummings was his adviser. Another quasi-Maoist. This is the key to this administration.
Teachers now speak of a working day reduced to numbers. As one respondent to a recent survey put it: “My job is no longer about children. It’s just a 60-hour week with pressure to push children’s achievement data through.” One in five now plan to leave within two years. Vic Goddard, the principal at Passmores academy in Harlow – of Educating Essex fame – complained that Gove dismissed vocational qualifications, sending the message that “you’re only valuable if you go to university”. Further education has virtually been demolished.
Supposedly, Mao once said: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.” Chaos excites the men who run our country now.
So, best of luck to those kids on Thursday. I am not a Maoist. I prefer rather old-fashioned philosophers. Whatever your results, as Bill and Ted said: “Be excellent to each other.”
