education

funny thing about politics when you are in opposition it is easy to score points, in fact it is very hard not to. the joy of being part of the opposition is that you can pretty much criticise anything for any reason.
take education.
every year when the gcse results are posted the conservatives are there trumpeting on about how standards have declined and how the papers are so much easier than they were in the good old days. their can be no confidence in the results is their cry. surely though this can’t be true as most of the top grades come from public schools. do the wealthy middle and upper classes really spend all that money just to get qualifications that no one has faith in? that can’t be right.
so it must be the state sector schools whose results we cannot believe. those estate kids who go to the local comprehensive must be getting a dummies guide to exams paper each time they get to sit an exam. that must be the answer.
unless of course the real benefit of the public schools isn’t so much what you learn but who you learn it with.
so the bottom line seems to be that it is all too easy for children to pass their exams. they need to be challenged. they need to be truly tested; they have to prove themselves in the heat of the exams.
fair enough you might say.

yet when the sats (that is standard assessment tasks to you and i) results decline in english for the first time since the tests were introduced (1995) what do the conservatives say?
step forward michael gove and tell us: "we have seen a historic drop in english results, the brightest students are not being stretched, and the weakest are being failed the most. it is deeply worrying that english results are in decline."
from that you would think that the drop had been from the highest mountain and into the deepest abyss. when in fact the decline was from 81 to 80%, a big, a very big 1%, disaster.
i believe mr. gove has entered hyperbole corner.

hold on a second haven’t the tories been complaining that standards are too low, that it is all too easy.
now call me stupid (and many do) but if you are planning on making something harder you are expecting to see more people fail because if they don’t then the tests are the same as they were before.

really all this shows is that in opposition over education the tories have their cake and they have eaten it.
oh we want things to be harder to reward those that work harder.
oh no fewer have attained the standard this year it goes to prove education system is wrong.
all the conservatives are really complaining about is that too many oiks are passing too many exams. if someone from the local comprehensive is getting those results it just makes the private sector look a lot less attractive.

for all the talk about them being caring and compassionate the tories never really change. problem is this time next year they will be in power,