Michael Gove's silly GCSE numbers business will not last five years, but that will still make it his most lasting legacy, as GCSEs themselves are Margaret Thatcher's.
Those who were 16 during these few, strange years are going to spend the rest of their lives converting their incomprehensible "levels" back into grades A* to G.
GCSEs were only ever introduced in place of the much tougher “O Levels” to hide the decline in educational standards caused by the closure of grammar schools. Today’s comprehensive school pupils wouldn’t be able to hack the old exams which actually required knowledge. I’d love to see “results day” if O Levels were brought back...
ReplyDeleteBitter Old Man is not a good luck.
DeleteI never cease to be amazed at what young people these days know, and can do. You need to get out more.
You'd know, I suppose. At least two of your closest political associates are still not 16 and most of them are young enough to be your sons, more than one has been mistaken for it. From time to time they even try and dress like you. Laura Pidcock went straight from university to Parliament and you have gone straight from university to retirement for 20 years after which you feel like being an MP. She, you and the Tories are on 30-30-30, what a choice. Bring on Dan Hodges.
DeleteI never cease to be amazed at what young people these days know, and can do. You need to get out more.
ReplyDeleteThen you need to talk to the businesses who have to employ them. Or the universities that have had to move their freshers year courses to second year as the students can’t hack it. Or ask why our social mobility is so atrocious.
Britain is the only country in the OECD where children are worse educated than their grandparents.
It’s the legacy of comprehensive schools.
children are worse educated than their grandparents
DeleteUnless your only point of reference is the upper middle class, although even then, that statement is completely ridiculous.
Grammar schools, along with fully legal foxhunting, have just lost an overall majority on the part of the only party that might ever have brought back either of them.
The remaining grammar schools (middle-class ghettos, even in somewhere with as many poor people as Kent has) will survive, as will the non-enforcement of the hunting ban where it already applies.
But grammar schools in general, and hunting either as a fully legal activity or anywhere where it does not already go on, have gone. Forever. Get over it.