Court rejects bid to overturn
GCSE grades
The controversy followed last summer's GCSE exams when pupils
got lower than expected grades
Comment
When recently the education secretary
announced that his Plans to scrap GCSEs in key subjects in England and replace
them with English Baccalaureate Certificates are being abandoned by the
government, my first thought was that the Court case against the state on the
GCSE results of last August would also go against the government. On the surface at least, the government’s
seeming U-turn may be construed as an admission of fault which will not go
unnoticed, not least by the Judges who are yet to pronounce on the case.
When Micheal Gove stood on the floor of
the House of Commons and made admissions like ‘a bridge too far’ and that
"My idea... was just one reform too many at this time", humble and
honest as they seem, one cannot help but conclude that such statements could
prejudice the pending GCSE Court case, which after all is at the core of the
dispute.
That the Court ruled in favour of the
government and agreed that standards need to be maintained, showed two things,
first, that the growing abuse and misuse of rights in our society should not be
allowed to trounce the good intentions of the government. A coalition of litigants wanted to force the
government to change the results of last August GCSE exams and award their
pupils a higher grade than they really achieved, the government said no,
contending that adequate standards have to be maintained, they then sued and
lost.
We see similar abuse and misuse of
rights growing in every sphere of society these days, and in almost all the
cases trying to thwart the government’s well-intentioned plans for the long
term good of the country. The government
has indicated it wants to cap maximum payments to a family on benefits to
£26,000, that being the average annual income of a working family; some
pressure groups oppose it and are threatening to go to court. The State’s plan
to relocate families on benefits from very expensive areas, like Westminster,
to cheaper areas is facing similar resistance too. You can’t eat your cake and
still have it in your hands!
Second, that ruling goes to reaffirm
the faith of many people in the integrity of our Judges and the robustness of
British justice. Personally I believe
that the integrity of our Judges and our Justice system is the greatest asset
this country has. Wealthy people, Corporations
and Sovereign wealth funds from all over the world who are queuing to invest in
the United Kingdom are attracted mainly by the safeguards provided by our legal
institutions.
Two years ago Roman Abramovich, the
owner of Chelsea FC, floated Evraz, a steel giant based in Russia, on the
London stock exchange; you just need to read the accompanying 635-page
prospectus to see the extreme lengths the promoters went to satisfy our listing
disclosure requirements - They were set on ‘tablets of stone’, this boosted
investor confidence and they subscribed handsomely. October last year the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
sought the help of our government to establish Arbitration Court in the UK, in
the hope that a London-based arbitration centre would help counter investor
concerns about the Saudi legal system and thus boost foreign investment in the
kingdom. The court would hear some of
the most high-value and sensitive legal claims in the world. The Saudis
want their largest companies, including Aramco, the state oil monopoly, to
stipulate in contracts the use of the London-based venue to settle any dispute.
Qatar, Kuwait and many other
middle-eastern countries have investments running into tens and probably
hundreds of billions of Pounds in the UK, the Chinese have too, and billionaire
Li Ka Shing in particular keep snapping up our utility companies. In all these, the main attraction to an
investor is the assurance that he can seek redress and gets justice if his
interests are threatened; he does not have to, as it happens in many parts of
the world, rely on the whims of a benign dictator to sleep well at night. I believe our Judges should be held sacrosanct
and their remunerations should not be subject to any austerity cuts - we are
lucky to have them.
Coming back to the dispute under
discussion, I think there is overwhelming merit with the government’s position.
Both GCSE and A-Level standards have been
falling steadily over the years and complaints were coming from all quarters;
from employers, from universities and from the government itself. Sir Terry Leahy three years ago when he was
still the boss of Tesco complained that school leavers are so inadequately
equipped in basic numeracy and literacy that they had to completely retrain
them to bring up to scratch. Sir Stuart
Rose, the former boss of Marks and Spencer expressed similar levels of dissatisfaction.
Last month the CBI which represents all
the captains of Britain’s industry and commerce, referred to the ‘exam factory’
mentality that is destroying both our School system and school leavers. Both Oxford and Cambridge universities have
lost so much faith in our A-level exams that they now virtually have to rely on
their own entrance examinations, like the Cambridge pre-U for their intakes.
Let us return to those old traditions
that made British education such a hallmark of excellence that all the nations
of the earth aspired to it. History has
it that after the 2nd World war, even up to the 1950s American
aristocrats still felt compelled to send their children to avail themselves of
a British education. British private
schools, like Eton, Harrow, st Pauls and many others are highly sought-after by
well-to-do parents the world over, but ironically you will be surprised to hear
murmurs of elitism in some quarters within the UK itself. Recently, Mrs Frances King, the principal of
Roedean College, a top girls private school in East Sussex, where fees for
boarders is up to £31, 000 a year, quit Britain to take up a similar
appointment in Switzerland, criticising the tide of jealousy and hostility towards private education within
Britain. Similarly, Anthony Seldon,
master of Wellington College, last month warned that private school pupils were
beginning to feel the effects of a ‘hatred that dare not speak its name’. Again, like Mrs King, he criticised ‘jealousy
and hostility’ towards independent schools and warned that public school pupils
were being ‘discriminated against at the final hurdle’ when they apply to
universities.
These schools are a huge source of
income to Britain; some of them have even opened satellite colleges overseas,
like what Charterhouse is doing in China. Every economist in the land will tell
you that what Britain needs most now is to boost export, which will in turn
boost growth. This is exactly what the Prime
minister has been doing in India for the past three days, spreading the reach
of the country further afield and show-casing the best of Britain. So let us support and be proud of our schools
and do away with tribal bias against our wealth-generating private schools. I remember hearing PM Cameron say during the last
Tory party conference that he has not come to apologise for privilege, but to
actively spread it as wide as he can possibly do. Spreading it is exactly what Eton College has
just done last month, by building a second brand new ‘Eton’, called Holyport
College. This school which will start in
September next year will devote half its entire intake to pupils from poor
families and educate them completely free of charge in the best of the Eton
tradition. What can be greater than
this?
So coming back where we
started, can there be any justification for the case against the State, which
was brought by a total of 167 individual pupils, supported
by 150 schools and 42 councils, plus six professional bodies, including
teachers' unions? Put it another way; had
Lord Justice Elias ruled in their favour, and the government compelled to climb
down and re-award all those pupils, about 50,000 of them, higher grades, will they and their sponsors
go away celebrating that they have won a noble course? The answer, I am afraid, is no. They may have
only won a pyrrhic victory. What is
wrong in re-sitting your exams if the assessors Judge that you have not done
well enough? What surprised me most was
that those teachers and especially council leaders who sponsored that Court
case went to school in an era when the word of the school examiner was beyond
reproach. At a time of austerity when
all governments are facing budget cuts, the leaders of those local councils are
using our council tax moneys to pursue such a hollow course.
Modern communication
technology has now made the world a smaller place; you can now easily compare
how our school leavers measure up with their counterparts in other advanced,
and even emerging economies. More
importantly, like I said earlier in this essay, what matters most is the final
user, that is the employers to whom the skills of our school leavers and
graduates will fall upon to hire. We
have to trust our government that they mean well for us, when they say that
standards are falling and need to be toughened up we should believe them. If you allow a free fall in quality and award
A-grades to every school leaver, it will
show, you cannot hide it, and will I bet you, the market which is the final
arbiter will definitely not be misled by such fool’s gold.
NB - Sorry this article was
originally intended to be a short News
Commentary of less than one page, but as I progressed it turned into a
formal Weekly Essay. It was billed
to be published on Sunday, but I changed my mind and published it today
Thursday, that is 3 days earlier.
Patrick Chike [Editor]
