Why Are We Tolerating Failing our Children?
Today the goalposts will be 7 yards apart for England and for Wales, they’ll remain at 8 yards. The governing body considers this range to be within tolerance so therefore it is fair, reasonable, and correct. Have a crack!
Jamie was driven to become a GP and worked towards that goal all through high school, progressing to achieve all 8’s and 9’s on ALL GCSEs, except one. One result shattered those dreams, a Grade 5 in English Language. Regardless of all the 8’s and 9’s this meant that at the age of 15, nearly 67% of the medical schools in the country won’t even consider the application in two years’ time, even with Jamie’s Distinction grade on the Spoken Language Exam, even with a Grade 8 in English Literature, not even if English Language went on to be Aced at A-Levels.
The problem with this is that Jamie doesn’t know that Ofqual’s research has revealed that there is a 48% chance this grade is indeed, incorrect. Jamie is far from alone, up to 298,000 students every year are awarded an incorrect grade. What opportunities do you know of that your children and grandchildren lost because of this? Apprenticeships, university places?
Jamie is not allowed across the threshold of 25 medical schools, even with straight A*s at A-Levels but it’s worth noting, those universities considered the most selective, Oxford and Cambridge, would be welcoming. However, two other universities go so far in their misunderstanding of the GCSE English Language exam results that they indicate anything less than a Grade 6, must mean you are not a native English speaker. Even with the Distinction grade on the Spoken Exam.
Jamie knew some classmates had submitted their exams back to the exam boards, to have their marks reviewed. One student’s marks did not move but another’s, Cameron’s, moved from a Grade 5 to a Grade 7. Jamie couldn’t afford the £76 fee to have the exam reviewed, so no possibility of finding errors. Besides that, the school refused to submit it just because they could (they weren’t too fond of Jamie, they really liked Cameron though).
The student whose grade didn’t move read in the margin notes on the paper, from the person marking the exam (a senior examiner), that the marks awarded were within a “reasonable range”. What did that mean? It meant that since only 10 marks separated each grade (Grade 4 to Grade 5 to Grade 6 and so on), if you added up the permitted reasonable range of marks that you didn’t get but someone else did, for the exact same answer, it meant your Grade 5 would easily have been a Grade 6 or even a Grade 7 but for the bad luck of pulling the short straw, the wrong examiner. Poor Jamie. Lucky Cameron.
This “reasonable range” is what Ofqual calls tolerance. Tolerance is the different number of marks allowed (or tolerated) from the examiner for each question, whilst still considering the different number of marks awarded to be fair, reasonable, and correct. For example, if a question is worth 8 marks with a tolerance of 2 marks, the 4 marks you were given would be permissible, deemed correct and would remain your marks even when a second examiner determined that they would have awarded you 6 marks instead. (Thank goodness you weren’t the student who was given 2 marks for your same answer though, as that is deemed correct too. Tolerance!) Hmm, 10 questions, supposing a tolerance of 2 marks per question, well that’s 20 marks not given (examiners are allowed to deviate by up to 32 marks for the English Language exam). What is that you say? That’s two grades higher!
But hey, at least Jamie didn’t pull the 30%-Have-To-Fail straw, senselessly baked-in since 2012, regardless of a good exam performance. Yes, roughly 30% must fail each year, regardless. Imagine if the Driving Test was the same. How brilliant! The roads would be so much quieter, 30% would be forced into walking or using public transport instead. But which of us will it affect? Not me! I need my car to get to work.
When exam organisations make statistical statements such as: 96% of GCSE Maths and 52% of English grades are definitive or correct (as revealed by Ofqual’s 2018 research), that leaves 4% to 48%, up to 298,000 students every year with an incorrect grade. 298,000 children like Jamie. It would be like watching the World Cup when sometimes they’re aiming a kick at posts spread 8 yards apart, other times, 7 yards. Both within governing-body sanctioned tolerance. Both correct. Afterall, it’s just a game, not anyone’s future we’re playing around with.
On the subject of statistics, here are a few to prove that this education status quo is extremely damaging beyond the obvious, student-centred injustice:
- As recently covered in The Economist, of the G20 nations only Russia will fare worse than the UK regarding GDP in 2023, furthering a decades long decline in Britain’s productivity. One cause of this is lack of education. The share of the British population with higher secondary qualifications is 32%, the average of the OECD, 42%.
- Regarding Britons in the criminal justice system, the Office for National Statistics published that of our 2022 prison population only 8.6% had passed five GCSEs. The pass rate in the UK’s free population whilst better, is still a disheartening 58.3%. It’s a hard pill to swallow especially considering those failing grades could actually have been incorrect, they had a high chance at being passing grades but the resulting negative life chances of a failing one, are definitively indisputable.
- In the last decade there has been a 35% drop in the number students taking A-Level English. This is happening right now, in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens.
Until we confess that any attempt to excuse our flawed exam processes as it relates to our most vulnerable, our most underrepresented, our children; then we will continue to fail not only them but our country as well. 96% to 52% correct? That leaves 298,000 children with far less opportunity for economic prosperity, each and every year. Whose child or grandchild will it be? Yours?
We can fix this. Many solutions have been offered by experts in the field of education and assessments. We need only act.
Notes:
Why you ask, are the marks given for an answer allowed to be different? To be within a range of tolerance? Because the examiners are human beings, the mark schemes are subject to some degree of human interpretation. Because if we didn’t allow a range, nearly every exam out there would be appealed for a re-mark until we found the examiner who better liked our answers and graded it favourably. Besides all of that, exam boards will be fined by Ofqual if they change grades by too much. Oh my, the additional cost and loss of trust in exams that would cause! Tolerance was the easiest option, right or wrong, backed by science or not, fair or unfair.
Why you ask, do 30% fail? Because we want to be sure that all the different exam boards produce the same results otherwise one exam would be considered easier than the others. Because we came up with this idea in 2010 and that is roughly what the results were then so it was easiest to stick with that number again, right or wrong, backed by science or not, fair or unfair.
We’ve heard it argued that for every lower-than-definitive grade given, there is a corresponding higher-than-definitive grade given. If a student takes ten GCSEs then the theory behind this immensely flawed statistical science is 50% of their GCSEs will be higher and 50% will be lower. It’s a wash. If that is the case, I shall buy my lottery ticket every day. I’ll lose today but I’ll win tomorrow, correct?
Who really cares about complaints? The students are different every year so we don’t need to worry about making them happy, they’ll be gone in a few months.
Sources:
Ofqual – Research and Analysis – Marking consistency metrics – An update – November 2018.
Relevant excerpts:
“The term ‘definitive’1 is based on terminology ordinarily used in exam boards for the mark given by the senior examiners at item level for each seeding response.”
“The median probability of receiving the definitive qualification grade varies by qualification and subject, from 0.52 (English language and literature) to 0.96 (Mathematics).”
“Analysis can be extended to calculate the probability of a candidate being awarded a grade within one grade (ie +/- 1 grade) of the definitive grade. This is illustrated for all subjects in Figure 13. It is observed that the probability of being awarded a grade within one grade of the definitive grade is 1 or nearly 1 (ie 100% or near 100% probability) for nearly all subjects. For English literature, history, English language and literature, geography, sociology and English language, the median probability ranges from 0.96 to 0.99.”
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The Mr Salles Guide to 100% in AQA English Language GCSE Paper One Question 3
© 2022 Dominic Salles
“For example, Paper 1 is worth 80 marks. Examiners are allowed to differ by 16 marks.”
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The Economist
Britain’s productivity problem is long-standing and getting worse
Many culprits and few easy answers
Jun 9th 2022
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Stagnation nation”
Relevant excerpts:
“Yet the OECD, a club of rich countries, reckons that only heavily sanctioned Russia will fare worse in the G20 in 2023.”
“And even if it is hard to pin down the exact sources of the productivity slowdown in the 2010s, it is easier to identify areas where Britain has to do better in future. They fall into three big categories: investment, people and the spread of knowledge.”
“The share of the population with higher secondary qualifications—ie, people who do not take a degree but who do stay on in education after the age of 16—is around 32%, well below the oecd average of 42%.”
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Office for National Statistics
The education and social care background of young people who interact with the criminal justice system: May 2022
Relevant excerpts:
“These differences are also present at KS4; 8.6% of those who went on to receive custodial sentences achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. This increases to 58.3% for those without convictions.”
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The National Association for the Teaching of English.
The Decline in Student Choice of A Level English A NATE Position Paper
https://www.nate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/NATE-Post-16-position-paper.pdf
Relevant excerpts:
“Recent years have seen a significant and continued decline in the number of UK students choosing to study English subjects at A Level – a total of 35% decrease between 2012 and 2016, with English Language and English Language and Literature suffering particularly steep falls.”
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DO YOU HAVE YOUR LICENSE TO SURF THE INTERNET?
Over the course of their young lives our kids will receive 1,000 hours of instruction in English, 45 hours in driving, eight hours in cycling and one hour in “internet-ing”. With a 95% rise of girls being admitted to hospital for self-harm (with causes linked to social media) and boys attending £4,000 “gaming” addiction rehab, we should provide far more instruction and even require a license to surf the web.
Jack knows how to ride a bike, he has since he was four but at nine he had to learn more. So it was Bikeability for eight hours, learning how to indicate, ride in a group and basically just how to ride safely. In a few years’ time 16 year old Jack will spend 45 hours learning to drive a car. Why didn’t we just stick a helmet on him at nine and tell him to bike through Elephant and Castle? It would be good practice after all. Why didn’t we just give him the car keys on his 16th birthday and ask him to pick up a pint of milk and free range eggs? Well, it would be dangerous to Jack and everyone he came into contact with on the roads.
“SIDE SALAD WITH YOUR TABLET, SIR?”
Around the same time he hopped on a bike for the first time, Jack picked up a tablet. Mum and Dad put some toddler friendly apps on it and this made going out for a meal much more delightful. Beep, beep, beep, “So honey, what should we do tomorrow?” beep, beep-beep …. boooooop, “Well, I need to wash Jack’s clothes, clean his room, buy a gift for a party he’s going to and …” “Okay okay, I guess I’ll just mow the lawn.” beep.
At eight Jack is playing Minecraft on the computer with “friends” from all over the world. Such a fantastic multi-cultural opportunity. Pink pigs can hang out with black enderman and green creepers. It is a rainbow of inter-species mingling. How fabulous! However the flip side is that we must consider recent studies by National Children’s Bureau – Northern Ireland that found students suffer poor grades by spending too much time gaming and the World Health Organisation states electronic game time needs to be reduced to tackle childhood obesity.
“I’VE BEEN TWEETING FOR YEARS MUM. I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!”
Jack is now at high school and at 13 he’s been “posting”, “tweeting” and “snapchatting” for years now. He knows what he’s doing. He is an experienced 13 year old after all and it isn’t dangerous like cycling in London, right? Sixty per cent of children aged 11 to 14 have shared pictures on social media of people self-harming. The Health and Social Care Information Centre states there has been a 95% rise of girls aged 10 to 14 being admitted to hospital for self-harm over a recent four year period. A 45% rise for boys. According to ChildLine, more children in Britain are considering suicide than ever before with many of those being aged 12 to 15. It’s not safe. Just like learning to cycle by giving it a go on Elephant and Castle isn’t safe.
JUST JUMP ON AND GO!
With new endeavours we all require a little basic training to varying degrees. For instance, I think I’ll take a course on bicycle repair before I attach new brake cables and head down a single track in the mountains; but, I will just give it a go with edging the paint on the skirting boards. (But maybe try it behind the sofa first.) At times we simply jump on the bike and go but at others we are required to know a bit more before-hand, in order to stay safe and keep others safe.
I WONDER IF SHE IS ALIVE?
In our new digital era we are all learning how to navigate and harness a completely new approach to life. Twenty-three years ago I flew to Guatemala to study Spanish. Once there, I never communicated with my parents. No word of safe arrival, no teary letters home. They just had to assume I was fine until they heard otherwise.
Similarly 23 years ago, my husband made a new friendship whilst travelling to Greece. The guy sitting next to him on the flight shared his love of cycling and traveling the world to experience other cultures. Jim was stopping in Athens whilst John was flying on to New Delhi. They exchanged mailing addresses (the ones with a postcode) and made plans to meet in New York, The Port Authority on Thursday 21 July 1994 at 15:00. And so they did. They are dear friends to this day.
Over a decade ago lots of Jacks were born. They’ve known nothing except constant connectivity. Do they have parents to advise them on their connected world? Probably not. After all, Mum as a teenager flew off to Guatemala for the summer to study Spanish having perused only one paper brochure. She has no juvenile experience with the internet. No data banks in the brain to draw upon. Perhaps she only knows this connected world as a great place to show off every good moment of her life. “Look at this breakfast I’m having whilst on holiday in Thailand. Isn’t it amazing!” She somehow fails to mention to her “friends” that the holiday has left her broke and wondering how to repair the car that decided to drop its engine onto the ground.
1.0 HOURS. SORTED.
Jack’s primary school had an internet safety lesson (The Right Click: Internet Safety Matters) lasting 1.0 hours. Done and dusted. This was taught to eight year-olds by a British Telecom IT Security Officer and Customer Installation Engineer. I don’t believe their job descriptions mentioned the ability to educate children. Perhaps the teachers took a 1.0 hour long course too, giving them the tools to help Jack navigate this brave new world. They and the teachers are at a disadvantage to teach the 1.0 hour lesson on internet safety. After all, the instructors are mostly just parents who grew up in a world where “screen time” only referred to television screens. What could they possibly teach young Jack? They have little training or experience and have been provided few or no lesson plans or mandates. If we spend 1,000 hours learning English we would need at least a quarter of that amount of time to learn how to safely and effectively use the internet. And not let it use us.
PAW… paw… Paw-Paw
Social media is a new way to communicate, a new language replete with a myriad of phrases and acronyms that are Greek to those over 40 (well those over 16, really). Know what “paw” means? No, it is not a slang for “hand”. It’s “parents are watching”.
Of course the government requires we teach our kids English (regarding which, they’ll receive over 1,000 hours of training over their school career) but not this new internet language. And I don’t mean “coding” and certainly not making a power point presentation. It’s no more advanced than clicking and dropping images around a screen and virtually any five year old can do that. They know the glowing screen intuitively just not appropriately. We don’t instruct on this new basis for communication, this new reality, this internet. Yet it is involved in almost every aspect of our children’s daily lives.
100 YEARS
Our vital digital interconnectivity became commonplace only 20 years ago. Bear in mind cars became common on the roads a 100 years ago but seat belts were only made compulsory in the last 50. Consider all that we have learned over the years about how to build and operate them safely.
We’ve had 100 years to develop how we harness and use many great innovations like cars. Therefore, Jack will spend 45 hours learning to drive on a few miles of roads, so why only 1.0 hours learning to cruise a million miles of information superhighway. Our modern world is evolving quickly and we have to keep up.
PRACTISE MAKES PERFECT
Some say, “But he’ll use it daily in class, researching, learning. He’ll learn to use it by doing.” Yes, let’s throw him the car keys on his 16th birthday as well.
I recently gave the proverbial keys to my own 11 year old for his homework assignment. He had three French phrases with which to transpose three nouns into new ones. Change “I like chicken.” to “I like race cars.” He spent two hours on the internet. End product; no new nouns discovered and learned. He did however, have next to the nouns already given, lovely photos of what the three new nouns would have been. A photo of a race car next to the word, “poulet”. Parlez-vous français? No.
LEGAL HIGHS
Right now we are throwing our kids to the wolves. Smoking is illegal for our young until they are 18 because it is physically harmful and addictive. Therefore computer gaming is legal for our young because it is physically healthy and not addictive. Hmmm. Perhaps that’s wrong. Research indicates it creates a bit more fight than flight in kids and has dire health consequences. Quite often that “sweat” kids exhibit while “gaming” is a nervous response: Your mind thinks its body is in peril. Your mind may not be wrong.
Withdrawal from gaming can be similar to that of drugs or alcohol. A Leeds University study suggested as many as 600,000 UK computer users could be classified as addicts. Addiction? I’m afraid so. Video game addiction therapy centres are popping up all over the world with one UK centre getting 10 calls a day from desperate parents. Perhaps it is not happenstance that the word “gaming” is only defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “computer gaming” and “gambling gaming”, another past time known to have a tendency toward addiction.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists compare the “high” a gamer or online user gets as being similar to the high people get when using illicit drugs. Our kids are getting a hit of dopamine. These psychiatric counsellors have found children become violent and threaten others and themselves, when trying to withdraw from computers and games.
HEALTHY SMOKES AND SMART PHONES
In the 1980’s when I was in high school in America, you could smoke in school. The law said anyone over 18 could buy cigarettes so yes, the older students could smoke in designated areas. I remember it well, a smoky corner of the breezeway between the two classroom buildings. (Not me of course, I just enjoyed “the cloud”.) Today it is the IT suite where at my son’s school, kids get their “fix”, their gaming break time. Some educators say it keeps them from being tempted to use their smart phones in class. (There is a bit of irony in naming this technology “smart”. Much like cigarette ads in the 1940’s praising smoking as “healthy”.)
Times change, we research, conduct studies, we progress. Today you can’t smoke in my old high school (nor most places). Smoking is bad for you and addictive. Now we must consider our kids’ poorly guided use of technology.
JACK GETS HIS LICENSE!
There are many courses for English, driving and cycling but few if any for “internet-ing”. It is time to end our haphazard approach to our new digital world and like our forefathers, put seatbelts in those cars. Let’s not lose this generation of kids. We need to leap forward, be good parents and good governments. Let’s demonstrate professionalism, organisation and concern. Let’s guide them safely through the motorways and byways of the world wide web and develop the courses and curriculum now.
Jump ahead a few years and we find Jack’s little sister Jill studying for her IL (Internet License). “Jill! Get out of the computer! No Facebook till you get your license.” “But Mum! I had an amazing pout!”