"A" level exams: what goes round comes round.

When I took my 16+ (then called "O" levels)and 18+ "A" level examinations in the 1950s they were set by the rather grandly named Northern Universities Joint Matriculation Board, NUJMB or JMB for short. No one doubted their integrity or veracity, which may be because that was a more deferential age, but I suspect also because they did what they did honestly and to the best of their ability in the light of the teaching materials and examination techniques available at the time.

I don't actually know, but am fairly certain that, although they would levy a charge to cover their expensivenesses, they would aim to cover their costs rather than make a profit out of the enterprise. There were other examination boards run by other universities, notably London and Oxford and Cambridge, which covered other parts of the country and presumably had a similar ethic.

However, these university dominated boards have, over the years, been merged, amalgamated and I suspect, semi-privatised. If they don't actually make vast profits I suspect they pay there executives vast salaries based on the proportion of the "market" they manage to grab.

What Michael Gove's move, to restore the dominance of the elite universities, demonstrates, is that there are vast areas of human activity in which business ethics and the profit motive are inappropriate. Education is one of them. Would that he also recognised the malign effects of the gradual privatisation of other vast swathes of the education service, so that it is in danger of rapidly ceasing to be a service and becoming a business. See Melissa Benn's article in Open Democracy for details.

It would, in my view, be a mistake to place the posher universities in the driving seat for "A" level examinations, since they are, or should be, designed for much more that selection for universities. Those engaged in the actual teaching at "A" level should obviously have an important input, as they know more about it than anyone else.

Whatever new structure is devised should be firmly dedicated to stimulating the interests,enthusiasms and critical faculties of those who are going to spend two years of their lives to studying the resultant courses. Other issues, including the the requirements of the universities and the needs of business, should be secondary. The profits of the organisers should not feature at all.

EBacc nonsense

There have been no posts for the past two weeks as I've been away on holiday. In that time both he "A" level and GCSE results have been published and the media have indulged in their annual orgy as to whether standards are really rising or so called "grade inflation" is making our young people's qualifications not worth the paper on which they're written. The present Education Secretary is encouraging this nonsense by his introduction of the so-called Ebacc into the debate. The Ebacc is a flawed and counter-productive concept for several reasons:

1. His prescription of what constitutes a "good" set of GCSE subjects was introduced after the current cohort of students had made their subject choices. Criticising them and assessing their schools by a new standard of which they had no warning is clearly illogical and unfair.

2. The French baccalauréat, on which the Ebacc pretends to be modelled, is a school leaving examination normally taken around the age of 18 rather than 16 and is a university entrance qualification. The International baccalauréat (Ibacc) is at a similar level.It is either highly misleading or hugely pretentious to give our 16+ examination the same name. (Incidentally, when I was at Port Moresby High School in the 1970s I tried to introduce the Ibacc but it fell to the ground through opposition from both parents and students since it required the study of a foreign language up to 18. Our Papua New Guinean students would have had no problem with this - most were fluent in at least three languages anyway - but the Australian parents and pupils were as insular as we British.)

3. The prescription as to what constitutes a "good" set of subjects is highly personal, highly contentious, and probably subject to fashion. I attended the kind of traditional selective grammar school that seems to be Michael Gove's ideal but would not have gained the Ebacc, and neither would anyone else, since the choice we had to make at 14 was between physics and chemistry or geography and history: one of either wasn't on the time-table.

4. I am sceptical about the division between "essential" and "optional" subjects. Mathematics is generally placed in the first category but, apart from a modest mastery of basic social arithmetic I can't see why generations should be forced to learn to solve quadratic equations and measure the height of a cliff from a boat out at sea using trig ratios if that is not their bent. Until the 1950s the one subject that was regarded as absolutely essential for logical thinking and the mark of a civilised person was Latin(plus Greek as well for earlier generations). Good fun for those who like that sort of thing but now seen to have been sailing under false colours.

5. Although as a teacher of economics I've always been rather doubtful of the value of business studies in schools, I'm not really confident that the division of subjects into "hard" and "soft" is legitimate. "Media Studies" gets a lot of stick but it seems to me that if it is legitimate to study English literature (novels, plays and poems)why should it not be legitimate to study film, radio, television, newspapers and other media. Given the pernicious influence the press has on our politics a rigorous academic evaluation of it seems to me to be highly valuable.

When I trained as a teacher in the 1950s we were taught that, whereas the French eduction minister could dictate exactly what page of the algebra book all French children in "troisième" would be studying at ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning, we in Britain had the superior approach of trusting our schools and teachers to know what is best for their pupils. Surely, rather than misguided and ill-informed dictation from the top, this is the ideal towards which we should be returning.

Third class honours - third class teacher?

I'm surprised that this simplistic idea of Michael Gove has surfaced again. Of course teachers need to know what they're talking about, but I suspect that, once we are assured that a teacher has the necessary basic knowledge, there is little correlation between academic performance and teaching effectiveness. In fact, I suspect that if the teacher himself/herself has had to struggle to grasp the basics then he/she will have more sympathy with and understanding of the difficulties of a pupil who faces similar struggles. Able mathematicians and physicists in particular can easily zoom off into the stratosphere leaving ordinary mortals behind,

Many teachers, myself included, claim that we did some of our most successful teaching in our early years when we were often literally just a page ahead of the students. If you've had to bash your brains the night before to understand a concept you tend to be good at explaining it the following morning. Later, when a concept is thoroughly familiar, it is often hard to remember why it is difficult to understand.

In my view good teachers have four qualities: they have sufficient basic knowledge of the subject for the level they are teaching, enthusiasm for it, are good communicators and, above all, have respect for the people they are teaching. Of these only the first is learnt and assessed at university.

The teacher who is bored by the subject will soon bore the pupils. Many teachers are masters of their subjects but poor communicators. This was borne out to me several times when I attended evening classes on "car maintenance," only to be left behind by a skilled mechanic who was master of all the intricacies of engines but had little idea how to break down his subject into "learnable chunks." Teachers who do not respect their pupils, be they infants, potentially rowdy adolescents or old age pensioners, will soon be sussed out and condemned to failure, however great their knowledge.

So it is probably far better to be taught by an enthusiast with a third than the first class honours graduate who feels his superior qualifications entitle him to higher things.

No graduation without taxation?

I first came across the idea of a graduate tax during a short "updating course" for teachers of economics held at the University of Bath in the late 60s. Note that this was a "course": the term "in-serice training" had not yet been invented, still less the ugly diminutive INSET. Furthermore the course was content based and therefore valuable. No one presumed to tell us how to teach: we were assumed to know that.

The idea of a graduate tax was floated by a Professor Sandford and interested me so much that I made a little speech about it at a meeting of the then Liberal Party Council. (In those days there was at least the illusion that the views of activists were of interest to the great and good in the party.) Now, thanks to the urging of Vince Cable, some forty years later the concept is to be given serious consideration by the government.

The great advantage of the graduate tax is that it does not burden the student with the burden of a great debt hanging round his or her neck. If the student earns little or no pecuniary reward as a result of higher education, by devoting his or her life to being a super parent, building a home and looking after children, or becoming a missionary priest, social worker or other low paid occupation, then little or nothing is paid. If however, the graduate does gain a pecuniary profit from higher education (and on average we do, to the tune of £100 000 in a lifetime, at today's values) then something is paid to finance future higher education.

The concept of a graduate tax does, however, raise several question,to none of which does there seem to be an obvious answer. Here is my selection:-

1. Should the tax relate to the cost of the education as well as the future earnings? Three year history degrees are relatively cheap as they don't require any equipment other than books. Three year physics degrees are more expensive because they require lots of fancy equipment. Five year courses for medical students are very expensive indeed. And what do we do about post graduate certificates and diplomas, masters' degrees and doctorates?

2. Do we draw a line between Higher and Further Education qualifications which also cost money and lead to higher future earnings.

3. Graduate taxes will produce a stream of income in the future, but the Universities (and HE Colleges?) need money now. The NUS, who support the idea, suggests that bonds should be sold now, backed by the stream of income from the tax in the future.

5. How do we ensure that the stream of income in the future actually goes to the universities (and colleges?) and not just into the Treasury pot?

6. How do we cater for EU students, who I believe have equivalent rights of access to British universities as British students?

7. How do we cope with high fliers who may evade the tax by going to lucrative employment abroad?

I'd be grateful if readers with any views on the above would air them in the comments, and also pose any other problems that occur to them.

The situation is so complex that I can't help wondering if the good old system of free tuition and means tested maintenance grants isn't the best. I know that three or four times as many students go to university today as when Vince Cable did, but then the country is now three or four times richer. If we could afford it then, why not now?

Full Circle, but Private

An article by Peter Wilby in yesterday's Education Guardian (Brand New World:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/25/free-schools-private-companies) predicts that " 'free schools' started by parents, teachers and voluntary groups...will (eventually) be run by private companies...(which)...talk eagerly of economies of scale if they can take charge of dozens, even hundreds (of schools)."

Aren't these "economies of scale" in managing salaries and appointments procedures, organising contracts for buildings, furniture, stationery and text-books, allocating budgets, etc exactly what Local Education Authorities used to do? The "free school" project is therefore merely privatisation under another name, with no evidence that the private sector can improve on the services of the now maligned public authorities.

Sadly, as today heads of both primary and secondary schools receive letters asking them to consider becoming "free", senior staff of all schools will be distracted from their real purpose of educating the young in order to concentrate their attention on debating the illusion of a brighter future (and the prospect of higher salaries?) under a new regime dominated by commercial considerations rather than the public good.