959 days ago
It is like National Velvet but far better, the rank outsider coming through to win a major sporting event. Emma Radacanu seems such a pleasant young lady discussing how honoured she is to have had a message from a role model that is the Queen, after her win. Wearing that crucifix, so unfashionable in Britain today, this is a girl who has worked hard to get A’s in maths and economics A levels just a couple of months ago and who talked of celebrating with chocolate frozen yoghurt with added chocolate. So like the whole nation I wake up thinking how wonderful this British sporting heroine is. But if there is a bandwagon there is always Nigel Farage.
971 days ago
The folly of the industrial-scale corruption of so many teachers is revealed today with more taxpayers’ cash being pissed away as universities are forced to bribe students to stay away.
991 days ago
Yesterday I published a chart based on data nobody disputes showing that the percent of kids getting top A level grades had rocketed in the two years in which grades were based on teacher assessment, rather than sitting exams. I reproduce the chart again as it is striking. There are two possible interpretations:
1348 days ago
The peak years for state school entrance to my old University, Oxford, were in the 1960s. Then, successive Governments and Education ministers including, in a rare error of judgement, the blessed Lady Thatcher, started to scrap grammar schools. That ladder which gave bright working-class kids educational and social mobility was whipped away as they went along to comprehensives. Comprehensive schooling has, almost entirely, failed both the bright poor and the not so bright poor who, on most measures, fail in later life as badly as they did in the “bad old days”. But one institution has a solution… an establishment where most of the senior staff went to public schools and Oxbridge. Yes, you have guessed it…
2449 days ago
There is a change to the annual ritual. For about thirty years A level grades got steadily higher. Those of us who had to interview those with A*s at History who thought that Waterloo was a train station named after an Abba song knew that was because they were getting easier but when pointing this out were ritually abused as insulting hard working students and teachers who were so stressed out that they need 15 weeks holiday a year. This year the ritual is being tweaked.
2810 days ago
A level results are out today and the only question that goes begging is just how stupid to you have to be to actually fail?
98.1% of exams taken were passed. 25.5% of exams taken resulted in a grade of A or A*. 75% of those papers sat by boys were scored A* to C. For girl papers that number was 79.7%. Well done hard working girls. Well done hard working boys. Well done the grossly overpaid teachers. Well done everyone.
