Friday 16 August 2019

I still don’t know the answers


Yesterday was A-level results day, a day that creates almost universal anxiety followed by a range of emotions from great joy to overwhelming despair.

In a leak on Wednesday relating to grade boundaries, we learnt that to earn an ‘A’ in Maths, a student would only have to achieve a mark of 55%.  On first blush, to old duffers like me, that suggests that the examiners are going soft on students, making it easy to get great results.  It made me reflect on the 40% that I got for History in my University Bursary[1] exam in 1987.  By the standards of the day, I failed; translated to modern times, that might have been a B.

The reality is somewhat different.  My fail mark was thoroughly deserved.  Asking my friend Sally, on the day before the exam, to provide me with a summary of English History from 1558 to 1688 because I hadn’t bothered to read the text, might not have been the greatest strategy for passing.  It proved not to be, and not because Sally didn’t do a decent job – she was, after all, dealing with an idiot.

No, what the grade boundaries reflect is that this year’s Maths exam was really hard.  The BBC suggested that there was a new, tougher specification this year .  A friend’s son achieved the A* that he needed to be accepted to read Maths at University.  That meant he passed the paper with a result exceeding the overall Maths A* boundary of 72.3%.  When I sat my Maths exam, with a result of 74%, I was awarded a B.

Times have changed, grade boundaries are adjusted to reflect the body of results that are achieved by students across the country – it doesn’t mean that students are less bright than in our day (clearly not in my case) or that standards have diminished.  What it does mean, is that the grades awarded are a reflection of overall national performance. 

However, that does imply that comparisons of results from one year to the next are somewhat meaningless, given that there is an active focus from exam boards and regulators to maintain standards through the management of grade boundaries – at 97.6%, the overall pass rate in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was the same as 2018.  In an exam year where a grade C in Maths could be achieved with a result of 34.3% and a pass mark, an E, with just 14.3%, there is something clearly wrong with the level of difficulty in the paper.

Which leads me to the most troubling aspect of today’s system.  I vividly recall Son of GOM returning home from an exam during his A-level year, distraught at the difficulty of the paper.  No words of comfort from Mrs GOM or I could mollify him.  He carried a feeling of failure throughout the summer holidays, only to have it dispelled when the results came through and he achieved a better result than he’d feared.

By setting the difficulty of the papers too high, we risk disrupting the mental health of our children.  They are already driven to a performance expectation set by schools that reflects pressures from central government to achieve unsustainable improvements year-on-year.  As parents, we are also subject to influences that lead us to exacerbate the issue for our children, leading to a situation where, for some, the perception that any result below an A is poor.  Mrs GOM reminds me that, in her day, a B was considered to be a great result, and an A was outstanding.

This shift in mindset has led to a situation where students may be profoundly disappointed with the results that they have achieved.  The daughter of another friend achieved results for her A-level exams of A, B, B; better than required for her to pursue her chosen tertiary course, and results that we should celebrate.  Yet because of the pressures she felt, some self-imposed, she is unable to take satisfaction from what she has achieved.  That may change after a few days of reflection.  I hope it does, she’s done fabulously well.

Sadly, my father-in-law is no longer with us, but as the epitome of a GOM, he would bemoan the systems we have in place today, arguing that we make it too easy for teenagers today.  He would consider that a bone-idle historian, such as myself, should get everything that he deserves, and he’d be right.  But he would also disregard all argument to the contrary, despite having two daughters who work in education, who would seek to convince him that we’ve come a long way in improving today’s methods of teaching.

Despite being a GOM, he was a gentle soul, and whilst he’d probably argue (because he could) against the notion that today’s young people face pressures that we never experienced (albeit, he was fighting in WWII at the age of 18, so he’d have a strong point), he’d possibly have some sympathy for today’s youngsters.  The influences that they face are considerably greater and more widespread than we, as parents, probably realise.

As a collective, the government, educators and parents have a duty of care to ensure that we do what we can to reduce the mental health risks to our children by not laying a foundation for perceived failure.  I’m no authority – I didn’t have the answers in 1987 and I can’t pretend to have them now.  But what I do know, is that we should do better for our kids.


Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2019
16 August 2019


[1] University Bursary was New Zealand’s equivalent to England’s A-level exam in 1987

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