Fair Cop

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Financial Times, Friday 14 August 2020


The commotion, nay fury, surrounding the farrago that is this year's exam results for our currently maturing school student cohort is understandable in and of itself. So many results have been devalued, sometimes greatly, in stature by Ofqual and its statisticians, that the career direction and future lives of many of our young people will be altered irrevocably, mostly to their detriment and through no fault of their own.

The pretext for this 'rounding down' is that the results that stood originally fell outside the scope of the 'normal' performance curve measured historically. The outcomes on average were seen to be evidence of grade inflation. This in itself has been a criticism of results even in normal times; rising standards seen as not evidence of improvement in teaching and overall student performance, but rather as an indicator of softening of standards generally and  assessment in particular. That it is deemed by this government infeasible for improvement to happen in like manner seems curious given the general political fetish with growth and the use of crude fiscal measures such as GDP to measure the performance of the economy.

The subtext is obvious to some of us, but usually hides away in the backwaters of political discourse; but it's now rising to the surface like a particularly nasty oil slick. Todays FT carries a piece analysing this in some detail and quotes Ofqual directly. One such quotation stands out so starkly it took my breath away. I'll lift the entire paragraph directly, for anyone reading that will have missed it, and for its context:

'After moderation, the proportion of pupils achieving a C or above fell by 10.4 percentage points among the most deprived third of pupils, compared with 8.3 percentage points among the wealthiest third. Ofqual said the disparity was justified. Research showed teachers had a "tendency to over-estimate...the grades of socio-economically disadvantaged students". '(My italics)

Just think about this phrase for a few moments: "...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of socio-economically disadvantaged students". Now substitute:

"...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of Jewish students"
"...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of black students"
"...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of Muslim students"
"...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of women students"
"...tendency to over-estimate...the grades of LGBTQ+ students"

I think you get the picture. Discrimination against prejudice generally is rightly now pretty much legislated against on grounds of gender, religion and sexual orientation. But on grounds of class, we appear to be pretty much stuck in the nineteenth century. Class-ism is still normalised and even seems to be retrenching itself as the true status quo: an apposite (and deliberate) Latin cliché in itself.

It's no accident that Boris Johnson has suddenly found the time to voice an opinion '...that there had been a "robust" marking system'. This from a man who has been hiding away from the public gaze under the parliamentary recess and 'deferred paternity leave' and whose storied academic career consists in having been nannied through Prep, Eton and Oxford at extraordinary private expense; a luxury ill-afforded to those not of his class.

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