Annual GCSE results debate misses the point: passes matter when we're clear on purpose

Without the annual GCSE and A level results season, bad weather and an off-message Prince, what would the press report in August? It is depressing, though, that while (until last August, at least) the results have improved year-on-year, the media and political treatment of this story has not.

Let's start with a bit of context: we've spent the best part of 25 years building an educational culture that has replaced the 3 'R's with the 3 'T's: tests, tables and targets; not all the outcomes of this shift have been negative but we should be wary of one: exams designed to assess the progress and ability of individual students are being increasingly translated into devices for assessing the effectiveness of teachers and schools.  Against such a backdrop, a degree of 'teaching to the test' is inevitable.

Moreover, when schools are cast in competition with each other and where teachers can select the syllabuses their students follow by choosing between examination boards that are also competitors, the rigour of the examination itself is an easy victim - schools that select tough examinations will get fewer passes and be assumed to be worse schools with worse teachers; examination boards that design tough exams, or even overly innovative ones, will lose customers.  In a market that is worth more than that for secondary school text books (a sign that the system is seriously out of kilter), the testing agency, usually one of three dominant awarding bodies, is a reluctant guardian of standards.

Further, when one form of examination, the GCSE, is defined as the standard bearer (whatever that standard might be) there are other unintended outcomes.  Subjects never suited to GCSE assessment - often those with a practical, technical or creative orientation - are only able to secure their place on the timetable if they are forced into this assessment form or if an alternative form of assessment is granted GCSE 'equivalence'.  Thus, a vocational course in, say, hairdressing is granted an equivalence with a GCSE in, say, History, a fact represented without distinction in top-line school performance data.  This renders the resultant league tables less comparative than their clean A-C headlines suggest.  Although the options to do this have been much reduced in recent years (and the tables are more sophisticated), the process has claimed another victim: curriculum breadth and, in particular, the uptake and status of vocational courses: schools are discouraged from adopting courses that do not have a league table currency while, if they do adopt a course from that diminishing range of vocational qualifications that still offer GCSE equivalence, it is assumed that this is a ruse to score in the league tables rather than to broaden the curriculum.

The upshot? Young people of all abilities take a GCSE dominated curriculum in which 10 GCSEs is assumed to constitute breadth.  It does not; it constitutes 10 variations on a particular assessment theme.  Where in this is the place for good quality professional learning for all, for the development of the skills for effective citizenship, for the pursuit of a range of sports, for good quality and highly regarded personal development programmes? In short, the bright follow a curriculum that denies them breadth but gives them grades, those deemed less able chasing in their shadows. Too often, at the other end of the scale, learners are channelled onto 'vocational' programmes, there not out of informed choice but because they have fallen onto a default curriculum that confirms vocational and practical learning as a poor relation to the academic mainstream.  If the UK wants to raise the status of areas like engineering, technology and science, throwing the naughty boys a car engine is no way to do it. And nor is a narrowly academic English Baccalaureate.

The solution (or a first step towards it)? As we are beginning to argue through our Transform Education project, we need to stop obsessing simply about grades and performance measures and start asking questions about what kind of education system we need in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, what kind of young people we want to emerge from it, and what educational breadth really looks like.

Yes, let's measure the performance of this system and, yes, let's measure the progress of young people through this system  (and with real rigour using a range of tools) but shouldn't we start by asking what we want and need it to do? 

Beyond the Bradford Spring: lobbying, party-funding, trust and transforming our politics

The debates on Newsnight this evening about the Bradford West by-election and the role of lobbyists in our democracy, and the related and long-standing concerns about 'cash for access' and party funding serve only to underline the obsolescence of how we currently 'do' politics. How did we get here? It seems to me that several factors have converged to produce this state of affairs, but I'd like to make three observations in particular:

1. The professionalisation of our politics has turned Westminster into a stronger gated community than any that new-build suburbia can offer - access to this community is through a subterranean (and invisible to most) network of internships, lobbyists and think tanks, where a new generation of 'straight from college' (Oxbridge or similar PPE preferred) special advisers are honed, themselves merely serving apprenticeships for elevation (sorry, election) to Parliament itself;
2. For those seeking to influence politicians (honourably, as is usually the case, or otherwise), buddying-up to this network is vital, with the outcome that experienced business and third sector leaders spend a disproportionate amount of their time chasing these influencers - by purchasing access through the professional lobbyists, sponsoring (usually governing) party activity in some way or treading the wine reception floor, seeking to happen upon the youthful bag carrier for the minister concerned;
3. For those wanting to access politics (that is, to be politicians) , especially those who might have 'done something' beyond this Westminster Village, they find the gates all but closed - one unintended consequence of the professionalisation of our politics is the end of the parliamentary road for the mid-career trade unionist, community leader or business executive who fancies their chances at the polls.

For me, these three developments produce at least three negative outcomes:

1. Disconnected politicians with whom we share no history and for whom we have no empathy: trust in politics is the victim and every ignored protest march or expenses transgression strengthens the sense that voting doesn't change things (even if it might) and politicians don't care (even, as I suspect, most of them do);
2. Bad policy: just as voters are cut adrift from politicians, practitioners are largely ignored by these 'not so special' advisers - with the result that impractical but headline hugging policies are foisted on professionals who are often locked into performance frameworks that have come from the same planet;
3. The separation of the formal and informal political spheres: in earlier times the youthful rebel might have become the seasoned campaigner and the mid-life parliamentarian; as noted above, this is increasingly not an option. The result is a separation between the politics of protest and the politics of process, between the 'civil' and the 'civic' as some commentators put it - this separation is bad for democracy itself.

All of this produces disenfranchised citizens. Empowering citizens means creating a politics that isn't accessed through the secret codes of the gated community but through the kind of rich civil society that emerges when individuals realise that they can have an influence without writing a cheque, or selling their soul in some other way.

To do this we need to build an education system and a community engagement culture that gives potential voters the knowledge, skills, confidence and desire to hold their politicians to account, and enables them to self-organise (to lobby), personally and collectively such that the professional lobbyist is obsolete. How about a strengthened (rather than abandoned) Citizenship curriculum in schools and free to access 'social impact' courses in every FE and adult education setting, developing skills in community leadership, public speaking, negotiating and accessing the media?

The result would make for a Big Society to which might all want to belong. And we'd get better politics and politicians too.

Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson in sparkling form at the launch of Transform Education

Thanks to the masses who packed into the Thatcher Room at Portcullis House, Westminster last night to celebrate the launch of Breslin's Transform Education project (www.breslinpublicpolicy.com) and who heard Stephen Twigg, Geoff Whitty and Maggie Atkinson in sparking form - we've thrown some of their comments out through Twitter (@UKpolicywatch) but these soundbites can't hope to do their efforts justice.

Thanks also to our partners at GlobalNet 21 for helping us to stage what will be the first of three meetings and, we envisage, a much bigger project.

From the ensuing discussion a series of key questions emerged and readers of this blog might want to ponder them further. Here, in no particular order, are just some of them:

• What purpose (or purposes) do we want (and need) a twenty-first century education system to serve?
• What do we mean by 'breadth' in education, and in the curriculum in particular, and how do we ensure such a curriculum for all learners?
• What does meaningful, purposeful engagement-building learner voice or youth participation look like and how might it support the broader educational enterprise?
• What do we mean by professional, practical and vocational education and what is its place, status and purpose in the curriculum of all young people?
• How do we best support the challenged, the challenging, the looked after and the otherwise vulnerable?
• How do we introduce transformative change, especially in the highly structured context of the modern secondary school?
• What can secondary practitioners learn from those in early years and primary education, those in the youth sector, those in the 'alternative' education community and those in adult education and FE?

Comments and additions to the list are welcome. Let the discussion begin!

Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson to speak at the launch of Transform Education

We are pleased to announce that Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Stephen Twigg MP, Professor Geoff Whitty of the University of Bath School of Management (and formerly Director at the University of London Institute of Education) and Children's Commissioner Maggie Atkinson are to speak at the launch of Transform Education on the evening of Tuesday 13th March at Portcullis House, Westminster.

This is the first in a series of three meetings, staged in partnership with GlobalNet 21, exploring the challenges facing educators in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. The focus of the debate at this first session will be on rethinking policy and practice with regard to curriculum and achievement.

Further details about the Transform Education project and about the event, including how to register for an invitation, can be found on our website, breslinpublicpolicy.com.

Tickets will be allocated on a first-to-respond basis.

Breslin Public Policy Launch: many thanks to all!

Many, many thanks to all of you who helped us to celebrate the launch of Breslin Public Policy last night - really, really appreciated and a fantastic evening with lots of bustling and productive conversation. It was great to bring so many people together, drawn from across the fields of policy and practice. Connecting these too often separate realms is key to everything we do.

If you had intended to join us but were unable to do so on the evening, or if you simply couldn't make the date, do stay in touch - we hope to see you at our next event, for which you will receive an invitation shortly.

I am also pleased to confirm that, following our free charity raffle, we will be making donations of £100 to Medicins Sans Frontières, School Home Support and Age UK. We're proud to give this sum to each of these great causes, our own attempt to do Responsible Business and demonstrate Corporate Responsibility.

For those of you who were not there, the charities were chosen by our winners: Francis Sealey of GlobalNet 21, Anne McHardy of McHardy Farrell Media and Carly Mason of V. We will be making the donations this week.

The good news for the three winners is that they also get a voucher for a meal for two and a bottle of wine at Charterhouse Bar, kindly donated by Charterhouse. We will be in touch with the winners shortly to confirm how to claim your voucher.

Many thanks to Phil, Janice, Ed and the team at Charterhouse for a great evening - a lovely venue and already established as the home of one of our favourite networks, Convergence.

Thanks, also, to Richard O'Sullivan and Phil Ventre at Callisto for developing our branding and our website concept and design, to Helen Wiles at Helen Wiles Zine for building the website and to Grace Pluckrose-Oliver for making our first short film, which you can view on the site: http://www.breslinpublicpolicy.com/.

On the site you will find details about the various prjects that we are currently working on, or have previously worked on. Early partners include The Bridge Group, V, CCE England, East Sussex County Council, the Diana Award, Navigation Learning, Character Scotland, the British Olympic Foundation and the British Paralympic Association; we are grateful to each of you for your support and for inviting us to work with you.

Our next event, which we are staging in partnership with Global Net 21, is the launch of our signature education project, Transform Education. This will take place at Portcullis House, part of the Palace of Westminster on the evening of Tuesday 13th March.

This is the first of three meetings in which we will explore the challenges facing us as we seek to build education systems and develop approaches to learning that meet our needs in the first part of the twenty-first century. The focus of the first meeting will be on issues of curriculum and achievement in the school sector.

We are thrilled to confirm Stephen Twigg MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Professor Geoff Whitty CBE of the University of Bath's School of Management (and formerly Director at the University of London's Institute of Education) and Maggie Atkinson, The Children's Commissioner for England, as our speakers. You can get a sense of what we will be discussing by listening to the podcast on our site, produced by Francis Sealey at GlobalNet 21.

In the meantime, thank you again for celebrating with us last night or for helping us to get to this point in some other way. Your support has been greatly appreciated.

Now the work begins.

What shall we do about vocational education?

Education policy is full of contradictions and mixed messages and today's announcement on the declassification of vocational qualifications, in terms of their status in school league tables, is a case in point. For the past 35 years - since James Callaghan's acclaimed Ruskin College speech calling for a great debate on what we want from our education system - every Secretary of State has spoken at length on the importance of vocational education, about bridging the academic-vocational divide and about the need to provide the right kind of labour supply to our once great engineering and manufacturing sector.

The practical moves have, though, been much more tentative: GNVQs appeared to flourish briefly post 16-but never became firmly established at Key Stage 4; Key Skills never achieved the foothold in our schools that they did secure in our more vocationally inclined FE colleges; in the same era the notion of "disapplication" briefly allowed students who struggled with the full National Curriculum at Key Stage 4 to drop particular subjects in favour of a programme of "work related learning"; Ruth Kelly rejected Tomlinson's key recommendation that the Diploma model should be applied to both academic and vocational programmes, although there was a retrospective attempt to do just this during Ed Ball's tenure in Great Smith Street; Michael Gove, supported by his traditionally-inclined school secretary Nick Gibb, has been clearer, appearing to be much less fond of vocational 'relevance' and much more fond of academic 'rigour', albeit while his colleagues at BIS have been calling for a resurgence in the apprenticeship system, something that the unintended consequences of tuition fees might help deliver.

The flirtation with disapplication let the vocational cat out of the academic bag: disengaged, unmotivated, less successful, or maybe just less able? Step out of the mainstream and into the also-ran world of alternative curricula. Throwing the naughty boys (for it were usually they) a car engine was never the way to boost the status of vocational learning or that of the careers in engineering and manufacturing that such an education might lead to. Thus, vocational programmes have too often come to represent a curriculum that learners fall onto rather than one that they might aspire to; of course, this creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: able students, and schools that want to serve able students, shy away from vocational learning while schools in more challenging circumstances and more disadvantaged intakes reach for this 'relevant' curricula because it suits 'their kids' - and with points in the league table, who might blame these schools for grasping at the appearance of parity and a measure of educational success? This is hardly a recipe for attracting our most able into engineering or design or manufacturing. Rather than closing it, phoney parity emphasises the gap between the academic and the vocational domains: a failure for all.

The problem is that, taken alone, today's action further depletes the status of vocational learning without any attempt to meet the real challenge: the need to transform it. The news on the abolition of the parity that never was should have been coupled with a cross-party commitment to deliver the best vocational education in Europe within a decade, not as an alternative to the academic route but as a part of every child's education. Three steps would be helpful in this respect.

First, all secondary schools should be inspected not just on curriculum rigour (which the promotion of the E-bac seeks to demonstrate success in, albeit clumsily and unimaginatively) but on curricular breadth. Following the Secretary of State's desire to 'free teachers from prescription', schools might be encouraged to be creative in how they demonstrate this but demonstrate it, they must. Thus, any school that does not open up opportunities that ensure an entitlement for every student to participate in high quality work related learning (and, for that matter, learning programmes focused on the development of creativity, curiosity and effective citizenship) should not be able to achieve 'outstanding' status because of the narrowness of its curricular offer. A programme composed of ten GCSEs is not a broad one - I write as a former GCSE Chief Examiner - but a curriculum that adds to the E-bac an excellent vocational component, a community service element, good quality citizenship education and a real exposure to sport, the arts and creativity is.

Second, and at the same time, we should re-conceptualise vocational education as professional and vocational education; this is the 'nudge' to the middle classes that such learning is something for their children to seek out rather than to walk away from. Degrees in Law, Medicine, Marketing and Finance are profoundly vocational in nature; how about opening up learning in these spheres in our schools - taster programmes, summer internships, curriculum modules, delivered in partnership with the professions concerned? Anybody who wants to take a look at examples of such work would be wise to look at the Citizenship Foundation's excellent and long-standing Lawyers in Schools programme and their mock trial competitions - for they constitute brilliant vocational education, even if their aim is to educate about the law more broadly.

Third, let's do all of this while thinking not about parity but about complementariness. It should never have mattered whether a course in hairdressing or bricklaying or business studies is equal in status to one in geography or history or French. It does matter that every young person experiences a curriculum shot through with a strong dose of high quality professional and vocational education, whether the outcome is a career in carpentry or surveying, medicine or law.

Today feels like another assault on vocational learning; it doesn't need to be - let's make it the start of something new.