Falling Standards in Education

Every year, exam scores go up. Every year, the government hails this as a wonderful achievement. And, every year, we have a chorus of cries about exams being dumbed down, and standards slipping. Which is terribly unfair: each year, kids work very hard for their results, and are then subjected to a bunch of so-called experts telling them that their results don't mean anything, and that exams are now easy.

But it is vitally important that we have this debate.

Between them, India and China account for almost a third of the world's population. Every year, they produce masses of people, all of whom want to earn a living. And we cannot compete on cost - economic factors prevent that. Fortunately, a few really good employees are better for a business than a lot of really poor employees, which means that it is possible for us to compete with the Indian and the Chinese, if we generate people of sufficient quality. But that requires that our graduates are of a genuinely high standard, and not merely that the average result is four A's at A-level. (Bluntly, that's a meaningless statistic in itself - what matters is whether the students who get A's can count, not whether we can count the number of students who get A's.)

Now, back to the important question: are standards falling?

As far as I can tell, there are five reasons why exam results might be improving year on year:

1) Kids are getting smarter.
2) Teachers are getting better generally.
3) Kids are getting more support in their learning (from fellow students, tutors, teachers, or parents).
4) Exams are getting easier.
5) Teachers are getting better at teaching towards the exam.

Now, if true, any of the first 3 are a good thing (unless the 'support' consists of people doing the work for the kids - remember, the important factor is what the kids end up knowing, not whether they can pass an exam). Number 4 is obviously a bad thing.

Number 5 is the worst of the bunch, however, because it is a bad thing that doesn't immediately show itself as a bad thing. The thing is, if I can look at past papers for the last 10 years of maths and learn that there is always a quadratic equation, a differentiation and an integration, I can then teach my class to do these three things in a robotic manner. They won't understand any of the theory behind it, and won't actually learn any real maths, but they will pass the exams in large numbers. And it's hard to fault this approach - the exam papers are a good guide to what is considered important, and the kids are at least learning something. Sadly, what they are learning is of no actual use in the real world, where we don't simply face the odd integration - we face problems that need tackled with a variety of tools, and it's equally important to know which tools to use, as well as how to use them.

In the global economy, the kids leaving school this year won't be competing against their peers in the UK, against whom they at least have a level playing field. They are also competing against thousands of Chinese and Indian kids, who are willing to work for about a quarter of what the UK kids have to earn in order to live. It's a real bitch, but it's life. And it means that our kids absolutely must be the best they can possibly be, in terms of real skills that can be applied, not just the ability to pass some crappy exam.