The Students:

There is widespread anger over last week’s GCSE results as grades have dropped significantly for the first time in 24 years. Through what the exam boards claim to be ‘actions to curb grade inflation’ , we have seen many students receiving D grades this summer with marks that would have secured them C grades had they sat the exams and submitted their coursework in January. The worst hit subject is English. Many students who sat the AQA English Foundation paper found that they did not achieve their C grade this summer because, after all of the exams had been marked by examiners, the pass mark for a C was moved up by a total of 16 marks. It transpires, then, that because many students have met the standard necessary for access to the majority of academic further education courses; the standard has been changed. This will limit the options available for these students in further education and, therefore, drastically reduce the number of students who will go on to study in higher education. More working-class students will be forced to study vocational courses that may limit their choices later on in life. Many will inevitably find themselves needing to enter the job market at an earlier age than they had hoped. This may work out quite well for work minister, Chris Grayling, who has today unveiled plans for 18-24 year olds to work for free for 30 hours before being able to claim job seekers allowance! The more disappointed school leavers there are, the more free labour many companies will inevitably acquire as the workfare programme becomes the only option available for young people.

The Schools:
Over 950 schools are now putting in complaints to the qualifications regulator Ofqual (nearly a third of all schools in the country). This year Gove introduced a requirement that schools who fall below a floor target of 40% will be forced to become academies. This years deflated results will see many schools in this situation. This makes the blatant manipulation of results all the more disgusting, as it is another example of a move that benefits private corporations over students and school workers.

The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) is challenging the exam boards on grounds of equalities legislation; as the majority of children affected were from working-class and ethnic minority backgrounds.

The Teachers + Parents
Yesterday saw two protests against the GCSE scandal across the country. Parents of Golden Hillock School, Birmingham, protested outside the school yesterday whilst London teachers demonstrated outside the Department for Education. They presented this letter to Michael Gove:

Dear Mr Gove

Last Thursday, instead of receiving just reward for their achievements, many thousands of GCSE students found that their hopes of that vital ‘A*- C’ Grade in English had been dashed. It is now clear that this was owing to a substantial and unjustifiable shift in grade boundaries between January and June 2012.

Those students, their parents and teachers, as well as many members of the wider public, expect you, as Education Secretary, now to act swiftly to resolve this scandal.

Unfortunately, those same students, parents and staff are only too aware that this unacceptable shifting of the GCSE goalposts fits well with an ideological agenda that seeks to privatise education, undermine local democratic control and restrict the opportunities for our youngsters to progress to further and higher education.

The raising of the ‘floor target’ to 40% A* – C grades, a target that schools must reach to avoid the threat of forced academisation, is undoubtedly your decision. Conveniently for the supporters of school privatisation, this increase now coincides with a shift in grade boundaries that has made it significantly harder for schools to achieve that higher target.

If you are to convince schools, students and voters that you and your Government are not intent on damaging youngsters’ life-chances, nor set on unfairly extending your privatisation plans, then you have an urgent responsibility to insist that this summer’s English grade boundaries be redrawn.

I demand that you call on Ofqual and the exam boards to urgently redraw the grade boundaries for GCSE English to ensure that those students who, in June 2012, achieved the standard which was required to achieve a ‘C’- grade in January 2012 , are now also awarded the same ‘C’ – grade.

Yours
London Teachers

The demonstration was suggested by a young teacher from South East London and supported by Martin Powell-Davies from the Executive of teachers Union, NUT. Kevin Courteney, Deputy Secretary General of the NUT was also present.

With new capability procedures being introduced this September, many teachers could face punitive measures for the drop in exam grades. Schools may decide to balance their books by punishing these teachers by not allowing them to progress up the pay-scale, as they should do for each year in service. Can we trust the businesses that run many free schools and academies to act against the interest of profit here, and actually investigate the effort that the teachers have put in to teaching these students, regardless of the pass mark?

This scandal, on top of allegations of exam-cheating in previous years, has prompted education professionals to re-think their faith in exam boards. Many are asking questions about what a true education looks like, and how we can expect to be able to deliver it in a market-place of competing exam boards that respond to political manipulation.