Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Andrew Turner Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. That is why I found the discussion about employers knowing the difference between a C at GCSE at different levels attained wholly fallacious. If the big problem of educational attainment is the long tail of under-achievement, the measures to combat that need to be there for all. There is no evidence to suggest that dividing at 14 will help that. We had an interesting contribution today on some of the neurological evidence of the potential for growth from 14 to 16. What we do have evidence for is how overwhelming it will be for the poor and those from socio-economically challenged backgrounds who will be condemned to the new CSEs. That is why the 1980s Conservative Government abandoned this policy. In 1985, Sir Keith Joseph, who became Lord Joseph, unveiled evidence that there is a

“strong association between low achievement and the poverty-related factors of poor housing, single-parent families and a low proportion of children in higher socio-economic groups”.

This policy of division was too divisive even for Sir Keith.

We also hear that with the new O-levels there will be no national curriculum—although a back-door one because of a single qualification authority. This strikes me as a rather strange route to developing the kind of curriculum we want, drawing on a wide knowledge base. It also flies in the face of the Secretary of State’s ambitions to create a national narrative of British history, to teach in all our schools a single notion of British history that imbues notions of citizenship which develops a—rather Whiggish in my view—conception of the British past that all will share. They will not all share that if there is no national curriculum. The greater the division between schools, the greater the division in the teaching of history. Any ambition to teach a cohesive notion of citizenship through the teaching of history is totally undone by the elimination of a cohesive national curriculum.

Internal reforms of the GCSE would be welcome. Clampdown on grade inflation and the proposals vis-à-vis the examinations board are to be welcomed. An end to generalised humanities GCSEs—the merging of history and geography—are to be welcomed. We can learn from the international GCSE, the I-bac. But all that can be achieved within the current system. That is the tragedy of what the Secretary of State is up to.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions the baccalaureate and international GCSEs. If those are acceptable, and it seems that they are, and they are the examinations for able pupils, which they are, what would happen to the other GCSEs that would be occupied by the less able?

[Tristram Hunt]

The point about the GCSE is that it is a general certificate of secondary education. The point about the CSE is that it had stigma attached to it. At GCSE one can have an A and an A*. There is still the GCSE and a structure. The briefing to the Daily Mail is that there is an ambition to return to a more divisive system. The tragedy is that there is so much work to be done: the quality of teacher training; ending the scandal of an ever-expanding key stage 4, which means pupils are finishing history or geography in year 8; ending the relentless examination culture that sees AS exams in the January of the lower sixth—we need to get rid of that; embedding a new strategy for the teaching of foreign languages; driving up numeracy and literacy. These are the real challenges confronting schooling. In the face of these challenges, this political strategy seems a massive misallocation of the Secretary of State’s time and resources and those of civil servants in his Department. The Government are already reviewing the primary and secondary school curricula, so why also begin this tub-thumping policy that is not based on empirical evidence?

This is no way to make policy: revealing these kinds of ideas in the Daily Mail, a newspaper usually opposed to deep thinking, learning and cohesive policy development, and at a time when young people are taking their exams. All we can hope is that it is a rather cack-handed example of kite-flying by a Secretary of State who is slightly puffed up at the moment and that the kite will soon be shot down and normal service resumed.