Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Nia Griffith Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman, not for the first time, has misunderstood. We want to ensure that more and more of our children do better and better.

There are two poles in this debate, neither of which I am happy with. One pole holds that only a minority of about 20% or 25% will ever be able to pass academic qualifications—the A stream, the elite. The other view, which was incarnated in Labour education policy in the past, is that to ensure that a majority of children pass the qualifications, we need to make them less demanding. I reject both those views. I think that more children can succeed if we make our exams more demanding, because we have a higher degree of aspiration and ambition for all our children.

I understand why the right hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby and other Opposition Members find it so difficult to grasp this point. Sorry, he is an hon. Gentleman—there is no cap on his aspiration or ambition. They find it difficult because the only way in which they felt that they could succeed was to lower the bar. We believe that it is by raising the bar that we can deal with this issue.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Michael Gove]

No, thank you.

We not only have a two-tier system in the split between foundation and higher tier GCSEs, over which Labour presided—

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[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for asking about one of the more than 1,700 vocational qualifications. So he supports the engineering diploma being an equivalent. Does he support nail technology or horse husbandry or any of the others? Again, answer comes there none.

The hon. Gentleman says that there is nuance in his position. I say, rather than nuance, there is an absence of clarity, without which we cannot secure consensus. Does he believe that we should continue with foundation and higher-tier GCSEs? Yes or no? A simple nod would suffice. Again, answer comes there none, but we probably know what he thinks. When he was a Minister in the Department for Education and Skills in 2003, the “Excellence and Opportunity” White Paper said that:

“the GCSE has become a qualification at two levels: Level 2 (or grades A*–C) is viewed by the public as success, while Level 1 (or grades D–G) is seen as failure. For many young people achieving Level 1 is demotivating. Some young people prefer not to reveal that they have taken GCSEs than admit to a lower grade. This undermines motivation and discourages staying on”.

That was the view of the hon. Gentleman and his Department in 2003, but they took no action to deal with the problem. At last, 10 years later, the coalition Government are taking action to end the problem of failure, to ensure that we no longer have an examination system that is demotivating and to end a system that discourages staying on.

[Nia Griffith]

Does the Secretary of State accept that with the foundation and higher-tier system there was always the opportunity for pupils to transfer, and there was always a motivation to try to drive pupils to get better than a D by getting a C? How will the new system of separating a CSE and an O-level examination allow a pupil to be pushed so that they can attain the higher level—the O-level qualification—if they have already started on a CSE syllabus, which is significantly different?

[Michael Gove]

I have to ask the hon. Lady where she has been for most of this debate. At no stage have we talked about separating children at the age of 14, and at no stage—

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[Damian Hinds]

I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Lady, who is an erstwhile colleague of ours on the Select Committee, but I am not proposing a return to anything from the past. What we must do is build an exam and qualification system that is fit for the future and reflects the new reality in which the participation age is 18, not 16. We must make sure that all young people can reach their potential at 15 to 16 and that if they have not done so by that point, particularly in key subjects such as English and maths, they go on to do so at 16 to 18 and beyond.

[Nia Griffith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I am running very short of time.

There is a bunch of complications in this two-tier system—for example, it applies to some subjects but not others, and there are even subjects for which students can enter one paper at foundation level and still score a grade B or A. There might be good reasons for all that, but one thing this system is not is clear. I understand the argument that all must have prizes, and in some ways that seems like a good thing, but it does young people no favours to kid them that the worth of the qualifications they are taking is greater than it really is. Instead, we must strive so that all merit prizes. We should aspire to the vast majority of children getting those key subjects aged 15 and 16, but as I said in reply to the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), there must be the facility to return to them at age 16 to 18. One of the key points in the Wolf report was the lack of post-16 focus in our country compared with others on English and maths in particular—subjects that command a huge premium in the workplace.

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[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I am certainly not against change. As a former teacher, examiner and Ofsted inspector, I spent a lifetime trying to raise standards of teaching and learning and to develop programmes of study that better prepared pupils for the modern world so that, for example, in foreign languages we moved on from talking about boys falling out of cherry trees to teaching children realistic phrases that they could use in business and leisure situations.

Did I detect the Secretary of State retreating from the position attributed to him in the press last week? Did he really say that he was not going for a CSE/O-level divide? I am not sure. I remember, though, that back in 1981, well before the GCSE was rolled out nationwide, I was piloting the 16-plus. That is because we believed very much in piloting things to see how they worked out and what the problems were. We were trying to put together two very different examinations, with a D grade being attributed to pupils of average ability. That is how we got to the system whereby the A to C grade was seen as the superior way of designating some children, with D to G grades for the rest, and with the foundation and higher papers. I make no apology for that; it is the history of how it came about. It is extremely difficult to set questions that will stretch a very able pupil but not prove to be complete gobbledegook, and a complete deterrent, to the very least able, and that was the point of having different papers. The key thing was that right up until March or April, pupils could move between the examinations that they were going to take in June. That was very important because it gave everyone an incentive to keep working the whole time and not to think, “Oh well, they’re only CSEs, so I don’t need to work so hard.”

I have serious worries about the introduction of a dual system. For example, in small subject areas such as music or a second foreign language, children of a larger range of ability are often taught in the same class. Will they now have to be taught two different syllabuses, or programmes of study, because one class will include the more able and the less able, with some going in for a CSE and some going in for an O-level? In smaller schools, that will affect not only small subjects but mainstream subjects. It may be very difficult to accommodate everybody. The teacher might have to run about trying to cope with two programmes of study at once, or perhaps some pupils will be discouraged from taking the subject having been told that they can do it only if they are capable of doing the O-level-type examination.

Dual entry could arise, because a child who might fail the more difficult O-level-equivalent exam would therefore do the CSE as well. A lot of money is already spent on examination fees, and dual entry is extremely expensive. As well as creating additional costs, it would place a lot of extra pressure on children and staff. There is a danger that children will suddenly not be given a chance to do the more difficult exam and be withdrawn because they might mess up the results. There would be the sheer disruption of introducing two completely new examination systems when there are many simpler and more effective ways of raising standards.

I do not understand the Secretary of State saying that people in this country do not re-sit English and maths, because they certainly do. When we go to any institution for 16 to 18-year-olds, we will find people making sure that they give every pupil the chance to get the A to C grades in English and maths that are so essential to their going on to their future careers or university courses. On international comparisons, it is not at the top end of the ability range that we do so badly in this country, but at the middle and lower ends. Creating segregated systems will do nothing to improve the morale of the middle-ability and less able pupil; in fact, it will do precisely the opposite.

As regards examination boards, the Secretary of State alleged that there had been some shopping around to find the system that provided the highest grades for the least effort. It is true that there has been some choosing of different programmes of study, perhaps because some are more inspiring or user-friendly to the pupil. I am not against having more than one examination board, but will the Secretary of State please confirm that we are not going to have separate examination boards for different subjects, which would be an examination officer’s nightmare? I also plead with him to allow some space for innovation. Having different examination boards has allowed us to innovate without a 100% roll-out.