The debate over last summer’s English GCSE results lingers on. The grade C result matters because a school’s performance is assessed on the number of A to C grades achieved by its students. So a few marks difference that turns a C into a D has a big impact on how the school is viewed.
But the whole exam system is just not working. In the noise over C grades, sight has been lost of the impact the marking had on A and B grades. To the schools they don’t matter because they are not grade C. It’s a funny old world when “third best” is paid more attention than “best”.
For employers, though, it doesn’t matter that much. Despite years of rising grade levels, experience on the ground shows that the basic abilities of new entrants to the workforce has been getting worse, at all levels from basic school leavers to graduates. The Daily Telegraph reported on the difficulties the Williams F1 team had in trying to find enough people who could pass a basic maths test. “Of the 250 applications for its apprenticeship scheme this year, 45 were invited to an open day and 16 made it through to the tests round. Just six young people passed, with 10 failing to get more than half the answers right — a failure rate of two-thirds. In previous years, the company allowed hundreds of applicants to sit maths tests early on in the recruitment rounds, but this led to such a high failure rate (194 out of 200) that the company abandoned the tests until later in the hiring process.”
The tests were devised in the 1960s by Birkbeck College and involve simple multiplication, division, addition and subtraction, for example “express three quarters as a decimal”. When I saw that question, I realised I knew the tests. Back in the mid-70s when I was working at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham, I was seconded briefly to the training department to mark the tests done by the apprenticeship candidates. The mark at which they went on to the next part of the process was 75% and a majority of those I marked got 75%.
It was suggested to Williams’ chief executive that the tests could be made easier or updated as they were 50 years old. To both suggestions he said no, saying that “maths is maths”. Until basic education is improved it’s a bit self-indulgent of schools to be worrying about the missing grade Cs. Schools may claim to be doing it for their students, but the reality is that the grade does not really matter, it is what they can do that counts.
