One day, in the school I went to as a child, so the story goes, an irate parent walked into the headteacher’s office demanding to know why her son was in 1E.
“Your son is in 1E, Madam,” came the reply, “because we have no 1F!”
The answer to such crass elitism was, of course, comprehensivisation which is precisely what we didn’t get. Instead of really getting to grips with the substance of the problem we simply started jumbling the symbols around. Now level F in 5-14 is what you aspire to while A is when you’re still learning to write your name.
This all gets very confusing though, when F becomes the lowest level at Standard grade - so low that is practically disappearing as an award as the years go by - and C is the highest.
Then C itself becomes the lowest level of Higher pass to the extent that many pupils regard it as a failure. Higher Still “solves” the problem by introducing several levels of “Higher” each with its own A-C grades.
Nobody’s fooled and the core problem remains. But what is new is that an insidious cynicism begins to pervade educational discourse. In a school I taught at previously we considered renaming the register groups as flowers. You could have 1 Daffodils and 2 Bluebells and 3 Belladonna and 4 Deadly Nightshade . . .
It was very funny but it was also a sign of the fact that the whole point had been missed - how do we ensure that the individual child is catered for without being categorised too strictly.
What happens is that everyone learns to understand that the opposite of what is being presented to you is nearer to the truth.
That is what happened to “Higher Still”. Everyone heard “Lower Yet” and when it came with fanfares about “equality of opportunity”, “social inclusion”, and so on, the obvious thing to do was to look for the ways in which it would increase both inequality and exclusion and they were easy to find in a system whose assessment procedures manifestly favour the privileged.
The dishonest jargoneers are not always successful though. During the Higher Still process there was a serious attempt made to change the word “fail” for “underpass”.
Let’s hope that the national debate on education which was launched last week is going to be a more open, honest, jargon-free and wide-ranging debate than such recent practice might encourage one to fear.
I’d rather be a “failure” than an “underpass” any day.
