Time for fixed boundaries

No - this isn't an article about the riots. But yes, I am going to go a little Tory-traditionalist on you and take the Telegraph point of view. I want the abolition of grade inflation at A-level and GCSE by the imposition of fixed boundaries of percentages of students for every grade. First set a fixed quality boundary for "minimum standard" and call below that U. Then take all the results above that and rank them. Top 5%: A*. Next 15%: A. And then in tranches of 20% each, the 4 remaining grades (B-E) below that. Here's why.

When you run a 100m, you do not get gold for a fixed time or a personal best. You get it for beating the others. When you get a job, you beat someone else to it. When you win an award, the others shortlisted have ended a grade lower than you. When you sell your goods, that customer bought them instead of a competing company's offer. This is competition and it is good, as long as it is fair (and as long as, alongside this, we make strenuous efforts at real social justice and social mobility, disproportionately supporting the disadvantaged to give them chance to compete fairly) and should exist in education. By this token, when you get GCSEs or A-levels, you are doing so in direct competition with others in your peer group. There do not need to be "objective" standards for grades: I'm no statistician, but when millions of students take these exams every year, at the same schools and taught by the same teachers as the year before, there really cannot be any meaningful variance that would mean wildly differing quality from one year to the next. The sheer volume of the system means an A* one year - being in the top 5% - will mean, to within a hair's-breadth-of-dammit, exactly the same standard of student as last year. Change in standards over time will be very long-term and gradual.

I am a supporter of students. I value and want to celebrate their achievements. But I do find myself having to apologetically point out to them that my A grades are actually a lot more elite than theirs. They look a bit confused when I explain "there was no A* in my day." I ask them how many times they use the letter "A*" in normal writing and they get it: it's an imposed nonsense to cover up the gradual landslip in grades. How has this happened?

It's partly artificially political - no government wants to be seen to preside over "falling standards" - but there is a myth of fixed political interference which is a nonsense. Rather it is a matter of the skill of the teaching profession: to really understand grade inflation, don't mock teachers but recognise just how much teaching has improved. Over a quarter of a century, we've moved to a strict competitive focus on these letter grades. Teachers have always been committed, innovative and motivated and they still are: it's just their focus has moved - we have lost some of the breadth, pastoral concerns and extra-curricularity to focus almost exclusively on academic outcomes, predictably thereby raising the quality of academic work; we have used IT and followed research on good learning better than ever in the last decade; and teachers are working harder than ever before (and making students do so as a result.) Can we really be surprised at quality of student attainment improving? Although I gently mock my students that my A grades are worth more than theirs, in a straight comparison of our work, they're not: I looked back recently at my GCSE English essays which got me A, and they'd only get a B now. This is a subtle point, in contradiction both to the (genuine) problem about "basic skills" (a D/E grade problem for a small percentage), to the more general politicised nonsense usually printed in the media about "what students don't know / can't do" and really needs to be made explicit: genuinely, standards have gone up -and YET, grades mean less. My own GCSE work was (on a straightforward qualitative comparison) weaker than that of my current students but I was, in percentage terms, higher up my cohort. I deserve the A that many of them - despite their better work - do not. Now that sounds unfair - but here's why it's not.

I can't say how well I'd have done in this day and age as a student. I rather suspect word-processors and Wikipedia would have saved me the "longhand copying of neat fourth drafts" that still, just about, marked my GCSEs; whether Call of Duty would have ruined my focus as it does for so many current students, I don't know. The point is you can't compare different generations against one another - and there is no value to doing so. Of course technology and the world moves on; of course resources change and develop; but for all these students as they go through life, the one thing they will be permanently in the company of is their peer cohort - and they'll be in competition with them. The 100m sprint to the university-entrance finishing line is a crystal-clear instanciation of this, but they will realistically be fighting for success against these same peers throughout most of their (early) working life. An NQT starting now is not that closely in competition for any post I apply for - we're a different proposition, with different costs. And by my level of experience it's my references and achievements in post, and no longer really my academic results, that have come to matter - the results bridge that gap-before-your-thirties before you have an in-depth career record to point to. So it is irrelevant if my students' work is better than mine on a like-for-like comparison basis: they never were and won't ever be in competition with me on the basis of these grades (though later, on the basis of workplace efficiency, they might be.) These grades will only ever be a competitve marker against their peers, and so it against those peers that they should be set in fixed bands. You don't promote seven sides from the Championship to the Premiership and only demote two because "this year Championship sides looked like they were playing better football than ever before" - that may be true, but the numbers in each division, in each band, are rightly fixed.

This call for fixed banding of grades is becoming increasingly dominant and hurrah for the Telegraph for taking the lead on this: they polled on it the other day, but also witness these two excellent articles from them this week: Dr Richard Cunningham's (who seems to agree with me about increasing effort and quality by teachers and students - and I agree with him that what we don't need is more universities, promoting yet more meaningless grade inflation) and the explicit call from Richard Cairns, with which I am siding, for fixed boundaries. These are both strong articles, but there are two mistakes here - firstly the Telegraph has two academics from independent schools write them, rather than seeking a centrist or leftist to support the call - is this just PR-posturing from the private sector? Or do they think there's no hope of achieving this change? Surely, Telegraph, if you genuinely want this happening, you need to build some consensus across the aisle? Well - here I am offering centre-leftist support. Come and talk to mainstream teachers - you'd be surprised how many of us agree.

The problem for rightists is that they have yoked together an ill-fitting pair of arguments: they have hamstringed the valuable argument for fixing grade boundaries with traditional, prejudicial nonsense about some subjects being worth more than others. This is pointless dogma that stops the genuinely worthwhile traditionalist desire for fixed boundaries (as I'm arguing for here, despite being no educational traditionalist) being debated properly: witness Willetts' article also in the Telegraph, arguing for this kind of formal bias. I rubbished this nonsense in a separate blogpost yesterday but it can be simply dismissed here for brevity: if a subject is an A-level it must be counted the same as all A-levels; if it isn't good enough for that, then stop it being an A-level. Duh. Willetts is bright, but gunning wrongly here: combine fixed boundaries and a slimmer list of A-level options, along with enhanced vocational offerings, and you would have a much better educational system than just confusing matters with "it's-a-qualification-it's-not-a-qualification." Have the courage of your convictions and stop fudging with prejudice. You people are in charge. Make the change. Notice that the Richard Cairns article referred above - sound throughout in all other aspects - also throws in the one-liner about soft subjects with the statement that "We must also shatter the myth that exists in the minds of too many pupils that a Media Studies A-level is in some way equivalent to an A-level in Mathematics." No grounds are provided for this claim, as usual. Cairns is headmaster of the very grand independent school Brighton College. You may wish to quietly note that the school's website lists departments in Dance, Photography and Sports Science. While I agree there is some over-proliferation, this nonsense about "appropriate subjects" is not only the same nonsense people used to talk about English in the 1920s, it's in direct contrast to the subjects these schools themselves run. Less prejudice and hypocrisy, please, and more on the real issue: standardising with fixed grade boundaries.

I can't see why there isn't more decisive action here from the Tories. This is a government of iconoclasts who enjoy wiping the etch-a-sketch historical slate clean with a vengence; but where's their appetite to do so, common-sensically, here? They did it with budgets, school league tables, benefits and more. Their modus operandi has clearly been one of detonation-to-make-a-point, and then fresh rebuilding to their totally new template. I'm not going to get drawn into which of these other revolutionary acts has worked and which has not - but since they have form here, why not do it now for results 2012 (GCSE) and 2013 (A-levels - so those just having achieved AS don't have an odd jump in their results)? Why don't Gove and Willetts co-declare, right now, fixed percentage grade boundaries for those forthcoming exams - fixed in perpetuity at those %s of the cohort each year - no matter what quality of results? ZIP! The instant end of the politicisation of "continual improvement in results"! Trust teachers and schools and students to still compete (what choice, in this economic climate, do they have? - the structure of the game makes them do so, even if they didn't want to - which I also think they do.) Trust the inspection process and the ongoing development of teacher training and professional accountability measures to keep teachers and schools working at the cutting edge of good practice; trust the market (whether in universities or jobs) to then select between the outcome students. The difference, if there even is one, between 2012's B grade and 2013's will be so infinitesimally tiny that reference and interview differences will make it pale into comparison.

Universities want to be able to choose the best clearly, without grade inflation. Employers want the same. Both would welcome fixed grade boundaries. Teachers would be in no way offended, with the change rightly explained to them; and parents and students, whilst they would have to adjust to a one-off step-change adjustment, would understand the purpose and meaning of grades more clearly, and know they were fixed and therefore more credible. Competition between students for those % thresholds would not cease - if anything, not knowing *quite* where the boundary for the next grade up leads most people to over-work to be sure of hitting it. We would have to drop the current nonsense about every student always knowing exactly what grade they are at - or least, be honest about the element of estimation always intrinsically built into that, which would be better. Fixing boundaries would not relax the pressure on teachers or schools - grade inflation is already an irrelevance to them compared to the effect of league tables. Not least of all we would be rid of the Maoist nonsense of continually improving figures belieing ongoing problems in practice. Perhaps a third of schools each would fall back, a third improve each year, (and, to boot, we could then have a meaningful discussion about context and value-added) as opposed to the weird sight every year at present of seven-in-ten improving and perhaps one-in-ten falling back. So what if standards change slightly over time? That's the real world. Apple don't measure themselves against the efficiency practices of the East India Company. Fix grades to tell employers and universities who to take on. Make students realise that competition is raw - it is between them and their peers - it will shape their life - there's no guarantees, and you must apply yourself. Teams don't sit in the dressing room before the Cup Final consulting a grade descriptors table and saying "Oh right, if my tackles are 'robust' we get a draw, but if they're 'robust and expertly-timed' we win." You win if you do better than those you are competing with.

Fix the grade boundaries and we fix the problem with the value of qualifications. And I'm speaking as a centre-leftist.

Soft subjects and soft thinking

I can't do it. I can't resist. I swore to myself I would stay out of A-level results day, what with having no A-level students this year. But I can't.

It started a couple of years back when murmurings began about top universities beginning to look down on certain kinds of subject. I confess a mild negative prejudice myself towards Media Studies and Travel & Tourism but the leaked list included Sociology - a fairly established subject - and my own degree, which I taught at A-level, Psychology, claiming it was not a rigorous or academic subject. This astonished me, as it was in direct despite of evidence that psychology graduates have better job prospects than almost any other grads. OK, so the list included Film Studies (I probably agree, having taught a bit of it) but it also included Theatre Studies - and having taught both that and A-level English, I can assure you of their equal difficulty and workload. Where were these classifications of "hard" and "easy" coming from, except the raw (and usually uninformed) prejudice of a handful of (traditionally-educated) people at top universities?

My stress on this topic intensified in February when the Russell Group of top universities published their list of preferred A-level subjects. The observant will note that it is, in essence, Gove's EBacc: English, Maths, pure sciences; two main humanities, a language. Quite who is puppeting whom is unclear, but the narrowness of this list of Victoriana is clear. At time of writing, I note that you get a 404 failure when you attempt to download the document, which also has spelling mistakes (here's the Indy's version of the detail if this error persists.) I am humoured by both these ironies, from the website of the country's most academic universities. Still.

Today, the Guardian ran an article on the gap between state and private sectors in the uptake of "hard" versus "soft" subjects. One is tempted to question why the Guardian, of all papers, is treating this as newsworthy, if it's having to put those words into inverted commas: "look, we know there's no evidence and that this is all about prejudice, but we're going to report on it anyway, and in misleading statistical terms that make the distinction sound quite scientific." Hmmm. Let's call it a contribution to debate and move on. But now I'm sounding all revolutionary and I'm not. I've always been a rigorously academic student and teacher myself. But this public muddle is hurting students at all levels and of all types of ability.

Let's consider some apparently non-academic subjects - but I've tried to use ones which are nonetheless traditional in this example - ones that the private-schooled children of Telegraph readers might study. So here it is: I have profound respect for those who are good at Art and Music - I sure as hell am not one of them - but I can indeed see that those skills may not be ideal for a degree in Medicine. But there are two options here, and both should be applied: first, make non-academic subjects a different qualification group, rather than putting them in A-levels. I do not mean downgrade them - I am a champion and enthusiast for meaningful, rigorous, industry-devised qualifications in creative, media, and business areas. It will do everyone a favour to make A-level a narrowly academic qualification again. Universities with creative courses will be able to have parallel entry routes: these academic and / or these vocational routes into our courses; or, "this particular course is a purely vocational course and will only accept vocational qualifications from 18 year-olds" (or replace "vocational" with "academic" in said sentence.) This provides clarity for students from as early as 15 and, more importantly, the appropriate course type for different individual 16-18 year-olds - if the British can only get over their traditional (and internationally-unwarranted) prejudice against the vocational. Russell Group unis would be able to flag almost all their courses as "purely" academic at point of entry without students being confused by the apparent, but clearly false, equivalence of A-levels. This would be a formalisation of what they're already doing, but within an agreed national system. What's wrong about their current behaviour is not that some subjects are more suitable for some degrees than others, but that their broader-brushing tarring of the overall merit of many other subjects mean they are pulling against the rest of the boat when great lengths are gone-to to ensure A-levels are equal in rigour. Universities which specialise in rowing should know better. We are some distance down this road already, but the whole premise of "A-levels = academic only" needs to be clearer and formalised.

Secondly, and in balance with the above restriction on students, delimit universities' right to specify too many A-levels; this is muddying the waters of the simple "A-levels = academic" point. The Russell Group insists students can only have one subject not on their list - I did Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Theatre Studies, so ironically for a whinger, I'd be alright - but this is too narrow. Most students now study four AS levels (and those that don't, should, or should study a different qualification type, I think) but saying only one subject is free to choose is too narrow. A university is well within its rights to insist on half of what students study at AS being suitable to lead into any given degree, and of course to insisting on a good grade in one final A-level, directly relevant to the uni course proposed; but 16-18 is not merely a ramp into university - it should be part of an edifying, if increasingly specialising, period of education: you are past the "minimum threshold" stress of GCSE core subjects; you are learning in a more interesting and conducive environment with more enthusiastic students and fewer resentful trapped morons; you are working in more depth (GCSE to A-level is a bigger jump than A-level to degree, I strongly contend) and starting to really understand the relevance of options and subjects to your future; and let us not forget the personal development mountain young people have naturally to ascend at this age. By all means universities should be able to insist (1) on one excellent grade in the directly relevant subject AND (2) on the ("BBB") balance / points of grades overall and perhaps even (3) on a second "near-relevant" subject at AS, as one of four; but beyond this their narrowing insistence is landgrabbing beyond their remit or right. Leave young people some space to learn and choose who to be. The Russell Group guidance is clearly more restrictive than this. Their complaint that they're saying this to aid state school pupils may be honestly their intention, but the effect of their too-narrow pronouncement on subject validity is a great harm to educational breadth for huge numbers of students to whom their advice should be a practical irrelevance.

So what is it? Are A-levels all the same, or are they not? Is there a difference between academic subjects and non-academic? Do letter grades mean the same thing in different subjects? Does all this only apply to the very top universities anyway, and hence is relevant to only the top 15% of the cohort competing for those places, or should everyone else let themselves be poisoned by this prejudice too? I pity the poor saps caught in this whirlwind of contradiction. I mean, of course, our students (and perhaps, myself included, our Careers Advisors - both formal and informal.) There is an ugly brawl being played out in media public between traditionalists (who want only a narrow handful of academic subjects) and contextualists / futurists. Labour allowed the blooming of A-levels willy-nilly (I disapprove, as should be clear - there should have been more, and more profile for, vocational), and now the Tories want to smash this up - but (as depressingly usual) without a thoughtful philosophy beyond "What would Eton do?" Weirdly, everything's topsy-turvy here: at GCSE, with younger pupils who should be freer to choose, Gove imposes the EBacc (in effect, through the violent arm-twisting of league table placement); bad decision not because of the act of imposition, but because of the narrowness for that age of student (and because of the poisonous unwritten co-motivation - that it is to bash certain teachers and schools, not just to assess students.) At A-level, Willetts fails to take responsibility and impose a narrowing where it is much more appropriate age-wise, and instead lets / encourages small vested interest groups like the Russell Group publicise views which outright contradict a national system of supposedly equalised qualifications - and which are relevant to only a tiny percentage of achievers, but which have poisoned the whole debate. Good God. Both the baby and the bathwater are in the wrong place. How hard can this be?

If this were merely about academic rigour (as so often claimed), the above analysis points us to a solution which would rightly make student choices about relevance key, promote good vocational courses and still retain great breadth in academic courses at A-level, but it's worse than that: it's principled traditionalism-for-its-own-sake. Anyone that teaches these subjects (especially, I want to say, if like me you've taught multiple different A-levels) knows the narrow Russell list is simply not accurate, so let me say this clearly: bright as the Russell people may be, there are no grounds (note: no evidence presented!) for their heightened claims for the superiority of this tiny / narrow handful of subjects. I did Chemistry at A-level and I assure you it's no easier than Psychology, which I teach. Theatre Studies is at least equally hard as English as an A-level subject, having taught both. The Russell attempt to refer to the EBacc core as "facilitating subjects" at A-level is sinister: it smacks of traditional public-school greasing of the route to the ludicrously imbalanced corridors of certain institutions (private school sctudents are 7% of the population but nearly half of all Oxbridge places. Merit alone cannot justify or explain this.) You can narrow A-level carefully, and insist on relevant study and high-quality outcomes without destroying all educational variety and breadth of option.

Other stats in the Guardian article worry too. As for the General Studies / Critical Thinking options, I am perfectly happy facing both ways on this: they are valuable, they do broaden educational thinking, they should be done by many students - but they should be thought of as an additional, and not a main, subject. Ideally, every school runs an enrichment programme giving students a choice between these kinds of options (and others like D of E, World Challenge etc), but making them use the block of time compulsorily for ONE of the options - perhaps for less time per week than real subjects, but to end in accreditation anyway. Doesn't that sound ideal? Of course, the problem is that in the Guardian's unusually reductive analysis, a state school doing something great like this would fuel the appearance of trivial subjects being taken. A distinction needs to be drawn between the inappropriate use of these subjects as main studies and their wise and edifying use as complementary, breadth-focused studies. Stats on these subjects merely re-affirm prejudices unless interrogated more skilfully.

We can fix all this. And it needs Tory decisiveness - there, I said it. We usually don't like dogma in education, and with good reason - but this ridiculous unclarity is wildly unacceptable. There must be a single, fair and clear system - even if we all have issues with some parts of it. To summarise, that central system needs these tenets:

1. If a subject isn't "good" or "rigorous" enough to count as an A-level, it shouldn't be permitted to exist as one. Boards should only be allowed to generate syllabi which have been pre-approved in principle. This decision is too important to be politicised under any given Secretary of State so, although they should have the final decision, an advisory board representing universities, employers, teachers, students, parents and political opposition should exist to contribute to these discussions, and their discussions reported publicly - woe betide the Secretary of State who goes against concensus opinion. Some subjects could be abolished on this basis - but see point 5.

2. Within the remit of this system, no UK university / group (however grand they think themselves) should be permitted to distinguish between the value of subjects in the same qualification, except for their direct relevance to the degree in question - and that for only ONE subject at A-level. Remember that the purpose of 16-18 education is broader than just being a feeder to your institution.

3. Once a subject is accepted as an A-level, we must accept that the (hugely complex and extensive) system of standardising difficulty between subjects and papers is effective, and trust professionals to arrange this for us. Politics, universities and employers' groups (which should all sit on the board in point 1) should commit to refrain from public statements calling into doubt the efficacy or politicisation of the significant number of hard-working, experienced teachers who (very effectively) achieve this standardisation.

4. Subjects that aren't academic can be qualified by other routes, and we should welcome and celebrate this. If this means more teenagers doing their study of vocational courses (and by this I might mean not just carpentry but also apparently intellectual subjects like Graphical Design and ICT) under Apprenticeship-type arrangements with real industry, that - IMHO - is greater, because the more relevant, kudos to those training routes. Bear in mind the rising evidence that employers want apprentices to mould, not graduates.

5. Making and publicising these repeated changes of educational direction arbitrarily is profoundly unfair to students whom you are asking to plan ahead by years. There should be cross-party agreement that, although a government of the day has the right to make any change within these points, there will be a minimum lag of three years before the new rules come into effect. This permits students to fairly make informed choices. It's all very well the Russell Group whinging about state school kids "restricting their options" - but when they've been studying their courses for two years and you only released this guidance five months ago, how can that be fair?

There's one final thing to dwell on why the transparency I'm calling for is so important: in desperate economic times, with sky-high youth unemployment and one final chance to get into universities before fees become crippling, it is no wonder today that the UCAS site crashed with a boggling four times the traffic of last year. The famous photograph of people pressing desperately to get onboard that last helicopter out of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War come to mind. I do not envy this oppressed and embattled generation. We must do everything we can to make things right, clear, and fair for them - and those that follow.

And I'm not sure if that point I just made should be discussed in History, Media Studies, Philosophy or Critical Thinking. Bear that in mind.

EBacc to basics

You have to be amused about the whole EBacc thing, predominantly because a red rag has rarely so transparently been waved at the educational establishment with such little substance behind it. The spitting fury is palpable, from teachers and teaching associations of the "new" subjects suddenly downgraded, to the Heads of the best private schools who suddenly find themselves at the wrong end of league tables they never anticipated. But all this sound and fury is laughably unnecessary. Gove doesn't mean what people think he means by introducing the EBacc.

Presume for a moment that a bunch of advisors a few months back, who spent years in opposition denigrating Labour's target-driven culture, and recognising that brutal cuts in all sections of public spending were unlikely to promote raised achievement in difficult schools, had a meeting trying to work out how, by the 2015 election, to paint the ConDem government an educational success. You need a target that sounds nothing like the other targets. And referencing the past is always sound territory for Conservatives, so do that too. Where you'd start is where many teachers start a GCSE course: with a difficult, traditional baseline assessment on which they help students little, so as to get an idea of the natural lie of the land, uninfluenced by support or later political interpretation. And in the case of Gove's advisors, that would take the form of this question: how can we select a criterion which is currently very low, so everything counts as progress? Dare I say drama teachers might use a difficult traditional play as the baseline assessment at the start of year 10, or English teachers a challenging textual extract for analysis? Quite. All those Gs and Fs would be a good place to start: not so much things can only get better as the only way is up.

So only one in six students got the EBacc? And very few at top schools? Perfect. Even if there were a mass revolt, or even mass disinterest, there'll still be enough careerists, traditionalists and downtroddenly-obedient teachers to rapidly and dramatically swell the rate of uptake once they focus on this measure. Progress will be effortless and government able to claim credit for "restoring rigour to our educational system" (allegedly, whenever Tory Press Officers open a Press Release email template, the subject line autocompletes the word "Restoring" as the opening word.) But, cynicism aside - dare I say it as a centre-leftist and a teacher? - what's wrong with the EBacc as an idea?

There are two obvious responses: one, that it forces children to do subjects they hate, with little modern real-world relevance (honestly - how many geographers do we think UK PLC needs?), and problematic behavioural consequences in thousands of classrooms; and second, the protest that applying the statistic retrospectively to compare schools is unfair. The former is genuinely problematic, because it's about real education, and we'll come back to that; the latter, merely PR, and easy to dismiss. The cacophonic cries of "unfair / it's retrospective" are pointless: these claims are predicated on a target-obsessed mindset from speakers literally unable to see wood for trees. "But we worked so hard to skew our curriculum to the targets about A*-C!" goes the underpinning non-philosophy; "it was all rubbish and now it's worthless rubbish! That's not right or fair!" Well, nor was rigging your subjects to suit a league table, so quit pretending you're on a moral high ground - you're in the mire and now you simply have to wade to another point of it.

But, dear me! - all this kerfuffle from the right as well as the left. The terrible state of British education! So few educated well! Actually, since so few got the EBacc - since the outcomes are so low, it will be generally disregarded by most parents as an invalid comparison of real quality even if it marks an interesting point of note about the recent drift of education. As it happens, back in the Dark Ages when I left school, these traditional subjects were all you could do - ironically my GCSEs do form an EBacc, despite my now teaching subjects outside of it. A saner response is taken by my own head, who stops short of the word boycott but expresses general indifference to the publication event, indicating that his first priority is subject relevance to particular pupils. Good for him. It's quietly conspicuous that the options grid this year now discretely maximises the chance of pupils, however accidentally, selecting an EBacc combo (doesn't it sound like a Subway sandwich?), and doubtless we shall all landslip gradually and quiescently into the being-forced-to-count-against-it swamp over several years, but the expression of hope from some heads that there might be a general consensus to pay no attention to it (or better yet, to actively publish to their parents a rationale for ignoring it) is admirable in its disinterest - even if unlikely to come to anything other than the squished compliance so engrained in teachers' genomes. In the end, this profession does whatever it's told.

This is not to say that Gove doesn't have a point: these traditional subjects are indeed underdone; it would indeed be better if we had a little more of this kind of knowledge in society. The question is whether a focus this explicit and narrow will so dramatically hack back the new technology-type subjects that we'll be unable to staff the only kinds of jobs Britons are still likely to get in this day and age. As with much Tory education philosophy, it is hard to escape the sense of an initiative genuinely positively-intentioned (even for the most deprived) but designed at such a lofty Olympian height in the public school clouds that its effect at ground level will be massively ineffective at best - or heavily counter-productive. The "engagement" issue with comprehensive pupils ("but we have to do courses they'll enjoy!") may well be pandered-to too much, but shifting them forcibly onto the EBacc is only likely to produce a raft of hybrid courses (please await "IT History", "BTEC Geography of Sport" and "Maths Travel and Tourism") to avoid the behavioural car crash that would follow from forcing vocational-type students back into more academic-type lessons. The EBacc, ironically, will damage and devalue the vaunted purity of the subjects it aims to promote.

It will be adopted, though. The clever trick of the EBacc, and why it will succeed in dominating debate and forcing schools (in time) to adhere and be interested is that sheer narrowness of its list, creating an artifical debate. Notice that only Geography and History are permitted as Humanities. Cue a predictable debate (already now starting) where The Telegraph attempts to row religion back into the frame. This is likely to end with RE included as an equivalent option, thus affirming Gove's "flexibility" and "responsiveness." But it is unlikely those framing the original plan anticipated anything other than allowing this in when pushed anyway; it is less likely that Citizenship, for example, will be permitted to count, as this is a subject born and bred under Labour - no matter how much more relevant it is to the modern world and young people than RE. A sham debate will cover the absence of a real one. English Literature might be permitted the same exception, where Media Studies will not, although this government doesn't seem massively enamoured of books; Music and perhaps even Art might be allowed to slip in somewhere (as traditional arts), although Drama teachers will remember the 1988 curriculum's erasure of the subject from existence and would be wise not to hold out any hopes. By playing in a general sense to the traditional assumptions of a mostly educationally backward-looking populace (who, en masse, almost all did only these traditional subjects, but not for the reasons enshrined in the EBacc) Gove easily hands the fight over to becoming the teaching profession versus the traditionalist press - leaving himself a free hand to tinker, unobserved, in more specific ways elsewhere - while all the time watching the EBacc rate rise. Clever boy.

Of course the presented argument for the EBacc - that these other subjects are less challenging than the traditional ones - is simply not true. As anyone who's ever examined knows, a gargantuan industry exists around standardisation of difficulty between subjects - and it works. (Cynics might suggest that the public-sector cull will destroy this effective process and thus genuinely require a return to old subjects. Hush my lips.) Media cherry-picking of select questions for political comparison is a classic fallacy of argument from single example and simply cannot prove the superiority of one subject over another: they are cross-standardised, and it does work. But nonetheless, Gove is in some ways right: it is certainly true that "new" subjects like Media Studies, Psychology, ICT and BTEC Sports have proliferated - for all their genuine relevance to students, and (more importantly) relevance to real-world employment futures - beyond the real need for them; it is difficult to challenge the rightist assertion that schools are using such courses to bump themselves up the tables unrepresentatively. It is true that we could do with more students knowing a little more history, culture and grammar - Gove and The Telegraph are right in this. It is irrelevant that the measure is retrospective, and complaints to this effect more likely damn the complainer than the Secretary of State or his advisors or press cheerleaders. It is futile to suppose the measure will be ignored or go away. If anything, as yet another measure amongst increasingly many (GCSE A*-C, A*-C inc English and Maths, EBacc, CVA...) it will rightfully inform those bothered to interrogate the figures in the round about the nature of a given school; schools are free to explain which targets they pursue, how and why - and if overall success rate clashes with EBacc rates, forcing a thoughtful choice between relevance and traditional status could be a good thing indeed. The EBacc certainly mustn't be the Holy Grail - but it's a good idea - if used right.

The choice, as usual, is in the hands of the profession; will we be so moronic as to mangle all wider aspects of education for this one Crufts hoop, just as we did when the A*-C including English and Maths score became focal? We needn't. You can sell success in many ways - and forge it in yet more. If there is a brutalisation of relevant education for young people just to chase the EBacc percentage, teachers and Heads will have only themselves to blame. Don't hold your breath.

Elitism in British education and society

It's a clever move by Cameron, you have to give him that. In the days of tight budgets, the declaration that he is going to raise the entry profile for teachers above third-degree entrants in act of "Brazen Elitism" is smart because it's simple. It will cost nothing (a few quid on PGCE subsidy is a drop in the salary ocean); it will be divisive amongst teachers on subject and age lines; it appeals to the idea that you can raise the bar by setting high aspirations (without reference to actual teaching change); it delights the traditionalist right-wing press because it is tacitly blaming teachers for educational failure; it steals Ed Balls' every-teacher-should-do-an-MA-thunder without either (a) the cost or (b) the risk of educating a profession more fully. Most worryingly, it's a brilliant steal of stupid teachers' votes, because idiots in the profession will think it designed to enhance the prestige of their role. Witness the patronising flag-waving of the opening paragraphs of the Telegraph article on the news, guaranteed to fool some.

It's also nonsense as recruitment strategy. Raising the bar of a profession does nothing to fundamentally affect the status of a profession. Changing the conditions / rights / most of all, salaries of a profession does; Fiona Millar in the Guardian is much more on the ball here. What she doesn't notice, and what is surely in the sly calculations of Osborne et al is that, since Labour have returned teacher pay to a roughly decent level (despite the NUT's claims, to which I am not unsympathetic) and solved a recruitment crisis; and since the credit crunch has set in motion a managerial-dream decade of teacher oversupply from career-switchers, the next government of any colour has some degree of carte blanche about facing down teachers on pay and conditions. Cameron could have two terms treating the profession without absolute disinterest or hypocrisy and still not have to pay the price: it took a decade after Baker's introduction of National Curriculum 1 in 1988 for the vast numbers of the offended professionals to swell to crisis, and so it could be again.

This brings us to Labour's recruitment drive early in their government. Why did they work so hard on either side of the millenium to reinvigorate recruitment into teaching? I am not disposed to believe then-and-now Labour claims that they wanted to raise standards by paying teachers an attractive salary, nor the unspoken (they wouldn't dare say anything so old-Left) thought that maybe it was catch-up payback for all the years of sub-inflation Tory pay rises. Rather, their prompt was desperation - there was a staggering recruitment crisis about to happen and they (effectively, it must be conceded) averted it by high-volume recruiting, with increased salaries and a new route in. It worked. The profession is better off. Schools are better for it. Has it made a difference?

Well... we find ourselves through the looking glass here. The great sleight-of-hand tradition in which Cameron's latest policy stands is one in which the mainstream fail to break through because of the fault of some part of the mainstream. It is divide and conquer stuff. Average parents are told - by implication - that their children would do better if state school teachers were as good as private school ones (they are usually far better); average teachers, that they would be able to achieve more if average parents did a better job of instilling obedience in their offspring; we don't approve of Grammars but we understand some average aspirant parents want to open them; and so forth. Famously, 7% of children attend private schools but form 75% of the judiciary, have access to the same proportion nationally of cadet training opportunities (leading to forces officership) and half of the top civil service. Naturally, the Milburn report from which these figures are drawn drifted into quiet obscurity, mostly ignored by the government once it had the anti-Cameron headlines they afforded. Labour's gutlessness on meaningful social mobility is depressing. And can any credence really be lent to the woe-is-us-it's-all-so-unfair claims of the independent school brigade given these figures? Additionally, industries dependent on unpaid internship work - positive-potential, expanding and / or high-paid "new economy" sectors like finance, journalism, arts, management consultancy - become, apparently without any prejudice, the province yet again of those whose parents can fund this extended education, and / or have appropriate personal links to open doors.

The difference ultimately between Labour's teacher recruitment drive a decade ago and Cameron's glitz today is that, in a similarity to Fiona Millar's Guardian narrative (in which she herself back-references Francis Gilbert's same point): this would be a bar to many good teachers - and populate the profession with idiots, in some cases. I entered teaching in that early New Labour wave of recruitment through one of those new routes - and my students' results speak for themselves. Whatever the motivation, the access opportunities, rising salary, and desire to recruit well were important, rather than a narrowing of the field like Cameron proposes. And by contrast, one of the best teachers I have ever worked with, and the best manager I have ever worked for in education, got a third - and would not now be allowed to enter teaching. Blunt tools don't work. But will more people know, and think about, these comparisons from great teachers of our own experience, than are seduced by the glib Dave headline about raising standards? Haven't we learnt yet that those words almost always presage intrusive idiocy in educational policy?