Daily Mail, September 19 2002

The extraordinary scandal over the doctored A-level grades has finally exposed the appalling corruption at the heart of our education system, a rot that goes all the way to the top.

The chief executive of the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) exam board, Dr Ron McLone, has been required to explain to the government’s exam watchdog, the Qualification and Curriculum Authority, why he personally tampered with many A–level marks to lower the grades his board was awarding.

But the QCA already knows the answer. For McLone had told them exactly what he was doing. Indeed, astounding as it may seem, McLone, the QCA and the other exam boards had actually agreed that the highest achievers would be marked down.

What McLone did – admitted in a leaked letter to a school -- was so shocking it beggars belief. He discovered that his board’s top A-level grades were in danger of going through the roof when this year’s exam results were combined with last year’s AS level grades to construct the final A-level score.

Because of the intense controversy over the new AS level, with repeated claims that its lower standard had made the overall A-level easier, McLone knew his political masters expected him to ensure that overall A-level scores were not significantly higher than last year.

So after the candidates’ work had been marked, McLone simply overrode his examiners and arbitrarily raised the mark expected for each grade. The result was that candidates who had otherwise scored top grades suddenly found that their coursework, which had been previously assessed by their teachers, had been marked down by the examiners as a fail, as were certain exam papers too.

The result has been that untold numbers of candidates have been swindled and cheated out of their university places and their careers put in jeopardy.

The government has said the disputed papers will be re-marked. What then? How can those candidates regain university places which have gone?

This is not just a deepening shambles. It is hard to envisage a more blatant and outrageous betrayal of trust, one which deals a deadly blow to public confidence in the whole examination system.

For McLone is not some rogue official. This was done, according to his own admission, with the connivance of the QCA, the very body that is now grotesquely sitting in judgment over the whole affair. And it appears from schools that another exam board, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, was up to similar tricks too.

A proper independent inquiry is absolutely essential. The QCA itself should be in the dock here. And such an inquiry should not stop there either. For the Education Department is in this up to its neck, too.

It is not a matter of whether explicit instructions were issued to doctor the marks (although who knows --they may have been). This scandal is the direct result of the government’s education policies.

At the core of the débâcle is the AS-level. It was introduced as an incentive to get less able students to stay on at school. So its standard is lower than A-level. But since it also accounts for half of the A-level itself, it follows that it must depress the overall standard of that exam.

The government insisted, however, that it would not and that the A-level ‘gold standard’ would not be compromised. The final proof that this was a fiction arrived with the marks that struck such panic into Ron McLone.

But the rot goes far deeper. For although the AS-level in its present form is new, the exam boards are put under political pressure every year by government attempts to manipulate the system to deceive the public into thinking that more pupils are achieving greater success.

Its driving impulse is to get more and more pupils into higher education. Now, it is blindingly obvious that this cannot be done without lowering standards. But the government refuses to accept this. Indeed, the Schools Minister David Miliband has sneered that those who warn ‘more means worse’ are elitist snobs who want to stop poor, able children from getting on.

The monstrous reality of this idiotic and infantile political posturing is that children from all walks of life are being betrayed. Standards are being eroded and examination results being made meaningless as the exam boards connive at the lie.

This is entirely due to the government’s hijacking of education for the purposes of social engineering. In its attempt to bring about ‘equality’, it is actually imposing a deadening homogeneity. Academic and non-academic qualifications are being merged into a meaningless mish-mash. Examinations have dumped originality for a tick-box mentality.

The ‘all must have prizes’ approach means that colleges are admitting students who are not up to it, so lowering the standard of their degrees. It is no surprise to find the OCR board, traditionally favoured by the independent schools, at the centre of a punitive action against excellence. For the independent schools are constantly singled out by a system which penalises the brightest in the name of equality.

Indeed, it now appears that if you are a less able candidate the doors of academe will swing wide open, but if you are a more able candidate you may lose your university place.

The root of the problem is the government’s grip on the education system. It is that control which lets it pursue its half-baked ideological experiments on our schoolchildren. It is that control which has let it undermine, weaken and corrupt the exam system. It is that control which has turned education into a massive lie, with fiddled results from SATS to university degrees.

The solution is to set the whole system free. It is not enough for the wretched McLone to be thrown to the wolves (as he should). The exam boards’ real crime lies in providing cover for failed government policy.

The QCA should be abolished. It has presided for years over a corrupt examination system, and serves only to allow ministers to avoid taking the responsibility that is properly theirs for the degeneration of education.

The exam boards should be freed so that they can once again consist of disinterested educators setting standards and marking papers with no political interference. League tables, which have played their own part in driving down exam standards since they cause schools to shop around for the easiest exams to boost their standing, should be abolished.

The disastrous AS-level should be junked, and a deeper lesson learned from that particular fiasco: that the government simply has no place mucking about with the education system for its dubious ideological ends.

The system must be liberated from the terrible incubus of political control. True, there are still serious problems with what and how teachers teach. But these problems have been hugely exacerbated by political interference over decades.

Now these chickens have come home to roost. The immediate victims of this egregious dishonesty and cynicism are hard-working pupils who have been cheated out of their rightful entitlement. The long-term casualties are the discredited exam system -- and the very idea of an educated nation, which has now been put in peril.

Posted by admin at September 19, 2002