As Alex called Gove’s latest brainwave, to bring back o-levels for thickos, as discussed at Jamie’s. Also from there, The Financial Times (!) comes down hard on it, arguing it would reduce social mobility and condemn the poorest and the northern to inferior qualifications:
The most significant issues around this idea are related to social mobility: the CSE will tend to be an exam for poorer children. Consider who would take the CSE if schools could select the quarter of pupils with the lowest average grades with perfect foresight.
[…]
There will be a geographical effect, too, with some areas switching heavily to it. I have marked this map showing what proportion of children in each neighbourhood will finish in the bottom quarter on the same measure. The CSE will be a northern qualification, too.
Go look: there’s graphs and everything.
It all does once again beg the question why a certain breed of tory, both in the UK as in the States, is so obsessed with bringing back obsolete forms of teaching to the point of fetishism. The phonics fights in the US, the eleven plus in the UK, the alleged degradation of a-levels, undsoweiter, all operating on prejudice rather than fact. Granted, that’s the conservative m.o. in a nutshell, but education does tend to bring the kooks out even more so than other subjects.
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