A measure of success?

Last week Michael Gove gave an assessment of the state of the education in this country.

Dotted among the words were various statistics. Arm yourself with a strong drink before attempting to read further.

500,000 pupils are in schools where less then 30% get 5 A to C grades in GCSE including English and Maths.

The actual number of pupils failing to achieve this standard is 356,000 each year.

350,000 pupils are excluded, temporarily or permanently each year year. Of these 150,000 are excluded for violence and disruption. (93,806 youngsters aged 10 to 17 were sentenced to custodial sentences in 2006.)

44,106 pupils were not entered to do both English and Maths at GCSE.

In 2007 128,000 did not get a single C grade in GCSE, 28,114 did not achieve a single GCSE G grade, and a further 9,881 achieved just one grade G.


Can you take any more? These figures were calculated by the Taxpayers Alliance recently: (14th March 2008)

A quarter of all 11 year-olds leave primary school with insufficient ability in reading and writing to cope with the secondary school curriculum.

Almost 30% of 14 year-olds fail to reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.

In the GCSE examinations, (age 16) almost 60% fail to achieve a C grade pass in all the core subjects - English, Maths and Science. 40% fail to achieve it in English.

As the TPA point out, after spending about £75,000 on each child over 11 years, a significant proportion leave school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled.

This is not the fault of NuLabour alone. The situation has been poor for some time, - hence the stressing of a national curriculum under Margaret Thatcher, and testing from her time on.

The TPA gives indications of problems with adults:

About 7 million adults in England could not locate a particular service in the alphabetical index of Yellow Pages and 47% would not be capable of achieving a G grade pass in Maths at GCSE. (The G grade mark is so low as to demand not much more than writing your name at the top of the paper.)

Michael Gove's statistics are frightening, and combining them with the TPA figures for 11,14, and 16 year-olds, the suggestion is that too many pupils arrive in secondary education with inadequate academic foundation, and that their progress is regression.

It is not that English children are naturally less well endowed, but Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year-olds among the 30 members of the OECD, at twice the level of Germany and the USA.

There are all sorts of reasons behind this - failures in family life, fundamental lack of (self) discipline, a failure to get to grips with disruption in class, and so on.

The Government, from its ideology, is convinced that some have poorer opportunities and so is levelling down. They are tinkering with aspects. It really needs a thorough reformation of many familial and societal problems simultaneously.