CAMBRIDGE LETTER
Exam ready
BILL KIRKMAN
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`One important issue, which is related to the idea of letting people take exams when they are ready, is the relevance of the education provided.'
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REUTERS
... education should be about the development of people.
UNDER plans currently being considered, school students will be able to take their examinations when they are ready, rather than at a specific age.
Reading this in the newspapers, I had a strong feeling that I had been here before. Indeed I had — in 1947. In that year, I was deemed ready to sit for the School Certificate (the precursor of `O' levels, which themselves were later replaced by the General Certificate in School Examination), although I was not yet 15. Two years later, aged 16 years and eight months, I took the Higher School Certificate. A few months later, I was able to leave school and take a temporary job before entering the army for a period of military service, which was then compulsory. Most people took the first exam when they were 16, the second at 18, but my experience was certainly not unique, nor even particularly unusual.
The proposed new policy, it is fair to suggest, is a return to the past rather than a great innovation, and I am sufficiently cynical — or perhaps have simply been around long enough — to feel that this, too, is not particularly unusual. Reinvention of the wheel is quite common, but the inventors always claim that their particular wheel is quite different from its predecessors.
School pupils, the government recognises, are under great pressure from a myriad examinations, and what the Chief Executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has described as an "assessment frenzy".
This will come as no surprise to people who have been following the changes in the education system in recent years. Teachers have been making the point strongly, as governments — the present one and its predecessor — have stoked the assessment frenzy.
Like reinvention of the wheel, pellucid glimpses of the obvious are also common. As most people have short memories, the experts have a good chance of keeping their reputation for expertise intact.
One important issue, which is related to the idea of letting people take exams when they are ready, is the relevance of the education provided. This is generally translated as meaning that there is too much emphasis on the academic, too little on the vocational. This is accompanied by the comment — true — that there is a shortage of plumbers and electricians.
Of course, as we live in a market economy we should simply rely on the market to alter the balance; plumbers are scarce, they can command good pay, and so people will decide to learn plumbing. They may have previously taken degrees in, say, history, but so what?
If one makes remarks like that, as I know from experience, one is thought to be flippant, or ironic.
I will admit to a small measure of irony, though some graduates have taken up plumbing — but there is a genuine issue, usually ignored, about the nature of education and also about the nature of vocational qualifications, and the changing labour market. In the half century and more since the Second World War, we have seen a dramatic increase in the proportion of the population going to university, and a dramatic change in the nature of most jobs. There has been only minimal graduate unemployment.
Education, surely, should be about the development of people, about encouraging them to use their minds. It may be closely linked to vocational qualifications (for example, in the case of medicine) but it is frequently a prelude to them. One of the best tax specialists I know, for example, took a degree in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic before acquiring his taxation knowledge. In Britain, many accountants, and many lawyers, studied history, or chemistry, or engineering — and many other subjects — before embarking on their specialist accountancy or law studies. In the village in which I live, we had an excellent and skilled plumber (now long retired) who was one of the most intellectually inquiring people I have met.
What would I like to see emerging from the Government's review of the education system? Letting people take exams when they are ready would be a bonus. So would ending manic measurement — the assessment frenzy. The best outcome would be encouragement of a view of education which placed more emphasis on drawing people out (which is what the Latin educare means) and less on slotting them in to jobs. That would be a good means of ensuring that we have a well educated and contented workforce, capable of responding effectively to changing needs.
Shall I see it? My views are unfashionable, so the answer is probably no!
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, U.K. E-mail him at: wpk1000@hotmail.com
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