How lovely to hear Education Secretary Lucy Powell sending her ‘massive congratulations’ to children receiving their GCSE results. ‘More of you are hitting top grades in maths, and technical pass rates are climbing in every region,’ she said. But does she really believe in exam results? Powell did, after all, recently promise to end the ‘GCSE resits treadmill’, and has in the past described spelling tests as ‘draconian’.
Powell laid out her philosophy in an interview with the Times Education Supplement in 2019 when she was a member of the Commons education committee. She did not seem at that point to be terribly interested in the idea of academic rigour. To be fair, she didn’t quite come across as the sort of progressive educationist who founded one of those nutty schools where the lessons are optional and children decide what, if anything, they are taught. She said she was sometimes one of only five pupils who bothered to turn up to lessons when she attended a comprehensive in Manchester in the 1980s, and she did pay tribute to ‘successive governments’ (i.e. Conservative ones as well as Labour ones) for raising standards and promoting the value of education.
Nevertheless, she made it quite clear that she thought children shouldn’t be taking so many exams and tests. ‘With testing and the data-driven approach, the pendulum starts to swing too far the other way,’ she said. ‘You have got to the position where policy keeps pushing and pushing but we are expecting to have identikit kids when we are saying “All schools should teach these subjects in this way. Everyone needs to take them and everyone needs to do this handful of GCSEs.”’ Powell added that school education was ‘becoming over-prescribed and micro-managed. And that is the same for teachers as well. Some of the joy has gone out.’
In other words, what Powell is really telling pupils this week is: ‘Well done you, all you identikit kids. But a lot of you would have been better off left scribbling on the floor, or whatever else takes your fancy.’
As for her acknowledgment of the efforts of successive government in raising standards, that comes over as somewhat hollow given that she spent much of her time in opposition trying to stop schools being turned into academies, free of local government control. She wanted to preserve the model that created sink comprehensives in the first place.
This week, Powell will be happy to bathe in the success of an educational policy that she spent many years opposing. Once the results season is over, though, don’t expect her to be pushing too much for academic excellence. She will be giving that pendulum a big shove back in the direction it came from. Maybe she won’t be happy with just five pupils turning up for lessons, but from what she has revealed of her educational philosophy I would say that she wouldn’t mind too much if a few never secured a maths or English qualification.
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