Private schools in Britain are increasingly dropping A-levels, the exams used to gauge student achievement, and are switching instead to the International A-Levels – the standards created for the foreign market which are less likely to be the target of tinkering by government officials. There’s also a growing interest among private school students in Cambridge Pre-U, which is considered a more traditional assessment system used in British institutions before subject-level A-levels came into wider use.

Not willing to wait for the Coalition to complete its A-level overhaul, this year more than 350 schools are abandoning A-levels in favor of alternate exams. 188 are offering the International Baccalaureate diploma, 72 are entering students for the International A-levels and 99 are offering the Pre-U.

Among the schools that have turned away from the A-levels, the concerns seem to be not only the growing uncertainty as the process to make the exams more rigorous drags on, but also fear that the changes could be undone should Labour win in the next general election scheduled for May 7th, 2015.

But Ed Elliott, head of The Perse School, Cambridge, said many schools were unwilling to wait for the reforms or risk them being reversed by a future Labour administration.

The school offers the Pre-U in psychology, music, physics and chemistry and will move towards the International A-level in biology from September.

“The Perse does not want to be part of a game of political ping pong which will destabilise the exam system to the disadvantage of students,” he said.

Elliott says that in the current political environment it only makes sense to sit out A-level exams in the near future until reform efforts shake out one way or another. Meanwhile, Perse students will have access to qualifications that are proven, rigorous, recognized internationally and don’t have political infighting tainting them.

Cambridge International Examinations developed Pre-U as a more rigorous version of A-levels. CIE offers the exams in addition to the International A-levels which the organization has been running for more than 50 years.

The IB — championed by schools such as Sevenoaks, Wellington College and King Edward’s, Birmingham — is a diploma qualification developed in Geneva and is designed to offer a more rounded experience for sixth-formers, with students taking a range of subjects, as well as completing an extended essay and doing community work. Latest figures from CIE show that 99 schools made entries for the Pre-U this year, up from 98 in 2012, and a further 150 are registered to teach it from September this year.

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The UK Labour party intends to reinstate a mandatory two week work placement before the end of school that had been made optional by the government, and the party also intends to get rid of the Coalition’s English Baccalaureate, reports Graeme Paton of The Telegraph.

Leading the review is Professor Chris Husbands, director of the University of London’s Institute of Education. He wants to work to turn things around for the “forgotten 50 percent” of students who don’t end up attending university.

Speaking before the publication, Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, said there was currently a “massive gap in this country between the world of education and the world of work” and a number of key reforms were being considered by the party in attempt to bridge the divide.

The reforms include requiring all students through the age of 18 to study English and math through GCSEs, A-levels or other qualifications to raise standards in the three Rs, reversing a government decision and introducing a requirement for independent career advice and an overhaul of apprenticeships to more accurately tie them to specific career sectors.

More reforms are being planned for the 14-16 phase since Labour thinks that is the critical time during which the Coalition is failing to prepare students for the workplace.

Last year, the Government dropped a requirement for compulsory work experience placements as part of a review into vocational education by Prof Alison Wolf, from King’s College London.

Mr Twigg said it should be reinstated in some form but insisted the length of placements had yet to be decided, adding: “The quality of it varied. Certainly there were cases where people were in a workplace just making a cup of tea and doing the photocopying, but actually there were also brilliant examples of workplaces that did it really, really well. Giving young people that chance to see a real workplace is really fantastic and if anything two weeks isn’t enough.”

Twigg is also adamant that the EBacc will be removed. Currently it ranks schools by the proportion of students that earn at least a C grade GCSE in five subjects: English, math, science, foreign languages and either history or geography. Twigg says it has a negative effect on the arts and engineering since they get pushed to the side.

“[The EBacc] is at best an irrelevance and in some cases it is distorting young people’s choices so they are not doing things that are best for fulfilling their potential,” he said.

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Other countries show a distinct “urban advantage.” On average, even students from urban “inner cities” outperform students from rural districts on reading exams and the difference is equal to about a year of additional instruction. Britain appears to show dramatically different outcomes; UK students from villages and small towns outscore students from the cities.

Along with the US, Belgium, Denmark and Germany, urban students in the UK performed substantially worse than their rural counterparts. Students from city and suburban districts in the UK ranked 30th out of 57 countries ranked. Village students ranked 10th.

The OECD said pupils in inner-city schools usually came from “more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds” but the trend was reversed in a handful countries, including the UK.

The conclusions come despite a series of high-profile drives by successive governments to raise standards in inner-city education.

Under Labour, £500m was spent over two years on its Excellence in Cities campaign to tackle underachievement in schools and millions more was invested in the London Challenge and City Challenge programmes. It has led to London becoming the best-performing region of England in terms of GCSE results.

Alan Smithers of Buckingham University says that “a more settled student population” explains the results. Because parents in larger districts have more choices, they are subject to social self-segregation. Parents tend to follow the herd, attempting to enroll their children in the school they’ve been told are the best even if that isn’t the case. After a while, such herding turns into a self-fulfilling prophesy and the performance gap between the best schools and the worst widens.

According to Smithers, difference in income also plays a role. Families in rural communities tend to be richer, and reside outside urban centers because they can afford to commute.

The study was based on the outcome of independent exams administered by the OECD in schools across the developed world.

Pupils aged 15 are tested in reading, maths and science every four years as part of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The UK was positioned 25th for reading in the latest tables published in 2010.

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John Cherry, the now former member of the West Sussex County Council, is being investigated by the Sussex Police for expressing allegedly racist thoughts about a proposed boarding school which will accept 600 students from inner-city London. First reported in the Mail on Sunday, Cherry said that minority families don’t value hard work and that the school – where students will be allowed to board for free from Monday to Friday – will be “a sexual volcano.”

According to the spokesman for the police department, two complaints about the delivered remarks were received and the investigation was launched. Since his heavily- criticized remarks, Cherry has resigned his position and issued an apology.

He told The Mail on Sunday: “Ninety-seven per cent of pupils will be black or Asian. It depends what type of Asian. If they’re Chinese they’ll rise to the top. If they’re Indian they’ll rise to the top. If they’re Pakistani they won’t.” He added: “If the children are not allowed out of the site then it will make them want to escape into the forest – it will be a sexual volcano.” ”The trauma of taking the children out of their natural surroundings is going to be considerable.”

He added that Stockwell, the South London neighborhood where the school will be based, was predominantly a “a coloured area – I have no problem with that,” saying that the local children would probably benefit more from the government taking over a secondary school instead. They are opening the board school will be an offshoot of the Durant Academy and take advantage of the former site of St Cuthman’s boarding school.

Durant Academy is itself currently under review by the National Audit Office. The report on the school – which is predicted to be critical of the plan – is expected as early as this week.

Durand Academy owns St Cuthman’s, a former boarding school, in Stedman, West Sussex, and applied for permission to develop it and use it as a boarding unit for its pupils. Buying the school building and land cost Durand more than £3 million, and the development would be more costly still. As an academy, Durand runs on public money but is independent of its local council. Sussex residents objecting to the plan have challenged its spending on the boarding project, and asked Margaret Hodge, the Labour chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, to investigate.

Although Durand’s plan has met a lot of resistance both from local residents and Conservative politicians, Tory Education Minister Michael Gove has expressed his strong support for the venture.

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George Osborne is looking for new ways to reduce government spending, and according to Peter Scott writing for The Guardian he might find higher education funding to be a good place for cuts. Yet even though currently universities around Britain have healthy treasuries, drastic funding reductions could lead to decline in educational quality that will have an impact on the country’s economic future down the line.

Although the Chancellor hasn’t yet announced where the new rounds of cuts will come from, higher ed seems a logical choice in light of the fact that many other social programs have already been gutted, and he has made a commitment to keep the money going towards health, defense and elementary and secondary education at the same level.

The universities’ temporary affluence is due to the poor implementation of the fees scheme which had even sub-par schools charging the maximum allowed tuition and reaping the windfall. Scott does not expect this to continue indefinitely, as £9,000 per year of college is not sustainable in the long term based on the citizenry’s mean income.

It is not their fault that, to ease Liberal Democrat consciences, the repayment regime is so loose that up to half of graduates will never pay back their loans in full – although the effect, of course, is to push up real (as opposed to nominal) public expenditure and bust the Treasury’s model. But a coalition government scrabbling for votes from beer drinkers and petrol-heads is not going to offend another constituency by tightening up that repayment regime. So, according to its blinkered neo-liberal logic, there is no alternative to cutting direct public support for higher education still further.

Scott doesn’t expect a reduction in funding for two of the government’s pet higher education initiatives: research and growth of the “strategically important and vulnerable” subjects like science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

But there might be open season on everything else, including expanding access to students from background typically underrepresented on university campuses.

In short, cutting higher education spending would amount to slashing and burning our future – unless, of course, we want to continue to rely on a bloated and corrupt financial services sector and property/high street spending bubbles. Not so long ago there was talk of rebasing our economy on high-tech high-value exports. Goodbye to all that. In any case, the truth is that the “prosperity” of higher education, which a predatory and desperate Treasury is now eyeing, is largely an illusion. In practice higher education is in turmoil as institutions struggle to make sense of the insane combination of a “command” economy and a highly volatile student “market”.

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The debate over education reform in Britain took a turn toward schoolyard conflict after Education Secretary Michael Gove criticized opponents of his plans for English schools. Responding to a critique leveled by some of the country’s top professors, Gove said that they were “more interested in valuing Marxism, revering jargon and fighting excellence” than doing the hard work required in improving education for the country’s students.

In an editorial for the Mail on Sunday, Gove said that he was fighting not for the status quo, but for the hundreds of thousands of students who were being ill-served by their local schools. He called his opponents the Enemies of Promise, and said that their sole objective is to deny the poorest kids the education that would improve their lot in life.

He also had some words for Britain’s teachers unions who he called “ultra-militants” because of their strike plans for the coming summer and fall. The two largest teachers unions in the country have announced plans to hold one-day strikes starting in the summer and continuing into the fall term to protest the move by Gove to allow the introduction of performance-based pay for faculty.

He said: “They oppose our plans to pay good teachers more because they resent the recognition of excellence and they hate academy schools because heads in those schools put the needs of children ahead of the demands of shop stewards.”

The heated rhetoric was in response to a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, where the country’s preeminent education professors attacked the new curriculum introduced by Gove as being damaging to children’s ability to learn. They said that the new program required nothing but rote memorization and was in opposition to the systems employed in other countries that relied more on problem-solving and critical thinking.

The letter came a month after the new curriculum – which covers knowledge that British students must gain by the time they turn 14 – was made public for the first time.

In English, it suggests pupils should recite poetry by heart in the first two years and master around 200 complex spellings by 11.

The maths curriculum introduces pupils to fractions at the age of five, 12 times tables by nine and algebra at 11.
In history, pupils are to be taught a sweeping chronology of British history from the Stone Age to the Glorious Revolution of the 17th Century in primary school.

Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, insisted the curriculum would provide pupils with the “fundamental building blocks of study” that would give them the knowledge needed to progress onto GCSEs, A-levels, university and the workplace.

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School authorities in Britain are taking truancy more seriously this year, new statistics released by the Department of Education reveal. According to the data, the number of parents forced to pay truancy fines is up 25% this year as the enforcement of measures designed to keep students from missing school has been stepped up.

More than 40,000 fines have been handed out this year, each for £60 (~$90 USD). Only about 33,000 fines were issued over the same period the year before.

Parents have 42 days to pay the fine or the matter will be taken further and families could be prosecuted. About 6,300 families had to appear before a judge for non-payment of fines in 2012 compared to about 5,600 the year before.

The number of pupils in primary, secondary, special schools and academies who missed at least a month of school – children known as “persistent absentees – fell to 5.2% from 6.1% the year before. There were 333,850 persistent absentees – 60,000 fewer than the year before. The coalition changed the definition of a persistent absentee in 2011 from a pupil who missed a fifth of the school year to one who missed a quarter.

The enforcement is up despite the fact that the number of students missing school has declined somewhat from the year before. The decline has been very modest though; in 2011, there were 370,000 students missing school on an average day. In 2012, the number had gone down to 327,000. This represented a decline from 5.6% of all students to 5.1%.

Britain isn’t the only country that’s encountering troubles with truancy. Earlier this year, two parents were convicted in separate cases for not doing enough to get their children to class in Scotland — although Scottish officials acknowledged that the students were refusing the go to school and acted in opposition to their parents, sometimes putting up a physical struggle.

In the case of a mother and daughter, the girl was physically larger than her mother, an hourly-wage laundry worker. The school had a welfare officer working with the family, but the sanctions the officer suggested to put on the girl led to a hysterical response and the mother gave up. She stopped meeting with the welfare officer and her daughter continued to be truant, attending 157 days out of 335. Although the mother pleaded not guilty, the Edinburgh Justice of the Peace court convicted and assigned her a fine of £150.

The punishment of the other person convicted – the father whose part-time employment made him primarily responsible for making sure his child attended school on schedule – was deferred both because the father had pleaded guilty and because the son had an attitude adjustment over the summer that promised that his attendance would be more regular in the future.

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According to the head of the leading exam board in England testifying before members of Parliament, the incentives put in place by the new testing system could encourage teachers to artificially inflate student scores. New measures put into place by the Coalition government link teacher performance to student test results, which means that teachers are under increased pressure to show improved scores — which they say is exactly the environment ripe for a cheating scandal.

AQA exam board’s chief executive Andrew Hall said he didn’t think that cheating was to blame for this summer’s GCSE English exam scandal, but said that the way incentives were set up made it difficult to assess their impartiality when assigning marks. This lack of impartiality and the fact that teachers had direct control over 60% of the final exam mark is what led the exam boards to toughen the grade boundaries of the exam to the outrage of the students who felt that they had been lowballed.

The parliamentary hearing followed a high court ruling last month against an alliance of pupils, unions, schools and councils who alleged that the government’s exam regulator, Ofqual, and the exam boards Edexcel and AQA had unfairly moved the boundary, in a last-minute “statistical fix” to counter exam grade inflation.

The bar was raised higher than for pupils who submitted papers in the earlier January marking round and some pupils claim they missed out on sixth-form places because of the change.

Statistical analysis of the exam results showed that teacher judgment played an outsized role in final grade assignments according to Hall’s testimony. He acceded to the suggestion made by the committee chairman Graham Stuart that when a mere two points made the difference between a lower and a higher final grade, the temptation to find them would be a very difficult one for a teacher to resist.

Ziggy Liaquat, the managing director of the exam board Edexcel, also said his exam board, which accounted for 10% of English GCSEsassessed last year, had observed inaccurate marking by teachers.

“We adjusted downwards 8% and we adjusted upwards 5% so there was inaccurate marking both ways,” he said. He added the evidence did not yet show teachers had pushed marks deliberately to cross grade boundaries.

Mark Dawe, who headed the exam board OCR, was the only one testifying who said that his board didn’t find evidence of overmarking in the exam papers it reviewed.

Graham isn’t the first to observe that the culture of high-stakes testing is a breeding ground for cheating. In the fall of last year, Kim Dancy of The Georgetown Public Policy Review looked at the issue in detail, concluding that when jobs and promotions hinge on test results, artificial grade inflation inevitably follows – the temptation being too much for administrators and teachers to overcome.

And so it proved. The first major standardized-test related cheating scandal concerned a round of testing in Atlanta public schools in 2009. Similar allegations about several other districts, from Los Angeles to Brooklyn rapidly surfaced. In some cases, it wasn’t even the cheating that made headlines, but the horrible pressure applied to those who refused to go along. As lurid as these stories are, they point to a pervasive problem that is growing and spreading in K-12 education.

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In England, school league tables are used to tell the story of the country’s education system. The tables, released once a year, allow comparisons not only between schools but also between programs offered by each school. They also keep parents and education officials in the know about how each one is performing compared to others.

Which is why every attempt to overhaul the tables – including paring down the number of programs that appear within – raises controversy, as did the newly announced plan by the Coalition to remove several thousand vocational courses from the list of the programs schools can use to calculate their league table position.

Thousands of vocational courses that lead to students “working hard but getting nowhere” – possibly nine in 10 of the total – are to be dropped from school and college league tables in England under plans outlined by the government.

Only a few hundred of nearly 4,000 qualifications now offered to 16-to-19-year-olds would merit inclusion in the tables, which remain an important yardstick by which many parents and ministers judge education performance.

This isn’t the first time that Education Secretary Michael Gove has taken a hatchet to the league tables. Since taking office, he has already removed a number of GCSE-equivalent vocation programs from league tables and now it appears he’s coming for the rest. Although students will theoretically still have access to the programs even after they’re no longer on the league tables – as long as they remain Ofqual-accredited – if the schools continue down the path they began after the first set of cuts, the programs might be limited or cut outright.

The move was spurred on by the 2011 report on vocational education authored by King’s College London Professor Alison Wolf. She pointed out that few of the vocational programs offered in schools were academically rigorous, especially when it came to core subjects like mathematics and language arts.

Furthermore, the programs often underperformed in their chief function – getting students ready for the workplace. More than 350,000 students between the ages of 16 and 19 were leaving after taking these courses and had no better odds of landing full-time employment than their peers who decided to forgo vocational training altogether.

Claiming the changes would set a new “quality bar”, Matthew Hancock, the skills minister, said: “Every student will have to study a high-quality qualification of substantial size if their college or school sixth form is to get credit in the league tables. Secondly, it will be clear which qualifications will progress young people into skilled occupations and which are more general in nature.

“At the moment, too many students are spending time working hard but getting nowhere.”

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A shortage of slots in the best primary schools is fueling unethical behavior from parents as they take questionable steps to make sure that their kids get an opportunity to receive high-quality education. From attending church services of a sect they don’t belong to, to falsifying applications, parents are willing to go not one but many extra miles to increase the chances that their children get that coveted school spot when the time comes.

The authorities in charge of preventing application fraud are not in the dark about what they’re facing. According to Julie Henry writing for The Daily Telegraph, the number of applications that are getting a second look from investigators has risen 11-fold since five years ago.

Over the past five years, the number of investigations into suspicious school applications has risen almost elevenfold. Admission forms from more than 1,000 families in 91 councils were queried in 2012/13 because of concerns about fake addresses, bogus baptism certificates, and even families claiming, falsely, that a child already in a school was a brother or sister to get a place under the “sibling rule”.

This wasn’t always the case. It used to be that children simply attended their local primary schools, and then upon completion transferred to the local secondary. In this way, children remained prisoners of their post code – stuck in a school that might be underperforming or not suiting their particular needs.

According to Henry, all this changed after High Court ruled that students were allowed to apply to the schools outside their local district and stopped the practice of automatically allocating all school places to those in the area. After that, the process of getting a child into school became much more complicated.

“The tremendous competition we are seeing is due to a number of factors,” says Prof Alan Smithers, an education professor from Buckingham University. “Fees for independent schools are so high, particularly in a recession, that fewer parents can afford them. We also have a much more qualifications-based society. You have to have the grades to get to a top university or get a job, so it makes sense that parents are more determined than ever to give their children a good education.”

Thus the church attendance every Sunday, even for those who don’t believe at all or are simply not members of the Church of England. The best COE schools reserve up to half of their slots for children from families of believers and no one wants their unwillingness to sacrifice a few hours every Sunday to be the reason why their kids must settle for second-best.

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