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As a professional student, may I politely ask what planet is Gove actually on with his E-Bac?
Yes, many years ago, even I did GCSEs. I was in the second year ever to do the new General Certificate of Secondary Education, as it was then. In 1989, I did GCSEs in Mathematics and French, and the following year I did further GCSEs in English, English Literature, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Latin, Greek, History and Electronics. I got straight As, as A* had not been introduced yet obviously. And why does this matter now? I had to type them all up for my unsuccessful training contract applications this year.
The GCSE was not the pinnacle of my own educational journey, though I did very much enjoy them. I wouldn’t say my Bachelor of Medicine or Bachelor of Surgery, Master of Business Administration, Bachelor of Law, Master of Law were either. I am proud of having passed PRINCE2, and the Diploma of the Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians (UK), but even now memories of these do not set me on fire.
I would say my Ph.D. was the pinnacle though, awarded from the University of Cambridge in 2001. This was awarded after a 20 minute viva examining a very short thesis of a few experimental chapters on a novel way to diagnose early onset dementia. I think coursework at GCSE was a good introduction for me for doing research, although I do not share in Gove’s criticism of the use of the internet in learning. Knowing which information is relevant and which is irrelevant is a highly prized skill, and I feel that people who are much younger than me, who are able to see the wood from the trees, are at an advantage. For partly this reason, I think the GCE Advanced level is a useless exam – this is a terrible fact dump of the highest calibre, and, although it was pivotal for me to go to Cambridge, I really have no idea how I would cope with the intense pressure of UCAS now in 2012. Anyway, for somebody who is obsessed with “academic rigour”, I am a bit surprised that Michael Gove did not wish to go onto to a Ph.D., but in fairness to him it is difficult to obtain funding for a non-sciences Ph.D. (his undergraduate degree was English) – or a D.Phil. as it is known in a few places including Oxford – directly from a II.1; he would have had to have done a Masters degree, which he did not do to the best of my knowledge.
I obtained the second highest First in Finals in Cambridge in 1996, as a result of writing twelve one-hour essays. I do not share in Michael Gove’s enthusiasm in bringing the three-hour exit exam as the sole measure of success in the e-Bac, but I have to say, when I came to assessing Natural Sciences Tripos finals in physiology in the early 2000s (for one year only), I awarded Class I to those people who could argue well and structure an essay well; people who received the Upper Second, I found, knew a lot, but simply could not produce a coherent introduction or conclusion.
My MBA taught me that collaboration in teamwork was excellent in advancing valuable skills, such as communication and negotiation. I think these are to be much valued in whatever you do professionally. I do not see how Michael Gove’s e-Bac will necessarily achieve this. I came top in innovation management, in a course at BPP Business School led by Dr Vidal Kumar, and indeed I am an advocate of ‘the adjacent possible’ philosophy of Stephen Kauffman (or “the Medici Effect” in another guise), where you learn to make unusual connections across many disparate fields to produce ‘the next innovation’.
I loved my Master of Law, but this again was very focused to a rigorous detailed look at commercial law, but developing skills such as making commercial pitches and completing successfully case analysis. I had to do a dissertation for this, where it was necessary to pose the right questions, present your introduction, methods, results and discussion, in the right order, and I hope that I took the field further in cloud computing. This is maybe what Michael Gove would call ‘coursework’, but I suppose he has had limited experience of this nature of academic enquiry, above his undergraduate degree at Oxford, not being impolite.
I haven’t lectured, though I have supervised at Cambridge. You’ll understand that I am a professional student, though I haven’t set up any educational departments, courses or establishments. But, as a ‘user’ of the educational establishment, starting with my election as a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster in 1987 (an examination which Prof Stephen Hawking even proudly boasts he nearly sat), may I politely suggest that Michael Gove is barking mad?
A nostalgic misfounded intellectual rigour is not the future of education
The idea that GCSEs are not rigorous does a great disservice to those who have them or about to have them, and to the teachers who are equally hard-working. There seems to be confusion between developing an education programme and an academic masturbation which is founded in nostalgia. I’ve always had ‘issues’ with the education budget being used for the upkeep of listed buildings of the Cambridge colleges – such spending should come out of the heritage budget, meaning that the money is fully spent on teaching, lecturing and research. Likewise, Michael Gove’s yearning of O Levels is back to the 1950s. It would be a retrograde step which would be extremely dangerous for education.
Education is about a balanced curriculum. To this end, if we could swallow our pride, a broad-based education akin to the International Baccalaureate may not be a bad idea. There are some fundamentals we need to address – people specialise too soon, and too many people are written off by the end of GCE A levels if they do them. The nostalgia about mathematics is ill-founded, as an extensive training in mathematics only hyper trains the parietal cortex part of your brain. It is much better that a rounded curriculum teaches other parts of the human brain, including attention, perception, memory, planning, decision-making, social cognition and emotion. It’s obvious isn’t it? This doesn’t mean parrot-learning rhymes and poems, or learning a method how to work out the tangent to a sphere in 3D. This means using your brain, and interacting with other people.
Whilst I don’t quite share some aspects of the argument, @charonqc is utterly correct in warning over the hypereducationalisation (sic) of programmes. Such hypereducationalisation is not edifying – and quite often common sense has gone out of the window. However, I do share with @colmmu and @vidalandreas that the key to successful learning is learning how to learn, and how to access information and analyse it cogently. You don’t need a superbrain to do this – we virtually all have access to the internet. Innovation should be pervasive in all aspects of education – this means that learners interact with one another. After all, whilst law firms look for teamwork as a competence, wouldn’t it be rather nice if the education system rewarded team ability as well as individual ability?
For too long, the outcome of education has been an outcome of how well you have been educated. I don’t think it matters how you test the learning objectives, whether this be coursework or written examinations. If you subject a learner to an exit exam of 3 hours duration only as a rite of passage inflicting intellectual pain, and because you believe in ‘rigour’, there is something fundamentally wrong with you. This is what Michael Gove and the Conservatives wish to do, and I wish all the parties follow the lead of the President of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, and Nick Clegg to avoid a two tier system where some students will be forced onto a scrapheap. Good for Clegg and Farron on their decree nisi in 2015 from the Tories. What I think has been incredibly commendable is how they have proved themselves in providing a stable government – I just happen to believe that the Liberal Democrats would be wonderful if they were allowed to implement their own policies, that’s all. @DavidAllenGreen and several others are completely correct in my view to voice concerns about how competition amongst exam boards may not have worked thus far. Turning the clock back decades a few decades favouring the few is not the answer – but a solution which recognises the aspirations of the many hard-working students is.
The illusion of choice
An ongoing onslaught by David Cameron has been that the state became too big through Labour. Yesterday, somebody remarked on Twitter, “BREAKING NEWS: Cameron to replace top-down bodies with top-down bodies”.
Three policy developments, the English Baccalaureate, NHS corporate restructuring and the Big Society, arguably provide evidence for a ‘top-down’ approach which actually encourages the state producing less rather than more choice.
The English Baccalaureate
In a less than successful interview recently on Victoria Derbyshire’s show on Radio 5, Michael Gove explained to the listener his perception of the “English bac” scheme.
Michael Gove recently promoted extensively an English baccalaureate qualification to recognise the achievements of GCSE students who complete a broad course of studies. The “English bac” apparently would not replace GCSEs, but would be a certificate to reward pupils who pass at least five of the exams, at grade C or above, including English, mathematics, one science, one foreign language and one humanity. OFQUAL has previously criticized the over-reliance of this qualification on GCSE results, but presumably will be given greater powers to oversee the diploma.
One wonders how Einstein or Bach would have coped under a system. More worrying is that it is the Government (or rather Michael Gove’s elite) who are imposing a value set on what they think is important in education on the rest of the education system including comprehensive school teachers. They are giving parents and headteachers little choice in this in fact, nor possibly OFQUAL in whether it’s a good idea or not.
Corporate restructuring in the NHS
My second example concerns a massive issue, which is indeed being sold to voters as reducing the state and increasing choice. Nothing could potentially be further from the truth.
The NHS in England is to undergo a major restructuring in one of the biggest shake-ups in its history. A huge new NHS (independent) Commissioning Board will oversee GP commissioning, sitting above as many as 500 consortiums (sic) of GPs to set standards and hold the groups to account.
Furthermore, it is proposed that this new system also will give patients more information and choice. “HealthWatch” will be set up to compile data on performance. Experts in this area have long criticized that the quality of data concerning benefits (often mixed up with outcomes) has been extremely poor, such that it could be dangerous if GPs use these data to guide their commissioning policy. This is a longstanding problem which is not addressed by the NHS corporate restructuring, which is estimated to cost £3bn in its first year.
The BMA and the King’s Fund seem to have had no choice in this, and how much choice is actually given to real patients and GPs is yet to be seen.
The Big Society
My final example concerns what possibly is the flagship policy of the Conservatives.
According to the Big Society’s own website,
The Big Society is a society in which individual citizens feel big: big in terms of being supported and enabled; having real and regular influence; being capable of creating change in their neighbourhood.
Again, the Big Society is sold as creating ‘an enabling and accountable state’. However, the Big Society as a whole might be fairly innocuous if it simply was an extension of the volunteering, pro-bono practices which are longstanding; or indeed a development of social enterprises policy.
The unique selling point of the Conservatives’ approach to the ‘improvement of society’ is in fact its focus on venture capital, which is a point hardly ever addressed.
Venture philanthropy , also known as philanthrocapitalism , takes concepts and techniques from venture capital finance and high technology business management and applies them to achieving philanthropic goals. It has a strong focus on measurable results: donors and grantees assess progress based on mutually determined benchmarks. There is also a high involvement by large corporate donors with their grantees. For example, some donors will take positions on the boards of the non-profits they fund. Critically, the venture capitalists are the ones who choose where they wish to spend the money.
Do financially-strapped worthy projects in the community get a chance to participate in this choice?
Conclusion
I feel that all these examples demonstrate a ‘top down’ approach to government picking winners, giving an illusion of choice.
This is a big painful pill for Labour to swallow as it is David Cameron’s PR team who fill the airwaves with the message that the State is too big, with the assistance of their Liberal Democrat accomplices. The Coalition is also busy spending our money implementing these ubiquitously unpopular schemes with little consultation. I am confident that they will be ultimately punished for this faulty ideological rhetoric, once the public realize they have been spun a tissue of lies, as they have been with the economy.
