GCSE Grading Goes Ga-Ga.
Today Justine Greening wrote this letter in which she explains that she wanted to give everyone more certainty about the value of the new GCSE Grade 4. Whereas previously – outrageously – Nicky Morgan had decreed that only Grades 5-9 would be regarded as ‘Good...
Can a curriculum ever be balanced?
One does not have to look too hard to find examples of where curriculum selection was designed to indoctrinate. The most obvious cases are the totalitarian states of the twentieth century where children in, say, 1930s Germany or the USSR were taught curricula that...
Is formative assessment fatally flawed? Confusing learning & performance
Do we undermine formative assessment by confusing learning and performance? Student performance during a lesson is “a highly imperfect index of long-term learning” (Soderstrom and Bjork, 2015), but...
The Bell-Curve Cage: Something must break.
I keep going on about this but at some point, something’s going to break. Ever since Michael Gove and Ofqual – more or less independently – decided, reasonably and sensibly, to bring an end to grade inflation around 2010, taking effect from 2013, we’ve been on a...
Be more Goose: a school shouldn’t rely on Mavericks
Reading, in Berkshire, is a typical British town. In fact, it was once considered by some to be the most typical town in the country. In the years following the Second World War, its typicality was of great use to a nation rebuilding itself: it was used as a sample to...
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