capitalism - a fail mark

Market forces have crowded ethics out of the GCSE and A-level exam system, headteachers' leaders said

There are four exam boards in England and Wales – the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, Edexcel, the Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts, and the Welsh Joint Education Committee. Schools can select which board they put their pupils in for and may well choose different exam boards for different subjects. It is big business for the exam boards. The overall cost to schools and colleges for exams is now more than £300m a year – double what it was a decade ago. The individual cost of entering a pupil for an exam can vary widely but a typical figure would be between £25 and £30 for an English GCSE. Obviously, if you have 180 pupils sitting the exam – as in the case of many secondary schools – the cost is substantial (£5,400 for just one exam).

To woo clients, the exam boards hold seminars, which can cost up to £230 a day to attend. They are supposed to explain in detail each individual syllabus. There are strict rules preventing examiners talking about the content of future exams. However, these appear to have been flouted.

Heads and teachers argued that the need for exam boards to make a profit, coupled with schools' desperation to do well in league tables, had created a toxic situation where there was a high risk of corruption.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "These events remind us that the profit motive sits uncomfortably with the values of education. Market forces crowd out ethics and league tables crowd out judgements."

From the moment a baby emerges from the womb it begins the process of learning. The radical educationalist, A.S. Neill, amongst many others, proved that most children desire to learn. The competitive atmosphere of to-day's classroom however can make kids resentful and anxious, and those who do not, for various reasons, come up to scratch, are sometimes made to feel worthless and insignificant. If their latent talents were to be encouraged to grow without coercion, then this would make for a better world.

Lesson time is largely devoted to the demands of passing exams, rather than giving students a real understanding and appreciation of the subjects which they are supposed to be studying. In fact, many believe that lessons are much more about how to pass the exams rather than learning about the subjects for their own sake. Numerous teachers complain about the rigidity of the syllabus and about how their lesson plans are being constantly supervised. The Education Reform Act of 1988 set up the National Curriculum which was designed to standardise what was taught in schools. The intention of this was to facilitate assessment and led to the creation of “league tables” showing the academic performance of schools in exams. Most significantly, maths, English, science and information technology were established as compulsory subjects up to the minimum school leaving age of 16. In contrast, under the 2002 Education Act, subjects such as history, geography, foreign languages, art and music could be dropped at the age of 14 since most of them were thought to be less relevant to the employment process.

The intent is to increase pressure on kids and teachers by bringing in more exams and more league tables, so as to supply British capitalism with workers who had already experienced and absorbed the competitiveness that is a key element of the prevailing enterprise culture. At the same time the doors of schools have been opened even wider for business enterprises to penetrate; some schools even handed over to profit-seeking enterprises to run. Real development of students potentialities come a bad second.