It is great news that Tristram Hunt wants to bring 14-19 education into the 21st century (Labour could abandon GCSEs within a decade, Hunt reveals, 23 April). Such reform is one of the repeat performances of government education policy since the early 1980s. One of the reasons for the failure to implement change is the inability of government to learn from earlier attempts at reform. The article states that the Tomlinson review was not implemented because it was introduced as a fait accompli. A review which announced a 10-year programme of reform involving consultation with all stakeholders and built around consensus cannot be described in this way. Tomlinson was rejected because the then Labour government had lost any appetite for transformational change and was anxious to maintain A-levels. The irony with this position was that Tomlinson was not going to get rid of A-levels.
Education policy is too fixed on the shape of our qualification system and there is no discussion about what young people should learn and why they should learn it. If the next government is to successfully transform 14-19 education, it needs to begin with the examination of first principles. Looking at Tomlinson’s ideas of establishing a core learning programme with elements of citizenship and creativity, as well as wider learning, is a good first step.
Paul Lally
Liverpool
• Gove inherited a fully working 16-plus exam system, with GCSE being taken in state schools in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the vast majority of independent schools. His decision to reform England alone – education being a devolved responsibility – broke the UK-wide system. The planned English GCSE reforms even have a different grading system, threatening massive confusion for users, and are a sad attempt to return to a memory-based O-level system.
The new GCSEs operate against a background of the independent schools abandoning the domestic product for the international GCSE (IGCSE). Who can blame them for opting for a successful system which clearly works? However, state schools, while technically able to do the IGCSE, are under pressure to stick with the reformed GCSE. In January, schools minister Nick Gibb decreed that while state schools may be entitled still to do IGCSE, the results would not be reported in the performance tables. The immediate step Tristram Hunt should take if successful in becoming secretary of state is to allow state schools the freedom to choose which the independent schools are rightly exercising in increasing numbers.
Hunt needs to go beyond this to devise a damage limitation programe for those schools who decide to do reformed GCSEs, which have yet to be implemented save for maths and English Removing coursework, demodularising the system, relying on end-of-course memory tests, denying the right to resit, are only the most visible signs of a GCSE which is designed with the 1950s in view. GCSEs do not have 10 years to be rescued from this dreadful politicised mess.
Trevor Fisher
Stafford
• Excellent though some may be, as a matter of arithmetic, grammar schools create the secondary modern element in neighbouring schools (Local comprehensives in battle for survival with ‘predatory’ grammar schools, 14 April). Conservatives – and apparently some grammar school headteachers – believe this does not matter so the expansion of grammar schools, in Gloucestershire and elsewhere, might well increase.
What Labour believes about selection at 11+ remains unclear. In 1977, a Labour local authority ended selection at 45 inner-London grammar schools. Messrs Blair, Gove and Cameron have all sent or are sending their children to high-performing schools that were once London grammar schools, so it is obvious that ending selection did not destroy those schools. A newly elected Labour government could at least prevent any increase in the damage that increasing the number of grammar school places causes other schools; but would it? Both main political parties are silent on the issue of selection at 11+. That leaves the electorate, deliberately or otherwise, in the dark about what it will be voting for.
Peter Newsam
Thornton Dale, North Yorkshire
• So Nicky Morgan (Report, 21 April) does not want to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) statutory or set standards of health education for any teachers. Instead she believes “schools and teachers should design and implement their own programmes”. I was the education lead in the last national committee of Sheps (Society of Health Promotion and Public Health Specialists). I have the highest regard for most teachers and their proficiency in connecting with their students. Nonetheless, in 20 years I have rarely met any teachers who could “design and implement their own programmes” effectively.
PSHE covers multiple areas of health risk, eg drug use, chlamydia, obesity, prevention of sexual exploitation and violence, road safety and (most difficult for many teachers) promotion of mental health and resilience. Even for modest developments like the healthy schools initiative, whole teams of public health expertise were needed to design and test material with children, teachers, school governors and inspectors. Developing whole systems of health promotion from scratch, by one person in one school, would require heroic abilities (perhaps Iron Man is available from Marvel?). In the absence of such fantasy heroes, perhaps Andrew Lansley’s unloved child, Public Health England, could educate the education secretary?
Woody Caan
Editor, Journal of Public Mental Health
