Amazing how each generation of children gets cleverer, isn’t it? An evolutionary feat that is all the more miraculous given an apparent inability among our young people to spell or add up.
Hundreds of thousands of pupils must be feeling very clever indeed. Outstripping the unbelievable results of 2020, A-level marks went through the roof again, with 44.8 per cent getting an A grade and around a fifth awarded an A*. Almost 13,000 pupils achieved a perfect three A*s, four times the number who pulled off that eye-watering feat in 2019, the last year that externally marked exams were taken. The overall pass rate was a deafening 99.5 per cent.
Hang on, was no one allowed to fail? Was there no numbskull so fantastically useless and lazy in all the land that even his own teacher couldn’t bear to paint his abilities in a radiant light? Well, as it happens, there was one person in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who mucked up spectacularly. Gavin Williamson gets an U from me for being possibly the dimmest, least competent Education Secretary of all time.
“I wouldn’t give Williamson a U,” snaps one sixth-form teacher I know who has struggled to coach his students, often via a dodgy internet connection, for exams which schools were not allowed to call exams “because it will cause the students stress”. Yes, really. “Williamson gets an F from me,” he fumes. “He can F right off.”
Read the full article here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/08/10/gavin-williamsons-prizes-everyone-exam-system-has-made-mockery/