David Laws, leader of the Education Policy Institute, is reported/quoted in today’s Daily Mirror as observing The old ‘C’ grade is not an adequate aspiration, and this is made in the context of comparing our education system to the world’s best.

I do and don’t know what to make of this. On the one hand it is that inevitable, withering, irrelevant, diminishing comment that is always made just prior to or on the day that GCSE results are announced for the nation’s students, these appearing tomorrow. Rarely is there an up-front and centre focus on and congratulations for the hard work and consequent ‘success’ [at whatever relevant level for any individual student] there should be. This wouldn’t be ‘news’. This certainly wouldn’t be the regular annual third-week-in-August news.

On another, David Laws does appear to have a positive history of actually knowing and caring about national educational policy and relevant matters: he did criticise the previous Education Secretary Michael Gove for having a ‘hunch’ approach to dictating education policy, not least the changes to GCSE which have their realisation in so many ways announced tomorrow. I have no particular view on the EPI, but it does seem to be an independent, evidenced-based rather than party-political or similar organisation.

But this comment attributed to Laws is nonetheless a soundbite nothingness, apart from the – annual again – insult it delivers to students who have worked hard to achieve what they can, especially considering the pressures they are under from schools to ‘perform’ for all the wrong reasons [target achievement and consequent external school judgement]. This is the diminishing impact of such observations as an overall comment and summation.

More critically, I don’t quite understand the notion that attaining grade C [or similar] is not an adequate aspiration. Always maintaining my caveat that individual student progress and attainment needs recognition and celebration when it truly reflects her/his best efforts and aptitude, I can accept a thinking about the level of attainment one would like to assist most students – if they can – to achieve. This being the case, how is the grade ‘C’, or whatever its numerical equivalent turns out to be, suddenly no longer an acceptable aspirational goal?

The point is, such grades are criterion referenced. They are described and assessed to those descriptors by their objective criteria. They are skills. For example, in the subject I have assessed for 30 years, GCSE English Literature, the notional grade C and its numerical equivalent is based on objective criteria and its descriptors and this has not changed over those years. And quite rightly so. This is what sustaining a standard actually means.

Therefore, core skills/understanding such as

• clear understanding of ideas
• clear, explained response to task/text
• sustained response
• understanding of effects of writer’s methods
• effective use of reference to support

have for all those years been sustained – occasionally varied in some language but meaning the same, and certainly consistent across all examining boards – so how are these no longer an acceptable gauge/measure of desired achievement for most?

Have other nationalities [the anonymous world’s best] become different readers of their literature? Have they become on average more ‘analytical’ and ‘exploratory’ and thus such skills [old grade A/new Level 6 descriptors] the new aspirational norm?

That’s nonsense. And this could now become a more complex analysis of grading, descriptors and very pertinently grade-boundary adjustments in relation to tomorrow’s GCSE grade details, but the point is this is precisely why Laws’ apparent soundbite of not an adequate aspiration is meaningless and ultimately just another annual knock-back to students, their teachers and the examiners who have this year worked so hard to sustain standards with a history of actual value and worth.