Class Hatred

Classroom war

The class war came into the classroom last week with the appalling skewing of the English A-level results to favour private schools over the state sector, potentially locking masses of 18 year olds into the ossified, servile social class positions our elitist Masters deem them fit for. 

Many students predicted to achieve A-results have often seen these reduced to Bs or Cs or even Ds,often resulting in the loss of university places for the coming academic year. Perhaps particularly perniciously, the algorithms applied by the regulator Ofqal, using previous school statistics, have decided that some of those due to sit exams would not have turned up in any case and so have applied "Uncertificated" results - as good as simply not having an A level at all. In all, 40% of pupils - about 300,000 people - received lower than predicted grades, with those attending state schools and colleges badly hit.

By contrast, not a single entrant from Eton had a single grade reduced - doubtless on the grounds that none of them would have missed the exams if they were poorly as Nanny would have sat them on their behalf. (This in spite of the fact that many private schools work to the Cambridge International A-Level, a course deemed by this Government as too easy to be valid in state schools...)

With deadlines looming urgently for university admissions, rather than celebrating achivements after years of study and work, life plans are now on hold or being revised drastically downwards for hundreds of thousands of young people, predominantly from poorer backgrounds. The class war waged by the self-entitled rich elite has potentially devastated a generation's life chances .

Given the covid crisis and the closure of schools from mid-March, this was always going to be a difficult year for resolving the academic results of courses where exams due to take place could not happen. An approach combining logic, common sense and compassion was vital given the impact that the results would have on the long-term prospects of the students involved. In previous years, the approach taken by the Education Department has been to compare exam outcomes with predictions based on previous assessments - with the integrity of the exams based on how closely or not they matched the predictions. With much previous work having been marked in the classroom and mock exam results and teachers' assessments available, it should surely have followed that there would not be any need for any radical revision of predicted outcomes. Any competent Education Secretary would have made the decision to go with these.

However, our Education Secretary is one Gavin Williamson, MP, a man who as Defence Secretary backed the Saudi Arabians bombing of Yemen in spite of warnings of war crimes. Then he ridiculously implied that back in the 1980s Jeremy Corbyn was a Czech spy, apparently in an attempt to deflect criticism of his own soliciting of a £30,000 donation from the wife of a former Vladimir Putin Minister. 

So little compassion or common sense there. And as for his competence - before being elected to Parliament, Gavin "ran" a ceramics company that briefly rose to infamy when it produced a range of pottery to celebrate the Royal Wedding of Charles and Camilla - unfortunately firing every last piece with the wrong date!

Nanny will sort it.

Yet now in his rather inappropriate Education role, this moron saw fit to to declare that the algorithms applied to A level students' classroom assessments, which shoehorned individual results into crudely designed national quotas, were in fact perfectly robust and should be left unchanged. The towering Cabinet intellectual claimed that there would be a grave danger that such pupils would run the risk of over-promotion in the workplace were their results to be reviewed and upgraded.

Williamson and his boss Boris Johnson have of course subsequently been running in circles to try to remedy the chaos they have created. With characteristic world-beating bullshittery, they have set up something called a "Gold Command" to sort out the mess: though after publishing the appeals criteria for students to use, they withdrew it hours later, leaving many bewildered and panicking at the rapidly diminishing time left to resolve their grades. Williamson has to time of writing continued to flap and flounder and say he is "very sorry", while the PM, who promised to take personal charge of the crisis, has..erm... gone on holiday.

How could we have ever expected better from this Government? This is after all a group effectively coralled by Dominic Cummings, who believes that ability and achievement is down more to genetic breeding (i.e., of his class) than teaching or effort. The last thing they want is people from other classes to partake of that dangerously intoxicating chalice of education. What ideas might they get in their muddled serf-heads?

  

Johnson - the Eton days

Kafka has nothing on this elitist regime of lazily smug, sleazy sociopaths - the irony that they are literally the most useless group of people from any party assembled around the Cabinet table is sadly lost on their super-sized egos. And yet even now, in spite of all the unprecedented deaths, corruption, sleaze, racism, blatant lies, misogyny and sheer incompetence, the Conservative Party remains pretty much as far ahead as ever in the opinion polls of the largely silent Labour "opposition".

But change will come - younger generations are distinctly more left wing in their outlook and aspirations for future society as the current one increasingly fails them in providing decent employment, affordable education or housing, and now can't even get their exam results right. As the banners waved by demonstrating pupils today made clear, the damage done to them at this crucial moment in their young lives will not be soon forgotten by them or by their friends, families and relatives. Boris may fluster and bluster, but some things can't be explained away or made up as they go along. 

It is a crying shame that Starmer is left staring like a rabbit caught in headlights as the government should be on the ropes over its blatant social elitism, but others outside parliament are already taking up the torch of opposition. With over four years of Tory rule to go, it is outside of Westminster that the new struggles are already being shaped. The 18 year olds at the centre of this storm may play a leading part in shifting the paradigm firmly towards deep-seated social change - not only in education, but across society as a whole.

And as for Gavin, over-promoted and under-performing, perhaps it's time to get back to the pots. Perhaps this time with a calendar.