Have Conservatives forgotten education?

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The New Statesman

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🗓️ 24 August 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

GCSE and A Level results are out, and the proportion of top grades have dipped since the pandemic years. It's an opportunity for the government and the opposition to talk about their ambitions for education. Are they both failing to do so?

Anoosh Chakelian, Rachel Cunliffe and Freddie Hayward discuss the Tory education record, from Michael Gove’s reforming agenda to unprecedented churn at the top of the Department for Education. And, they ask, what would Labour do differently?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Anouche. I'm Freddie. And I'm Rachel. And this is the New
0:10.9	Statesman's Politics Podcast. In this episode, we'll be discussing the state of
0:15.2	education in Britain with GCSE results coming out today and the A-Level results
0:19.2	a week ago.
0:30.0	Hello, I'm Anouche Shekely and Britain editor of the New Statesman and host of
0:35.6	this podcast. And joining me in the studio, I have our associate political
0:38.8	editor, Rachel Cunliffe and political correspondent Freddie Haywood.
0:42.0	Pupils got their GCSE results this morning and last week it was A-Levels. In both
0:46.8	cases, the proportion of top grades fell, following the grade inflation of the
0:50.0	pandemic years, with the biggest drops in England as the exam regulators in
0:53.7	Wales and Northern Ireland are returning to pre-pandemic grading levels slightly
0:57.0	slower. So what do you make of this year's results so far, Rachel? I know that the
1:01.9	GCSEs have just dropped at the time of recording. It's kind of what everyone
1:06.1	expected, which is that grade to fallen. And it's not just what was expected. It was
1:10.2	what the government kind of wanted to happen because there's been this panic
1:14.7	over grade inflation since COVID, the mutant algorithm, the what do you do when
1:20.3	kids don't take exams, you know, kids today are getting by too easy or whatever.
1:24.6	So they were trying to get back to 2019 levels, which is what we've seen
1:30.4	today, which on a kind of macro scale is what the government wanted. Now we're
1:35.4	back in line with our metrics. We can all measure things, you know, the way that
1:38.0	we want to. But for the kids involved in it, it just feels really, really unfair.
1:44.4	And the discrepancies from COVID and from all the disruption, sort of
	...

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