Once you go Bacc there’s no going back

**In one of their boldest moves so far, the Tories have chosen to entirely reform education – phasing out the GCSE in favour of the English Baccalaureate Certificate, referred to by the tabloids as ‘the Gove levels.’ The highlights of this particular educational reform include a more rigorous system for sorting out the rulers from the droolers, a complete scrapping of coursework in favour of an all-or-nothing exam at the end of a two year course and an altogether backwards leap in to the smog of the industrial revolution.**

Now don’t get me wrong, I think that there are many problems with our current education system, and the notion of reforming it is music to my ears. However, it seems to me that this reform is entirely in the wrong direction and is symptomatic of a very dangerous trend in modern educational policy.

The problem with our current education system is that it is built on the industrial revolution idea that there are two kinds of people – the academic and the non-academic. As such, the education system tends to do a great service to those who find capability and perhaps even enjoyment in areas such as mathematics, the sciences and classical humanities, and often leaves the rest (what would seem like the majority of students) at the wayside, having not benefited all that much from their time in education.

While the current system has made moves towards drawing excellence out of all students by providing a much wider curriculum and different methods of learning, due to largely economic reasons, pressure is primarily placed on students and schools to achieve in the ‘pure’ academic areas, and persistently stress and assess students to ensure quotas are being met.

With the introduction of the Gove levels, we will see a relaxation of standardised testing in favour of a final all-or-nothing exam at the end of a course, along with a scrapping of alternative methods of learning and assessment such as coursework. While the scrapping of extended standardised assessment will release the constant stress on students in one respect, the all-or-nothing day of judgement exam seems to be little compensation – it’s like swapping a weekly bee sting with a yearly shark bite.

The problem with choosing to assess students purely on exams is that it serves to completely ignore all those intelligent young students that may not cope well under exam condition, or display their capability best when presenting something other than an essay or working in a group.

What really seems to be happening here is that one ill-considered and dated system of education is being replaced by an even more draconian beast. Instead of considering new and innovative ways of teaching the young of today, the Tories are simply falling back on what worked for them – the classically academic, firmly middle class, widely privately educated lot that they are.

The fact that you are reading this article probably means that you are a Warwick student and therefore capable enough academically to get in to one of the country’s best institutions (we don’t get the odd wanker using the phrase ‘Woxbridge’ for nothing you know), and therefore it may well be likely that these reforms have suited you fine. As a student I actively enjoyed sitting long exams, studying hard to know all that I can in science and puzzling out long equations in maths; unsurprisingly, I was often last to be picked during football.

However, it is in our interest to educate all young people to the highest degree, not least because a well-educated public is better than a society full of the boring and ill-informed. It is my belief that education should deal as much with the economics of happiness as the economics of money. It should be the job of education to teach people how to find meaning and enjoyment in their lives, be it through dance, drama, sport, painting, woodwork, or any other skills and activities. If we are going to look down upon ‘soft’ subjects such as media studies in favour of the rigorous subjects of academia, and combine the post-Olympic, pro-sport climate with the selling off of school fields, many people are going to lose out on the opportunity to discover what makes life worth living.

If education is a universal right, then it should be universally applicable and effective, and innovation is the only way to achieve this.