UK Education in Chaos

UK Education in Chaos

The British education system at one time was considered as one of the world's finest, admired and emulated by nations spanning several continents. Now it is in a state of disarray, reduced to nothing less than a complete shambles and plagued with corruption thanks to the implementation of the so-called Curriculum 2000. "Luck of the draw" is becoming an increasingly influential factor in today's exam lottery.

This article's title draws on the sarcasm of a Warwick undergraduate contributing to the A Level newsgroup. Having been fortunate enough to take his A Levels back in the good old days when Edexcel was a reputable name, he was sceptical about the validity of students' current grievances. But the present state of the exam system means that come results day, such seemingly bizarre statements could be taken seriously.

In all fairness, Edexcel were made the scapegoats [or "escape goats" as Jade from Big Brother would say] after a minor error by their printing company for a Maths paper resulted in disastrous consequences back in January. The media blitz that followed had everyone jumping on the bandwagon, venting all their fury at the exam board.

Following the Yarm School head teacher's reporting of the unanswerable Maths question to the Beeb, suddenly allegations against poor old Edexcel reached new heights as they were blamed for more farcical errors. But with a sudden exponential increase in exam papers, these mistakes were inevitable. In fact such cock-ups had begun the previous summer, when in a much less publicised event, Question 1 in an AQA Physics A Level paper was impossible as it lacked essential data.

From personal experience AQA's shoddy marking and virtually non-existent customer service means they deserve as much if not more criticism than Edexcel, with over 1 in 3 teachers finding AQA's marking quality unsatisfactory last year for some subjects. However, neither is at fault as much as the government, recklessly implementing these changes so that 24 million scripts had to be marked when teacher shortages.are clear.

So why has Curriculum 2000 resulted in the introduction of these primary-school errors? Maybe because the endless module combinations and numerous resit opportunities have meant exam boards cannot sufficiently check through each and every one of the hundreds of different exam papers. AQA's report for January's A Level Literature paper casually mentioned how some of the options set had not been attempted by any candidates.