Labour's education legacy

One of the sneakiest policies that Labour introduced was that of making non-academic qualifications 'equivalent' to 5 GCSE's, albeit at grade D to E. This artificially raised the GCSE results this allowing Tony Blair to boast about rising educational standard s and Gordon Brown to justify his massively increased 'investment' in education. In reality the qualifications were often worthless and ridiculously easy to obtain. I don't remember anybody ever explaining why one NVQ was 'equivalent' to 5 GCSEs. What I do remember is that anybody who dared to point out this, or other aspects of the 'dumbing down' of Britain's education system, was attacked for not supporting hard working pupils and teachers.

So This Mail article that tells us that: 'Only one child in six gets five good GCSEs as pupils switch from academic subjects to 'soft' courses' comes as no great surprise.

'Only 15 per cent of children get five good grades in traditional subjects at GCSE.
The shocking figures – to be released next week – highlight the consequences of a shift toward ‘soft’ courses.
A Labour shake-up in 2004 gave pupils more scope to study non-academic GCSE equivalents – and these options have surged in popularity by 3,800 per cent.
They include certificates in personal effectiveness, salon services and preparation for working life.'

In contrast to Labour's addiction to ever increasing exam results however artificially inflated the results were, I note that Michael Gove has already raised the GCSE threshold for schools, thus increasing the number of schools that will be deemed to be 'under-performing'.