Mr Johnson will complain that the issue of whether examination results can be trusted will resurface yet again, despite independent evidence to the contrary. In a speech to the UK youth parliament, Mr Johnson will insist that "this generation really is improving. We should be celebrating the fact that pass rates are going up and attainment is rising. It is high time that the nation takes pride in these improvements."
Yet the facts are against this knocking approach: I myself have seen primary school kids doing things I never did until secondary level. And some of that better education really does get carried on up through the system, folks. The syllabi are different because people of our generation realised how bad the stuff we had to do was, being as it was designed really for a two-tier system and we lionised that grammar school approach but forgot that it was really aiming to produce teachers and civil servants and to reproduce a certain culturally-specific definition of the well-educated and when we found that didn't really fit the curriculum of life-as-lived, we began to chnge it for those who followed on.
We complain that they can't write proper English; it was ever so; who do you think is writing all the 'grocer's English' signs that Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells likes to complain of in the Times? It's the generation that's doing the complaining about falling standards. How soon we forget how we were and are.
I myself will be celebrating the fact that my children (all of whom took exams this year) have received an education that addressed significant shortfalls in education as I received it. They were taught to write essays rather than expected to intuit it; they were given help in advice in identifying good ways to take notes, assess information and to make the best of their abilities to learn which, again, we were not.
Good on you all and well done to your teachers.
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