Let's face it - grade poker is a heartless game. I call it grade poker when pupils face repeated entries into GCSE exams (often beginning in year 10 or even 9), with the sole aim that the school maximises its grades, and so does not face an ofsted investigation. Time after time I first meet a pupil when they are demoralised and reeling from a particularly inappropriate bout of poker. They have been entered into an exam too early, and before their own personal ability to read, to think and to count, are lined up in the necessary conjunction to sit an exam, The result 'shot across the bows' has nearly sunk them. And I spend weeks getting their confidence up, before ever we open a paper.
The roots of Grade poker lie I think in the difference twenty years ago or more, between public school and comprehensive. Almost all privates schools played grade poker. But then they had the freedom to do so. The creamed off the best students in the 13+ exams, and got them wired in to a great exam sausage machine straight away - and those who rebelled were asked to leave. The result was that grade poker, particularly when played against 'bog standard' schools, was a very successful game. But then some time in the nineties it was decided that the public school model ought to be unwound for everyone if possible. The Creaming of talent and the ruthless removal of failure were clearly not appropriate in the state schools system- But grade poker was a game everyone could play. Everyone who really mattered in eduction (I mean ofsted, government, governors, exam boards,teachers ad even parents) were happy. Here a way to import the public sausage machine into the state system.
The only people who screamed were the kids - but then of course we could all yell back, that the exam were character building, and anyway to got them off their X boxes..... Well Maybe - but grade poker to my mind has long since stopped being appropriate or funny. Kids are simply too smart for it. They know they are being led through a series of exams, not for their own benefit but for the schools and for the 'collective good'. More than that they know they in the end the school will not make decisions based on them as living, breathing kids, but merely on the schools own need to get an As. So they have simply become used to the fact that their exam board has to change half way through their course, or that the exam has changed half way through their course or they are 'required' to sit the exam early or late, or miss it or do it in april of over Christmas (all of which I have known in the last three years). Kids then have stoically and to my mind heroically accepted that their education is nothing about them, and is all about the school and the government.
And yet, and yet, and yet, as I am called to see yet another lovely kid, who needs to get a C to go to farmers academy, and would get it quite easily, in the normal course of things, at the end of a GCSE course; and yet who is being forced to take the exam a year early, and has the prospect of taking it again and again (unless I can make a difference), and is panicking at the thought; I start to dream of the old system. You that one with an exam at sixteen - or at least a single set of modular exams, and perhaps even a maths project systems or two, a system that might have been dull, but seldom caused this level of panic. For the current world of perpetual exam, might be good for the government and for ofsted (Michel Gove you note is not talking about changing the exam regime), and is absolutely wonderful for maths tutor like me (it is my bread and butter), but it is loathsome for the people who really matter- the kids - and turns what could be fun and certainly (potentially) life changing namely learning (even maths should be engaging) into an endless grind, through a perpetual game of exam poker.
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