The lesson of this year's GCSE results is that New Labour's standard measurement of a school's success – the percentage of students getting five GCSEs at grade C or above including Maths and English – is hobbling an entire generation of state-school educated children. The fact that a secondary school's ranking in the league tables is determined by this metric explains almost all the bad news contained in yesterday's results:
- The reason Maths is now so easy that a five-year-old can get a grade C is because schools have effectively forced exam boards to dumb down the syllabus, knowing that their fate hangs on the percentage of their pupils who achieve a passing grade in the subject. (To read more, click here.)
