In response (not to my blog specifically) I received many assurances that exams would go ahead. Definitely. Gavin was as certain a certain thing from Certain City.
I'm just a normal person with no particular scientific knowledge. I'd vaguely heard of the Spanish flue and watched an occasional bit of the news. I had a pretty good idea that Covid was coming back at some point.
Even if it didn't, I was teaching a mixture of remote and live sessions, had lost a lot of time from the first lockdown and had yet to recieve any update at all about how the exams might deal with that despite it being several months since lockdown had ended. It was mid October until that arrived, by which time, I'd already taught the stuff I could now take out to save time. Nice one. If an individual student had missed four months of teaching, my workplace would have been a frenzy with plans and support contracts. If all the students missed that much, then it seemed the DFE were prepared to do as little as possible.
All I wanted was a sense of plan B was. If you're going on a long journey, it's reasonable to think of a couple of routes to get there.
"let's go to Devon!"
"M5 might be be busy"
"Well, we could always go via Wales then across to Bristol if it is"
That sort of thing.
That's all teachers needed. A sense of what the back up plan would be. That's really not unreasonable to ask for. In fact, if you are in charge of all the exams in the country, it's not really something a humble grunt like me should even need to ask for. It seems an obvious thing to provide. Instead,we've effectively been sat in a traffic jam for months, waiting for the Sat Nav to get a signal, having set of on the journey into peak time bank holiday traffic with only a dogged insistence that "the road will definitely be clear and anyone saying it might be otherwise is a negative enemy of the state who hates holidays and doesn't want us to get to Devon at all"
Gavin dithered, doing absolutely nothing. Literally nothing at all. I don't know how many people actually work for the DfE, Ofqual and the JcQ combined, but between them, they provided no clarity at all between the end of the previous years exam mess and April this year.
Bits of information dripped out, rumours and titbits being fed at various meetings and people guessed what might happen, but nothing substantial upon which a school or a teacher could base their plans. In turn, that meant a whole lot of confusion for students about what their exams might look like, whether they'd happen and how and what to prepare for them.
Finally the plan appeared. Exams were cancelled (cue rejoicing students) then a month later, into the vacuum came... exams (confused students) But they weren't exams, they were assessments. They were like exams. They just weren't exams because the exam boards weren't doing them. Apparently, it's not an exam if you don't put the papers in a big envelope at the end. It's an assessment. That's very different.
This was all dressed up in so much rhetoric, you'd think the guidance was a constitutional document for a complicated minor Eastern European nation with a border dispute on three sides.
The result is workload for teachers (tiny violin sounds) but more importantly, for students, a rushed, confusing and absurdly intense period of assessing often incomplete and patchy knowledge.
These are students who at VERY BEST have learned online for 6 months of their courses. That's the optimum disruption and many have missed significant chunks of time, content and suffered challenges to their mental health from the circumstances. Students who've been stuck in houses they hate, stuck with siblings, unable to concentrate, sent out to work because parents have lost work when zero hours contracts stopped, students who've grieved over their family or just gone a bit mad because you aren't supposed to stay inside for months on end at any time, especially not when you are 15,16,17...
The response to that from the government hasn't been to offer teaching to fill those gaps, or space to work out what has happened or to appreciate the historical significance, scientific causes of cultural and economic impact of what they've just lived through. It's not been some space to think or an opportunity for people to resocialise or anything even halfway human or remotely thoughtful.
It's been to test the living shit out of them in a crudely designed, half thought through back of a fag packet, last minute system which uses long words to disguise that it's just a half arsed too late fudge. It doesn't matter what they've missed, what they've been through or what they think. All that matters is they get measured.
Why? Because Boris wanted to play politics with Covid, because Boris caused a longer lockdown by rejecting lockdowns until he had to lockdown. Because Boris didn't have the backbone to not lockdown because the papers and twitter wanted him to not lockdown in November then lockdown in January. Because Boris is just a windsock.
The education system was dragged in the wake of the generally muddled and innefective maelstrom of government where everyone was certain but the opposite happened when a different thing became popular opinion.
So here we are. Living in the hell created by a fireplace salesman who must be the least proactive man in history. Whose reaction to having created a spectacular mess in the previous year was to do absolutely nothing at all until no one could do anything about it the next.
There is little doubt in my mind that guidance was held back until it was unfeasible for any teaching bodies to reasonably take action against it. Because teachers are utter bastards for wanting to know what the plan is. Imagine that. Being responsible for the education of young people and asking for a plan! Utter bastards, everyone of them.
If your a fan of passive aggressive control mechanisms, you'll love it. If you are a fan of students being taught well planned and sequenced lessons, leading up to a final point they are prepared for, you won't.
The lack of planning, communication and clarity was perhaps understandable in 2020. No one really thought there'd be a mad pandemic situation. Even the algorithm could (very generously) be described as 'an idea that went wrong' and we all have those. This year, it's an absolute disgrace, a dereliction of duty and an indicator of a grotesque incompetence or worse, a contempt for the education and wellbeing of the young people of the UK.
Education has long been a cattle market where the weighing of pigs takes place. This year, it's a shit covered, chaotic place where no one is entirely sure what the right weight is and that is firmly, without question, the fault of the DFE putting politics before basic planning, information and communication.
We are the algorithm now. That's the trick they've played. Human algorithms for a minister who must be able to write down his thoughts about education on half a post it note and a government whose sum total of ideas is 'outsource it' and whose one major success came when they didn't.
Bastards.
