The Media

Fortnight:
- Horses here
- Horses there
- Horses everywhere
- And also some pork
- A politician lies, but this time, he gets into trouble
- Gove has some -gasp- good ideas for once
- Pope resigns.
- We discover that guns don't mix with more than just primary schools, and sometimes they don't mix with Paralympic athletes.
- An asteriod may either look pretty or kill thousands of people, depending on the maths skills of some scientists

Today, I think I might discuss a little about the formal media (printed press, television news etc) vs social media.

And no, it's not about the merits of "citizen journalism" or anything. I just find that sometimes the formal media tries to force our hand and way of thinking.

This is mostly in light of the horsemeat "scandal", when I discovered that actually nobody cares. Yes, there is the occasional person who worries a little, but overall nobody much minds. It was a simple case of mislabelling, and you find most messages online are merely jokes relating to it. Yet we find the media panicking over and dedicating more time to this story, telling us multiple times that this is something we should worry about, something we should care about. But it's hard to care when every interview they do with a minister follows this line:

Media: "Should we be worried about horsemeat?"
Minister: "No, it's safe to eat and just a case of simple mislabelling."
Media: "What should people do if they're worried?"
Minister: "They can return the product to point of purchase, but it's perfectly safe to eat."
Media: "So, is it a cause for concern?"
Minister: "No."

And yet somehow these interviews drag on and on, with the interviewer attempting to ask the same questions in as many different ways as possible. They're trying to make us scared so they can drag out this story for as long as they can, and as far as I can see their only motivation is to just yell at some ministers for a while, because everybody knows that news without ministers cast in a bad light is no news at all.

Rather than dragging out "scandals" that people have given up caring about, how about some new news stories, yeah?

The Failing Student

The fifteen days in news:
- Algerian hostage crisis comes to a sad end
- Gove fucks about again
- Horsemeat takes over the WORLD
- And then there's some pork in the mix.
- I get my exam entry list and it looks scary.

I apologise this is a day late etc. Down to business.

So, as my tiny round-up says, Gove is messing about with things again. This time, it's with A-levels. At the moment, students study for two years: The first year studying for AS levels (generally taking four), finishing with an exam, and then studying for A2 levels (generally taking three), leaving them with one AS level and three A-levels*. Universities often use a mix of AS level results and predictions in order to offer places. Gove's ideas would mean that students would continue to study to, in most cases, one AS level and three A-levels. However, AS levels would be a standalone qualification and not be a stepping-stone to A2. All exams for it would be taken at the end of the two years.

I'm not quite sure how that would work, but I would assume a student would have to choose which one of their options would be an AS right from the word go, so the AS could be taught at a slower pace to the full A-level. Schools would also have to run every course twice: the AS run and the A2 run, rather than just teaching one class with some students dropping out after the first year (or in the case of my sixth form's language department: stopping after the AS level). And then there'd be the over-achieving student** who'd think that because they're having to take the course for two years they might as well take the full A2 anyway.

Universities are in outrage over this. They'd have to base a student's progress on GCSEs, which are totally different to A-levels (example: French GCSE requires two five-minutes speaking pieces in which you get two weeks to prepare. A level requires a fifteen minute speaking in which you get twenty minutes to prepare). It wouldn't give a reliable view of a student, and someone who didn't do so well in GCSEs may be turned down for a university place when they end up with top marks at A-level.

Many people are saying that this is the wrong way to go about changes. I agree. I could screech all day about the faults of the Ebacc (and I already have). There are many things wrong with the system and A-levels are the ones with the least fault (at the very least, A-levels are the ones I have only a fleeting experience with). We need to start with league tables. Hence my title.

League tables started with a good idea: people can tell good schools from bad. But it's become much more than that, it's become an all-consuming focus of schools. Resources are poured into getting children into that precious A*-C bracket, noticably the few D students who have the potential for a C. That's what, twenty or thirty students? Suddenly, catch-up sessions in core subjects that used to be open for over a thousand students now become the preserve of a closed few, a closed few who often don't bother turning up. It means students like me, who spent a year as a "C" student in Maths despite having the potential of an "A", are completely ignored whilst someone who boasted about getting only six marks on a mock paper can skip out of the much-despised Core PE in order to go from a D to a C. It means a student who gets a C in their Chemistry paper and has the potential for an A must pay for their retake whilst a student who got a D gets it for free, although they don't actually want to take the paper again.

No, the education system isn't perfect. But we need to stop using the idea of the token "failing student", who are realistically very few in number, to mess things up for everybody else.

*This is mostly where my scuffle with my school comes in as I *hope* to finish sixth form with three AS levels and three A-levels. It's complicated.
**Or just the student who attempts to over-achieve *points to self*