The Best and The Rest

In sport, it is an easy thing. To identify who can run the fastest, jump the highest or throw the furthest, one needs only eyes and Omega. Even disciplines that, on the surface, might seem subjective (dressage, diving) possess criteria that are either met or not. This binary application of success or otherwise is unequivocal; one imagines people around a table, like the shadowy collective of James Bond's Spectre, nodding in agreement that Daley had indeed achieved the two and a half back-somersaults with two and a half twists during the 1.5 seconds available to him. One still wonders, however how an unacceptable level of splashback is calculated.

But why are we so eager to measure ourselves and others outside of a sporting arena? For schools, the government would argue that external assessment is necessary for higher education, training and employment providers to confidently match aptitude to role. Other, more educationally effective countries (Sweden, Finland, always), adopt a less target-driven and more child-centred approach - supported, it has to be said, by high taxation. In these countries, there is no standardised assessment of students, which raises the question why we do it in the UK. Surely our universities, colleges and employers could set their own exams to assess whether students have the aptitude to access their provision?

The standardised assessment of students is problematic on too many levels to consider here, but suffice to say that, every year in the UK, students effectively compete nationally with each other. There are only so many A*s, 9s or, crucially, GCSE grade 4s, available. No government would want last year's results to be better than this year's, and so norm-referencing and bell jar graphs are a dirty little secret, with the government directing exam boards to explain this away with the excuse that it is the only way to ensure that each exam, year on year, presents the same level of difficulty. Should an unusually able year group produce particularly erudite, accurate and accomplished responses, their results would be adjusted down with this explanation that the exam must have been easier - and lo, the bell-jar graph would have been applied. One hopes that one's own child was born into an academically arid year group, because the reverse is also true.

The assessment criteria (mark-schemes) for GCSE and A level exams in subjects which do not have the benefit of definitive clarity of sport (arts, humanities, design subjects, even languages) try to be helpful through the application of level descriptors. At GCSE and A level, there are several levels into which the candidate's response can be placed. In each level, the description of what is required to satisfy it changes, often by one word. For Theatre Studies A level, this one word itself can be problematic. In a paper which asks candidates to articulate the process of creating a performance piece, band 4 asks that, "Responses make perceptive connections between dramatic theory and practice." Band 3 asks that, "Responses make considered connections between dramatic theory and practice." Band 2 asks that, "Responses make some useful connections between dramatic theory and practice" and our band 1 candidate can get away with producing "Responses [which] make only generalised connections between dramatic theory and practice."

Imagine that a candidate is explaining a creative decision (the practice) his group made when devising a performance piece, and that this marking criteria had to be applied. The candidate explains that he was creating a scene in which a peasant is on trial for stealing food so that her child would not starve. The dramatic theory that the candidate draws on to make the connection between theory and practice is Bertolt Brecht's belief that empathic connections between the audience and characters can numb an audience's capacity to think clearly. Would the following extract from a candidate's essay be "perceptive" or "considered":

Brecht's theatrical practice sought to prevent the audience from engaging too empathically with characters. As his purpose was to use theatre as a tool for education, he wanted his audience to retain the capacity to think intelligently, and he felt that empathic engagement between audience and character was a threat to this. We therefore wanted to avoid the temptation for our audience to wallow in passive empathy, and so employed the technique of direct address, during which our actors would periodically break the fourth wall, in doing so jarring our audience from passivity. We used this technique effectively in the court-room scene where our protagonist chooses to defend the actions of the thief. Wanting to highlight for the audience the socio-economic forces that had led to thief to steal the food, we had our protagonist turn to face out to the audience and break the fourth wall on the line, 'What were her choices?'

It is a clearly articulated paragraph, with a lucid explanation about how the students' creative decision (the practice) was inspired by Brecht's thinking (the theory). But is the connection made by the student "perceptive" (the top band) or merely "considered" (the band below, and of only 4 bands)?

In the mark-scheme for GCSE English Language, arguably one of the most important examinations sat by students in the UK, descriptors are again used to help the examiner place the candidate's mark in a level between 4 (top) and 1 (bottom) before then fine-tuning the mark awarded within that level. To achieve upper level 4, the student's written communication must be "convincing and compelling". A lower level 4 student can do away with "compelling" - they only have to be "convincing". For an upper level 3, communication must be "consistently clear", and this drops generously to the student only having to be "generally clear" to achieve a lower level 3. Communication for upper level 2 must be executed with "sustained success", but only with "some success" for lower level 2. For an upper level 1 the candidate must communicate "simply", and "limited communication" would place our struggling candidate into the depths of a lower level 1. Again, there are incrementally differing quality judgements that need to be made by the examiner. But writing that is "compelling" for one examiner might be tawdry or derivative for another.

The mark-scheme for the same GCSE English Language response also expects the examiner to assess vocabulary and written technique, and to discern whether a candidate has demonstrated "Extensive and ambitious vocabulary with sustained crafting of linguistic devices" (top level 4) or merely "Increasingly sophisticated vocabulary and phrasing, chosen for effect with a range of successful linguistic devices" (upper level 3). I once worked with an examiner who had placed a candidate's description of a "boiling horizon" into level 4, thinking that candidate was applying a higher level application of visual imagery as they described the quivering, distorted effect of hot air rising. The rest of the candidate's response, to me, suggested that they had merely applied that old middle-school favourite, the "adjective-then-noun" approach, choosing "boiling" simply because the ground was, well, hot. My colleague remained insistent that the phrase was, albeit existing incongruently in an otherwise pedestrian response, a metaphor worthy of recognition, possessing the expressive prowess of Ted Hughes, had Ted Hughes lived in a desert. Because the rest of the candidate's response did not suggest that this apparent spark of genius was not capable of being "sustained", their response was eventually placed in level 3, but the discussion highlights the problem. What is one examiner's Ted Hughes is another examiner's Enid Blyton.

And what of the fact that, to become an examiner, one only has to have been teaching for 2 years? And what of the calibre of teachers recruited to the profession today? I have trained the loveliest teachers for whom Enid Blyton would present a challenge, trainees who possess such shockingly little knowledge of their own culture that the thought of them holding a child's future in their hands is frightening. To study for a degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, a student needs only 2 A level passes at C or above. I have passed a gentleman who, when asked by a student who "Peter Pan" was, replied, "Ah, I'm not sure. Maybe some sort of frying pan?"

Before I am accused of pedagogical snobbery, I will share another anecdote which highlights the problem of ranking students in subjective subjects using a UK-wide collective of different examiners. I was once asked to moderate some GCSE drama devised performance pieces. I remember being particularly impressed by a group who had explored the plight of WW2 evacuees. Their dialogue was darkly humorous, sharp and historically plausible. The only stimulus they had been given to inspire the production of this piece had been a sepia-toned photograph of a group of school-children, so my feeling was that the levels of creativity and inspiration that had led them from this photograph to, in particular, the tragi-comic scene at the train station from which their new 'parents' collected them, were deserving, surely, of reward. Only years later did I happen across an episode of "Horrible Histories" which contained a sketch virtually identical to the students' work. Their creativity and inspiration had, in fact, been plagiarism.

Applying qualitative judgements to students' work is, sadly, a feature of our assessment culture. But why do we then feel the need to extend this need to differentiate, to slide a credit card between the achievements of our children, in their day-to-day behaviours? I have worked in schools where a regular feature of the year was the awarding of subject prizes to GCSE and A level students. Like the Oscars, this then developed into the announcing of nominees before the big reveal. In one school, a head of year asked staff to recommend names for the gauche and clumsily nebulous titles of "Best Boy" and "Best Girl".

Simon, a secondary school teacher remembers all staff being asked to nominate students for achievement certificates for having demonstrated values or excellence or both. "All the certificates emanating from about 30 different subjects were then handed out to the students during one 15 minute form time, so the reality was a bizarre educational love bomb exploding over some students whilst others sat, hopeful, but ultimately bereft of any recognition. Teachers had only been allowed to nominate 2 students per class," he remembers. "This meant that students in some quirkily able classes missed out on excellence awards that they would have achieved had they been in a less able class."

It is tempting to want to dismiss this practice of publicly rewarding the few as frivolous rather than damaging, but any parent who has collected their child at the end of a school day to see them merrily clutching a nugget of recognition knows the powerful forces that are at play in their young, impressionable psyches. "I had one student in my form who had repeatedly received praise points all year for German," Simon continues. She was expecting a certificate. But it emerged that her German teacher hadn't contributed to the nominations. Watching that student try to metabolise her disappointment through applying a hastily adopted façade of indifference before then marshalling all her focus into joining in with the happiness of her certificate-receiving peers was difficult to watch."

It was too late for Simon to intervene, but he knows a colleague who happened to have a free period after the form-time issuing of the certificates to her form. Simon's colleague then proceeded to spend that hour securing for one of her tutees a certificate from a drama teacher who had applied the "two per class" rule to the exclusion of one of her tutees, Amy. "She went directly to the drama teacher after form-time, and found out that the teacher had indeed very much wanted to issue a certificate to Amy but hadn't because of this wretched 'two only' rule," says Simon. "With the agreement of the teacher, my colleague headed straight to reprographics and created a new certificate for Amy, and dropped it off with the teacher who then found Amy and explained that she had been missed off the list by accident because her surname was at the bottom of the alphabet," he smiles. "Amy was so happy. She even asked for a plastic wallet to keep her newly-won drama certificate in, to protect it from the rain until she could show it to her mum that night."

Recognising achievement and excellence has become a part of our culture both at school and beyond, but why? Winning anything feels life-affirming, but at what cost? In her article, The Hormone Surges That Keep Winners Winning, Maria Popova explains that the release of testosterone in winners is a powerful motivational tool that rises during financial booms, "inducing a state of risk-seeking euphoria and providing a positive feedback loop in which success itself provides a competitive advantage." But there is a contrast. "The stress hormone cortisol spikes during financial downturns; traders with sustained high levels of cortisol become more risk-averse and timid, ultimately being less competitive."

That form-time at Simon's school was only a small snapshot in time, but the release of hormones for the affected students would have happened in a second. The students who hadn't receive a single achievement certificate would have felt the surging embarrassment of losers, surrounded as they had been by the testosterone-fuelled celebrations of the recognised. In UK schools, our assessment system with its subjective mark-schemes and the culmination of that bell-graph norm-referenced distribution of grades is currently a necessary evil. The exhausting process of regular teacher assessment that leads up to it is probably also contributing to our production of less knowledgeable students than countries who assess less vociferously. But, with the evidence from biologists described in Popova's article, and the knowledge that the children who miss out on recognition are experiencing actual, measurable hormone releases that can lead to timidity, the question should be asked, why are we also playing with school mini-honours lists? With unnecessary, Oscar-style public award recognition?

Of course, life for many of our school children will go on to present difficulties as they become adults. Not everyone can win that coveted job, get into Oxford, or marry The One. It makes sense to teach resilience. But do we have to orchestrate situations that play with our children's self-esteem so profoundly, and when they are so young? And if we insist on playing with the feelings of our children, then surely less haphazard systems need to be in place in our schools. How would Amy had felt going to sleep that night if she hadn't had the drama certificate propped up on her bedside table? Because without the fortuitous intersecting of a dedicated form tutor and a free period, that simply would not have happened.