THE COACH OF MARGINAL IMPROVEMENTS

I was told they’d appointed one of these for the British Olympic cyclists. It seems to have worked. A carrot here; an extra half hour in bed there; training till your toes bleed.

Excellent.

 I’m against the exam ethic, this absurd media frenzy about GCSE and A levels. Dumbing down or getting brighter? Well how about both?

A friend who’s very clever and now a lawyer worked out how to “game” GCSE so she came top in the UK in two subjects which she promptly dropped. “It was about working out their vision of the model answers with the right words and in the right order. Like a crossword in a sense”. Now she’s very clever.

But the girl I mentioned in a blog a few weeks back who was told by her school she was a “dunce” was obviously not. Schools with their wide experience can spot obviously “dunces”, people with no talent, people incapable of progressing. She was told she was likely to end up in hairdressing or childcare (being a dunce qualifies you to look after children at their most impressionable learning age? Good heavens). Well she was predicted 2 Fs, 3 Es, 3 Ds and 2 Cs which I have to admit was a bit disappointing.

Her enterprising Godmother picked her up and with her husband over just six months did a bit of intensive 121 coaching on a little girl who started to discover she was actually quite bright (whilst, curiously, the school – and I use this word in the loosest sense - stubbornly stuck to their original assessment). In the event she got 4 ‘A’s, 2 ‘B’s, 3 ‘C’s and an A* in a subject they’d predicted she’d get an F. What are we to make of this?

Primarily I want to focus on an educational system that is self-obsessed and seems to have forgotten how to spot talent and then teach inspiringly and produce not marginal but phenomenal improvements. This was simply a case of neglect. It was incompetence from professionals who’d be fired in any other walk of life. It was luck that two smart people rescued the young lady. Where there is talent however deep it is buried, we need to fan the flames and make is burn brightly. From dunce to super confident girl (“I’m going to get three ‘A’s at A level “– and she will) in six months of loving teaching and encouragement. How many kids with GCSE ‘D’s and ‘E’s out there today could have done the same?

It’s not often I get this angry. Michael Gove, can you hear me? Sort it out.

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