Sphinx

One of the basic principles of our society is that success and failure are individualised: you are naturally talented and worked hard, YOU are just not good enough, or should have tried harder. This is fair, isn’t it? Places at the Best Universities should go to the Best Students, Important Jobs should go to the Right People, it should all be sorted out on merit rather than attempts at social engineering or quotas or positive discrimination. Just think how awful it would be for someone to know they didn’t get on that course through their own merit, or if they got a job that was better suited to someone else. Clearly unfair. Not everyone can have prizes.

But fairness is not evenly distributed. Some people get pre-approved as members of the Right Sort: they get multiple chances to succeed – to get better exam results, to get into Good Universities despite their exam results, to get good jobs despite their abilities and qualifications, to fail in those jobs and yet keep on rising. It’s not they’re necessarily worse; they’re just not actually better, but ‘fairness’ means ignoring the many things that give them an advantage, and reducing everything to a question of individual qualities – which may be demonstrated by academic qualifications, except when that’s inconvenient and we have to come up with more intangible claims instead. Anything other than admit what’s actually going on: class and race.

This is what is interesting about the current A-level fiasco. Every year, some young people do brilliantly well and get places in Top Universities because they’re naturally talented and worked incredibly hard and not at all because they enjoyed the privilege of an expensive private education with more resources, more attention, smaller class sizes etc.; every year, some young people fall short because they just weren’t good enough or lacked the right work ethos and not at all because of their socioeconomic background or the lack of resources or the class sizes. </sarcasm> But this year, the underlying structures of inequality are all too visible, with exam results being shaped by an algorithm that, wholly coincidentally, favours some sorts of schools over others.

[Update: good summary here of a critical problem with the algorithm, a key point being that it is not applied to classes under a certain size, hence exempting (1) less popular subjects (that state schools are less likely to be able to afford to offer) and (2) places where classes are small (ditto), plus of course the problem of the very high-achieving student in a school with a less good historical performance who will get dragged down to the average of the last three years.]

The subtext becomes text: individuals are to be sacrificed in order to maintain the status quo, some teachers are trusted more than others. And it’s not a deliberate, malevolent decision; it’s the result of people genuinely aiming to solve a massive problem but not properly thinking through the implications, or caring about some of them, or recognising their own assumptions and prejudices. It reveals that privilege – smaller class sizes that evade the simple application of the algorithm – is taken as grounds for more trust, not less. It reveals that the purpose of the whole system is not to recognise individual merit or attainment, but to maintain its own credibility in the eyes of big business and pundits, and to sort the population according to predetermined criteria and maintain the status quo.

The whole class of 2020 has had its world disrupted. Of course, so have lots of other young people (the university class of 2020, most obviously), and not just young people, and the return to any sort of normality may be postponed indefinitely. For the most part, however, although the pandemic has affected some groups much worse than others, the impact of coronavirus is both easily individualised (especially as government propaganda, sorry, guidance and messaging seeks to make it all about individual responsibility and behaviour not state actions or competence) and easily generalised – it affects everyone, it come out of nowhere, it’s nobody’s fault and we’re all in it together. Cf. the 2008 financial crisis; nothing wrong with the system, honest, we just all need to save and cut back public services.

This could be different, because it is unmistakable that individuals are not being treated fairly on the basis of their individual merits or efforts, but downgraded or rewarded on the basis of the school they went to, which clearly also correlates with their class and social status, their degree of privilege, their location within the UK. And it may not just be those who have been directly disadvantaged who see the basic unfairness, but also those who can see how it could so easily have been them – and maybe even some of those who benefitted (look, if I can go through seven years of private education and come out of it recognising how the system is stacked in my favour, so can you…).

The optimistic part of me, battered and downtrodden as it is, can see this as the closing part of the first act of the new Hunger Games-style franchise, as our protagonists realise that they are being exploited and manipulated, and that only fullscale revolution will suffice. We’re moving into the political education and preparation phase, and my classes on Greek Tyranny and Thucydides may have even more pointed political subtext that usual this year (it would be very easy to rework the Melian Dialogue for this, as for any situation of power imbalance: “justice applies only to those already judged to be of equal merit” etc.).

In the meantime, all one can do is feel desperately sorry for the young people who have been robbed of their dreams and ambitions, and hope that the advice and support some of them are getting on social media will pay off somehow – while of course other disappointed students have parents and head teachers lobbying for them, who know the right people with whom to have a quiet word, and the right things to say… Once again: the problem is structural, not individual.

Note: original version of post was edited to remove a tweet, supposedly from Gavin Williamson but actually from a cleverly constructed parody account, and commentary thereupon.

Update: it should be acknowledged that comments on this specific crisis applies primarily to the English government; the Scottish government had the sense to row back hastily when it became clear what a mess the intended process for inventing exam grades was. However, I think the general issue of the exam system being intended to sort students and label them, rather than recognise their achievements and efforts, hold true more generally – while Scotland can now sit back and feel smug about the English, up to that point they were following the same approach with the same lack of concern.