All the A-Level and GCSE results are now out and this has, as is now becoming customary in this country, provoked the usual polarised response: The obvious joy and satisfaction of pupils and parents at yet another record-breaking year, and the usual chorus of groans from those of us who suspect that exam success is because of the massive dumbing down of exams and falling standards in our schools. The whole sorry saga gets regurgitated year on year.

Clearly, one does not want to cast aspersions on the individual successes achieved by hardworking students, many of whom will have worked and studied with admirable devotion and are rightly reaping the benefits of their labours, fully deserving of their excellent grades. No-one is saying that GCSEs or A-Levels do not challenge youngsters at all. What is very much in doubt, however, is whether  grades give us an accurate reflection of this country’s true abilities, and whether employers still have confidence in the system. I would argue not, given how we get a record number of A* grades awarded year upon year and yet the United Kingdom has consistently tumbled down international league tables. How can we be getting better yet getting worse? Employers certainly do not trust these grades and are right not to. It is increasingly difficult to deny that exams have become easier, though this does not stop the NASUWT union from doing so.

True to form, those dunces at the NASUWT put out a bombastic statement accusing the Coalition Government of “a betrayal of young people”, banging on about the Educational Maintenance Allowance and all the usual guff I am sure we are all now becoming accustomed to hearing. Their General-Secretary, Chris Keates, writing in the Telegraph, pursued a fairly glib policy of simply denying that there was a problem, dismissing claims of ‘dumbing down’ as “nonsense”. Miss Keates needs to do her homework. One only need look the exam papers and changes to the syllabuses for, say, A-Levels Mathematics, since 1997 (and if one’s uncle is a maths teacher, such as mine, one may just well have access to such things). The textbooks of the 1980s still have the best rating and are in great demand (albeit, sadly, out of print). There is no doubt among most objective observers that exam questions have become far less demanding. The syllabus for maths alone has been reduced drastically since 2000. A particularly appalling example are Statistics and Mechanics, where the highest modules in these subjects have been withdrawn because no-one has sat them in years. A great shame, for were this not the case then there might be a good statistician around to tell Miss Keates that rising trends in exam results whereby every year students get better is a statistical anomaly.

Even in my own days at school (and I finished my A-Levels in 1999), I remember being terrified in the run up to my GCSEs because I found the mock papers so intimidating. In the event, I need hardly have worried. The actual exams were nowhere near as difficult as the mock ones I had sat previously (which were old exam papers from previous years). Anecdotal evidence, for sure, but still a damning indication of how the exams had become easier over just a couple of years, even as long ago as the turn of the millennium. Of course, I do not need a fancy statistician or even my own schoolboy anecdotes to tell me what I have seen to be demonstrably true, as for many years I worked in recruitment. I routinely received CVs from individuals claiming to have GCSE or even A-Level English, who even with the advent of Word Processing were still incapable of sending out a document not riddled with spelling and grammatical errors (despite that it was, presumably, their hope that I would be inclined to furnish them with employment). I am, I should stress, not simply talking about the odd ‘typo’. I am talking about CVs that were, in some cases, written in such crude, bastardised, pidgin English so as to be almost indecipherable. Indeed, it is shameful to note that despite the extraordinary alleged successes in education over the years, one in five British students manage to leave school functionally illiterate. This is a statistic that should make us all hang our heads in shame. If schools cannot even teach children to read, write and add up then we really are at a pass.

In the same Telegraph piece, Katharine Birbalsingh (the teacher who famously exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Tory Party conference) pins much of the blame on the modular format of modern A-Levels. She points out that, because A-Levels are taken in modules over two years and can be retaken as many as three times, this has lead to “manipulating modules” to allow pupils to pull their grades up. The trick, she says, is to maximise scores on easier modules taken at AS-Level (in the first year), allowing room for failure on harder modules later on. She gives the example of an A-Level with four units (two per year), in which a pupil retakes the two AS modules and manages to get over 90 per cent in them, meaning the pupil can now afford to get as low as a ‘D’ grade on second-year modules (A2) and still pull off a ‘B’ grade for the A-Level overall.

It is an excellent point, well made, but such chicanery aside, there is a far deeper political element to this problem. Namely, the complete failure of the ideological experiment known as ‘comprehensive education’ and Labour’s utter refusal to recognise that failure throughout their many years in power. Tony Blair entered Downing Street with the words “education, education, education” still ringing in our ears but what that actually seems to have meant, in practical terms, is ‘millions, after millions, after millions’ of taxpayer’s money poured relentlessly into an unreformed education system – more money spent on children, more money spent on teachers, more money spent on schools and on school buildings and resources – but with little concomitant improvement in educational standards and an actual reduction – rather than improvement – in social mobility (i.e., academically gifted children from poorer backgrounds making it to university). In this, Labour have been assisted by the complicity of the teaching unions – including the NASUWT. The truth is that, for the most part, the teaching unions could not give a fig about students. They are only interested in teachers and protecting the reputation of their members and the ‘profession’ they represent. They completely ignored – indeed, they participated in – the real betrayal that has been perpetrated against the young people of Great Britain.

For years, the teaching unions – aided by the Labour Party in government – have deprived young Britons of the skills they will need to be successful in the workplace and sacrificed the UK’s international competitveness, primarily to prop up failing schools and to shield incompetent teachers. Last year, just 22 per cent of students took GCSEs in English, Mathematics, Double-Science, a modern language and a humanities subject (this is half the number in 1997). These subjects have surrendered precedence to courses like the ‘Certificate of Personal Effectiveness’. This is, in some respects, quite a useful qualifications for most UK school-leavers, as it includes a section on how to claim the dole. The reason for this blatant dumbing down is almost certainly to inflate the pass rates (which it has) but at the cost of the life chances of a generation, steered away from subjects employers demand in favour of courses with exams that are easier to pass but which have little or no labour market value.

Now, I shall have to tread carefully in what I say about teaching unions. My girlfriend’s mother is a retired teacher and was an enthusiastic member of the NASUWT and a nicer nor more virtuous woman never lived. My girlfriend – a nurse, already disgruntled by my first article for this website (in which I essentially called for the NHS to be abolished) – is therefore wary about me writing this. Some things, however, are too important not to say and it has to be said that the influence of the teaching unions on education in this country is pernicious and unhealthy. Put simply, the unions block reform and protect bad teachers. Miss Birbalsingh has already described how union membership has become a social obligation within State education. In an article for the Daily Mail earlier in the year (in the run-up to an NUT-organised teachers’ strike, in fact), she talked about her trade unionist colleagues thusly:

“They tend to be loud in the staff room, forcing others to toe the line. They push the mantra of evil senior management exploiting staff, and bully younger teachers to buy into it”

…naturally, this reminds me of nobody in particular. She goes on to say;

“The idea of holding colleagues to account or requiring high standards of teaching is not on their agenda. Good teachers keep their heads down, ignore the fact they are paid the same or considerably less than the worst teachers, and get on with the job.”

This is where I have a huge problem. Not with membership of a trade union per se. Given the public-facing role that teachers undertake, they – like nurses – are extremely vulnerable to malicious litigation and it is, therefore, understandable that they should seek the protection of a trade union. What I have a problem with is that, in seeking to protect teachers from litigation, the unions have also effectively shielded bad teachers from legitimate professional scrutiny. It is near impossible for a headteacher to sack an incompetent teacher and over the last forty years out of the 500,000 or so that teach throught the UK at any given time just fourteen have been dismissed for incompetence. Now, I ask you, does that sound at all realistic to you? Compare it to practically any other profession and you will soon realise it is absurd. Breaking what has, for all intents and purposes, become a trade union ‘protection racket’ will be essential if we are to counter the crisis in our education system.

I believe our young people have the ability but they have been let down by the previous Labour Government, who have condemned them to joblessness, or a life of low-skilled labour at best, by pushing them into non-academic courses and qualifications of little or no value instead of studying demanding subjects that would prepare them for further study and make them attractive to employers. Labour and the unions have inflicted untold damage to the reputation of British education and delivered us a lost generation, who will leave school without the skills they need and languish on the dole, trapped in the insidious quagmire of Labour’s cockamamy benefits system.

This is why Michael Gove’s reforms at the Department for Education are so vitally important if we are to save our young people from a lifetime of welfare dependency. Credit to the aforementioned Mr Blair and Lord Adonis on starting the academies programme (really a continuation of the thinking of Lord Baker of Dorking and the late Lord Joseph during the Thatcher years) – but they were hamstrung by Gordon Brown and the other ‘old Labour’ troglodytes, and their trade union paymasters, who hate and despise academies, fearing the break-up of their little feifdoms and an end to the State monopoly that gives them so much power. Mr Gove has not just continued the academies programme, he has excellerated it to levels Blair and Adonis could only have dreamed of, freeing schools from the dead hand of the Local Education Authorities.

On the pages of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson championed the results of the Harris Academies (one of the new ‘chain’ of State secondaries). They have shown how the academies structure can transform education for pupils in deprived areas where simply pouring in money has failed miserably year after year. Their results, as Mr Nelson illustrates in a handy graph, speaks for themselves. If you look at their academy in Merton (the former Tamworth Manor School), they have gone from just 23 per cent of pupils achieving five A*-C grades in subjects including maths and English in their final year as an LEA school to a whopping 75 per cent this year. Mr Nelson singles out this school in particular because this was the school that wannabe Labour MP Fiona Millar (wife of Alastair Campbell) took to judicial review in an attempt to prevent it becoming a Harris academy. Indeed, Labour and the teaching unions have done everything in their power to strangle the academies programme at birth. This notwithstanding, over a thousand schools have now adopted academy status and the number is growing inexorably.

The NUT, the NASUWT and other unions loathe the idea that some teachers are better than others but this is a simply an unavoidable fact. I do not doubt the honesty of passionate trade unionists (like a certain retired teacher I know – who was an exceptionally good teacher) but bad schools are kept bad by this obstinacy and by the idea that poor performance is all down to ‘social problems’ (or some similar excuse). I know how good a teacher my girlfriend’s mum was. This much was evidenced by the incredible (bordering on the ridiculous) number of gifts she received from pupils, parents and colleagues alike when she retired. I also know she is a passionate (one might almost say fiery) trade unionist. But the simple truth is that not every teacher is as good a teacher as she was and her beloved NASUWT does her and her profession a disservice by shielding those of her colleagues who are not up to their jobs and are letting our youth down very badly.

In academies – and Mr Gove’s new ‘free schools’ – headteachers are liberated from the stranglehold of the LEA and the trade union bullyboys do not have as much clout. Instead of sending taxpayers’ money to the LEA bureaucrats, it is given direct to schools and heads and they decide how it should be spent. Heads are free to set their own pay and conditions and give financial rewards to good teachers. Only if the centralised state monopoly is broken will the system be capable of reform. Unions will not be able to call national strikes at the drop of a hat and only then will their ability to protect bad teachers be curbed. Combine this with Mr Gove’s new EBacc (English Baccalaureate) — in which a pupil must gain better than a C in English, maths, a science, foreign language and humanities subject to receive it — and maybe more State schools will be encouraged to put our young people on courses that will actually benefit them in later life (and, crucially, expose those who do not).

I congratulate those young people who have received the results they deserve. Now the Coalition need to move forward with Mr Gove’s urgent reforms to create schools that provide opportunities for all our young people to obtain the skills they need and, indeed, that the country needs them to achieve if we are to maintain our competitve edge in the international marketplace.