MICHAEL GOVE is the Education Secretary, although I believe his full title is the Messing Around With Schools Minister. His latest bout of reactionary interference has been to announce “reforms” for GCSEs.

In a nutshell, and for some reason Mr Gove always reminds me of nuts, coursework is out and exams are back.

Mr Gove’s aim is to end the dumbing-down of education.

Apparently, GCSEs are so easy the certificates fall out of the packet with the cornflakes. Or so you might assume, so often are GCSEs disparaged, usually by people who last sat an exam two days after the dawn of time, or the 1950s at the very least.

The alleged diminishment is based mostly on the prejudice that GCSEs must have become too easy because too many young people are doing well.

As someone who last suffered an exam in 1978, I feel for the pupils who will now be judged almost solely on exam results.

Exams suit some people and not others. They test certain skills, but are they even useful or valuable skills for the modern age? And besides, what’s so good about the three Rs (which I saw summed up the other day as “reading, remembering and regurgitating”)?

In an interesting blog on the York Mix website, John Tomsett, the head teacher of Huntington School, expressed his doubts about the changes.

Mr Tomsett began by mentioning his ability still to bore people with quotations from his A-level literature texts, including JM Synge’s Playboy Of The Western World and Shakespeare’s Antony And Cleopatra. With me it is the Ancient Mariner (“Water, water, everywhere…” and all that).

Perhaps straight exams were suited to those distant days before the internet and other technological changes to society; perhaps remembering stuff and splurging it out in an over-heated school hall with sweaty hands gripping biros was what had to be done then.

But times have changed drastically, so going back to the old ways seems a manoeuvre wrapped in the misguided mists of nostalgia.

As Mr Tomsett said, with regards to history, the GCSE as it stands “demands a range of skills which need to be artfully synthesised to attain a decent grade. Students have to interpret evidence, make connections between different sources, recall knowledge, make judgements and articulate reasoned conclusions”.

That sounds interesting. All that straight exams prepare you for is the sitting of more exams. They are little or no use in later life, other than as a shudder-some group memory or a common cause of panicky nightmares.

In fact, when pupils leave school and find work, if they do find a job, they will be asked to collaborate and, yes, to use the internet to discover things (and to discover that not everything unearthed that way is correct: another useful lesson). Indeed they will use all the opposite skills to those required for exams. So why don’t we teach those practical skills instead?

Answers on two sides of A4 to Michael Gove, to be completed within the hour; no consultation allowed; marks will be subtracted for swearing at the Education Secretary.

Quarrelsome footnote: isn’t it time to separate education and politics, so that the whims of the moment don’t change everything every few years? Just a thought…


• USEFUL knowledge is a wonderful thing.

For years, Hugh Murray was the man to ask. A phone call would send the ever-obliging historian scurrying. At the end of the line, you could hear books being moved, pages turned. And then the answer would come.

Hugh was a stickler for accuracy (“that feature was 99 per cent correct”), but his willingness to help was legendary.

Outside of a phone call, a book-signing of mine at York Cemetery was the only time I met Hugh. His book about the cemetery, The Garden Of Death, remains the perfect source for anyone who wants to know about that lovely place.

Hugh Murray will be much missed, by his family of course, and by anyone who wants to know.