Grade inflation

A-levels out tomorrow, with a new A* grade, which - if we're honest - we all know is stupid. There's nothing concrete about an A, it just means best, so what is the point about making more people get them or variants of them. Not that is matters much - the grading system could be 1,2,3,4, or scored like Tennis, provided it ranks. The real problem is summed up by the often reliable Mary Beard pretty well:

I fear I can see now what will happen. We will have used that bright new shiny A* grade to help us distinguish, just like we were told it would, the very very very good from the merely very good applicants. When/if it turns out that independent schools have monopolised the new grade, we will get blamed for not being sufficiently committed to access and social mobility.

There's a long version of this complaint about social mobility, but I haven't the energy. I will however briefly note that the problem as it seems to me is a lack of an underlying vision of what education is for. It isn't about citizenship, because that doesn't mean anything; it certainly isn't about skills in the workplace, for if so, it's an astonishingly inefficient system we've devised here. It's about intellectual enquiry, what has been called the 'life of the mind', and the ability to cultivate that on an ongoing basis, not stopping at 18 (or 21). Along the way, a slew of other skills get picked up, and of course a lot of people fail to properly engage with the ambition, so those skills are pretty useful. But they aren't the point, or at least not the point of education, rather than training..

And Michael Gove's 'liberation' of schooling seems to me likely to founder (regardless of other issues) unless he makes it clear what the ambition is for schools. I don't disagree with reform of the history curriculum for example, but devolving decisions about purpose down to the school level just leads to fragmentation and incoherence. I wish Michael Gove would sort this out rather than buggering around with structural reform that while not entirely bonkers, I suspect limited in positive impact.