Dear Readers,
Welcome to the latest edition of our fortnightly newsletter.
First up, an anonymous account of the recent exams debacle, written by a teacher at a state school in London. It seems that the meltdown on exams day was not only anticipated, but actively planned for: read on to hear about overbearing headmasters and crashed servers.
Next, a few links to what we’ve been doing online, for those of you who don’t spend their life glued to Twitter.
Finally, Once Upon a Time in Iraq has been hailed as a masterpiece of TV journalism from the ever-embattled BBC. A masterpiece it may be – but are the BBC the people we have thank?
Deleted Dreams
How a London state school covered their tracks prepared for the mass downgrading of disadvantaged students on GCSE results day.
It seems that how each student’s grade was exactly determined by the OFQUAL algorithm will remain secret. But there are several known components: past performance of students, past performance of student’s school, mock exams, ranking within the class and predicted grades given by teachers post-lockdown. It appears that the downgrading comes when the predicted grades – given by teachers post lockdown – do not marry up with the rest of the components in the algorithm.
In order to decide the predicted grade at my school, lengthy discussion took place over email. Once the grades were submitted, we were subsequently sent an email by our head teacher asking us to delete all lengthy discussion emails. If a student launched an appeal against their final grade, they would have the right to request this information.
In hindsight, this was a sinister move: a secretively engineered destruction of emails sent from class teachers to senior leadership, who have changed grades to fit in line with the data set. That is, the data set as the school saw it.
Moreover, the other components were often unhelpful. Take mock exams. Not all students sat them. Some teachers use them to shock students into working hard and give them deliberately bad grades. Other teachers help their students in mocks. Of course, most students don’t try in their mocks. I had a student show up in the throes of teenage heartache and write a dreadful poem about ‘the rack of love’.
I have never understood how anyone can accurately measure the truth of my school and the many London schools of its kind through data. I work in a typical inner London state school. We have a big rabble of students from a big rabble of places. There are a lot of poor students, refugee students, special-needs students, naughty students, whip-smart students. We have no money, a leaking roof, a general toilet smell that pervades half the building. We have police dropping in mid-lesson to pull some poor quivering kid out for an undisclosed incident, creating a mushroom cloud of gossip that dissipates by second lunch. And we have spaghetti bolognaise where the mince is topped up with baked beans (cost-savvy and tasty).
In May, our head teacher sent us an email asking us to decide on the grade that we thought each student would receive if they had sat the exam. Doing this, my colleagues and I racked our brains and our hearts. We went mentally through the entire time we had known them, weighing all those hours up so they could be reduced to one small letter in a box on a spreadsheet.
To give an example, this was how I graded one student, who I’ll call Tyrese.
He is a student dear to my heart. Fabulously innocent, clever and hard-working throughout Year 12. He was told that the Shakespeare theatre trip started at eight o’clock and encouraged to, ‘arrive a little early – explore Soho!’
He responded: ‘Yes, like Mr Hyde!’
I realised that, despite being young, stylish, seemingly all-knowing and very gay, Tyrese had almost never left the borough he had lived in all his life. His only reference point to Soho came from a Gothic novel, which he studied at GCSE. At the beginning of Year 13, Tyrese had discovered the fun of the world – naturally his grades had slipped.
In December 2019, Tyrese received an Oxford interview offer. I felt as moved and proud as if he were my own son. Tyrese pleaded with me to predict him an A*. I was annoyed at the huge disparity of opportunities that life had presented him with, compared to some of his more affluent peers. I would have predicted him an A, but thought: is the leg-up of a little ‘*’, really an unfair advantage? Compared with, say, piano lessons, inheritance money and tutors in the South of France?
I consulted senior leadership who come back with this response: ‘Yeah, fuck it: let him have his star! His predicted grade? A*.
In February 2020, Tyrese was told that he did not get an offer from Oxford. But he was still riding high on life’s pleasures. Why strive for an A*, when you could smoke a joint in the park at lunch time, turn up late to class and ask ‘Miss,’ (to the woefully concealed glee of the rest of your classmates) ‘Miss, where do you buy your board pens from, Miss? They’re so colourful!’ (I muttered, ‘I get them from the stationary cupboard’. But Tyrese didn’t take his mock exam seriously, and I gave him a B. Then came the coronavirus.
In May 2020, teachers were forced to rank students by central government, as well as provide a predicted grade. This initially fell on the class teacher but was reviewed by senior leadership. I would have placed Tyrese top of the class but found myself reminiscing on his fluctuating brilliance compared with persistent hard work of another student, who I’ll call Lesley.
I remember one peculiarly touching moment: Tyrese, head on desk after seemingly big night, moaning to Lesley; ‘I feel weak. I want a banana.’ Lesley, who up until this point has been gently researching the life of Christina Rossetti with arm draped reassuringly over Tyrese’s shoulders, slipped out of the room and returned minutes later with a banana.
I ranked Lesley as student number one in the class, and ranked Tyrese number two. I predicted Tyrese a grade A, but senior leadership knock him down a notch to B, because of his mock – and also because of Lesley’s superior ranking. I was very annoyed by this and emailed senior leadership challenging the B. But it was upheld.
A week later, I received the email from the head teacher asking us to delete all correspondence relating to decisions made about grades. I was irritated by this and didn’t delete the emails. Next, during the summer holidays, I received an email saying our email server was being changed, and that all past emails will shortly disappear.
Every year students are disappointed and every year many do not get the grades they deserve. But I think of my sweet A Level students: confidently expecting one system of evaluation and at the final hour receiving another. While the lower grades may impact their immediate steps, in my opinion, an equally damaging element is that they have learnt a hard lesson before their time. Eighteen is a very young age to learn that the rug can be pulled from beneath you at any moment.
In turbulent teenage years, you have tacit certainty that you can screw up much of your last two years at school, as long as you don’t screw up the exams at the end. This year’s leavers are different, though. On reflection, these students will have to acknowledge that it may have, in fact, unfairly counted that you came to class drunk and took five minutes to peel a banana.
Meanwhile, at The Fence
‘I do not want to dress up my character flaws as mental health issues, but I do think it is worth noting how psychologically ruinous the Fringe can be for performers.’
Like everything else, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival was cancelled this year. But might this be a good thing for the British comedy scene? Rob Oldham looks back at five years of trooping up to Scotland.
‘Back home, I Facebook-stalk the junior who shanked us over these shifts. I find pictures of her painting on a canvas the size of a garage door, which makes me cough evilly. Something on a theme of Kandinsky melded with mental health mumbo-jumbo. Rubbing my nose in her life outside medicine.’
A short story from Omar Al-Khayatt: a terminally ill doctor splutters around the ward, cackling at memes and despairing for the future of the NHS.
The Don of Iraq
The BBC’s five-part documentary Once Upon a Time in Iraq has been winning plaudits all across the political spectrum, with Andrew Neil even claiming it to be the best thing the BBC has ever done (angling for a job, Andrew?).
While the series quite rightly focuses on interviews with displaced, distressed Iraqis, there is one Western figure who features throughout: the mercurial Dexter Filkins, memorably described in the programme (by a US Marine) as looking like ‘a frat boy who has just woken up from the craziest party ever’.
In a story that stretches across fifteen years of global history, it seems a little strange that a journalist is given such prominence. On re-reading Filkins’ magisterial book The Forever War, things start to become rapidly become clearer. Episodes Two and Three of the series are taken in their totality from Filkins’ own book, a collection of reports and essays he wrote for The New York Times. Episode Four is largely based on his own work, too.
When The Fence rang a TV contact to inquire further, they confirmed that the producers were using Filkins’ book as their primer throughout, and that he was probably responsible for arranging interviews with some of the figures in the American military and intelligence community.
While the show is brilliantly edited, it does seem a little odd to splatter journalistic plaudits on the BBC when they were responsible for only a small part of the investigation itself. And it does, of course, neatly elide their own failure to accurately and effectively report on the Iraq War at the time.
A Letter from the Fence
We’ve spent August putting together the next issue and distributing the last one. Hard work! So, if you have been enjoying our work, please be advised: this is the last week of our summer sale. If you already have a subscription, why not purchase one for that endearing godchild/bookish aunt/ludic ex-boyfriend in your life. As of next week, subscriptions will cost £25 again.
Yours,
TF
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