# 54
This week, thanks to a time travel facility unique to The Bus Lane, we are able to bring you a preview of the commemorative edition of Sellar and Yeatman’s classic ‘1066 And All That’ due for publication in 2066. We print below the chapter dealing with the present Coalition’s efforts to reform the school examinations system.
CHAPTER 92
By the memorable year 2020 it was a truth universally acknowledged, that the Blair Years and the Thatcher Years had both been a Very Bad Thing. Each had contributed in their own peculiar ways to the Wars Without End, the Great Debt Bubble[2] and the Wasted Years (2008-2015) that followed. The year 2012 found the Coalition of the Posh Boys obsessed as ever with pinning the blame for the Great Double Dipper on the very young, the very old, the very poor, the very unemployed, the very foreign etc etc. On anyone in fact other than those who were truly responsible. Previous attempts to blame the sick and the disabled (see Lansley, A. NHS Reforms, 2010-12, and Duncan-Smith, I, Welfare Reforms, same period) were running into the sand and The Poshies were desperate to find a policy which could still distract, confuse and antagonise the public while wasting further huge amounts of imaginary money[3]. In panic, they turned that autumn to the lamentable Michael Gove.
Gove had a made a career out of being irritating and repulsive – even once managing to annoy the hell out of the saintly Lord Leveson (he of the Bless’ed Report). Now (and quite laughably) Gove had survived Call-me-Dave’s dismal re-shuffle and remained Minister of Education. As such, he enjoyed using his gift for sarcasm to attack young people as being too clever by half before informing them that they remained – sadly - not half as clever as him. Reluctantly, Gove had visited one or two schools and convinced himself that teachers had been cheating by deliberately teaching the children how to pass exams and allowing pushy parents to achieve better results, year after year, for their GCSE coursework. Throughout his time in office, Gove remained totally oblivious to the fact that the primary causes of ‘grade inflation’ were school league tables and the commercialisation of examination boards.
Gove feared (rightly) that if he consulted the teaching profession he would be swept away on a tsunami of pedagogic twaddle. He therefore plumped for the simplest and crudest solution available: he would replace an examination which too many students were passing with an old, discredited, test designed to ensure the majority of candidates would fail. This particularly delighted him because it illustrated so perfectly the neo-conservative maxim that ‘For a few to succeed, many must fail’ (otherwise, what’s the point?) Given time, he believed, the education system could be made to fix the number of high achievers as a percentage of the population. Cunningly, Gove kept this objective to himself and pretended that what young people really needed in their lives was “more rigour.”
Gove’s “stunning, new” policy involved preparing students for the twenty first century by reintroducing an examination system that wasn’t working when abandoned thirty years previously. Thanks to Gove, from 2017 onwards all young people would be forced to sit down and sit still for three hours at a time on selected summer afternoons, there to regurgitate essays learned by rote. Any who couldn’t do this would be kicked into the long grass – where they probably belonged – and where they could stay until they were old enough to leave school without any worthwhile qualifications other than a chip on each shoulder and a monumental sense of failure, alienation and injustice.
As if that were not triumph enough, between 2012 and 2017 a whole generation of school students would be preparing for exams which the government had decided were worthless and obtaining qualifications which would not be taken seriously by them, by their teachers or by colleges, universities and employers. The coalition cabinet could only marvel at such breathtaking and audacious stupidity, conceived and executed on such an epic scale. Whenever Gove appeared, they erupted into thunderous applause, secure in the knowledge that they too were assured of their place in history as A Very Bad Thing.
Miss Lauren Bacall
Before he finally melted away in the afterglow of his own self-proclaimed brilliance, Gove decreed that the new examination system was to be called the English Baccalaureate to commemorate the timeless beauty and lifetime achievements of Miss Lauren Bacall. This should not be confused with Laurel & Hardy, Kier Hardie, Michael O’Leary, Kiss me Hardy, Laurens of Arabia, Lauren Laverne, bacchanalia, back bacon or Buck Rogers (all of which - except Michael O’Leary - made far more sense).
TEST PAPER XIII
1. Which of the following were invented as ways of making people sit down:
a) Flush toilets,
b) School Examinations
c) Television
d) The Olympic Games
Which was the most successful? Illustrate and disinfect your answer.
2. Discuss “The years of drift and decline” without hesitation, deviation or repetition.
3. “We believe it is time for the race to the bottom to end.”
a) Was this even legal?
b) If not, why not?
4. Explain the meaning of ‘dumbing-down’ by reference to some or all of the following:
The Bullingdon Club, Channel 5, Lembit Opik, Lambert Simnel, Posh Spice, Russell Brand, Perkin Warbeck, Jeremy Kyle.
[Marks will be awarded for spelin, punkchuation; & use of joint-UP rytin J]
5. Attribute and explain cursorily, without petulance, flatulence or collateral damage:
a) “There will of course be some students who will find it difficult to sit the exams.”
b) “Thousand of young people have been failed because the Secretary of State refuses to sort out the grading fiasco of this year’s GCSE exams.”
[1] With apologies to ‘1066 and All That, a memorable history of England Methuen , London
[2] See Chapter 40: ‘Walpole and the Southsea Bubble’ (Will they never learn?)
[3] See ‘Canute, an Experimental King’, Chapter 9 and ‘Quantitative Easing’, Chapters 85-90, above.
