Melville House Books

There was a time, dare I say it, when the British claimed superiority over the Yanks, especially when it came to education. My mother, a fiercely competitive history teacher, reveled in examples of American ignorance, mainly to do with the works of Thomas Hardy. Beloved national treasure Bill Bryson (I know he comes from Iowa but we appreciate him more) compounded the collective hubris in Notes From a Big Country, complaining about the inadequacies of high school students who couldn’t name a single country in Africa and didn’t know that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. We really believed that the brain drain was all about the money.

Forward a few years and we’re standing in the corner wearing dunce caps. In 2002 the head of our Qualifications and Curriculums Authority was fired in a furore over the harsh marking of A levels. (Quick cultural clarification: A levels are what we take instead of American SATs. SATs here are what kids do aged 11 and again at 14 to check that they’re doing ok. Basically, we stole the name and repositioned it to make our youth feel cleverer.) Back to my mother, a self-confessed scientific ignoramus, who had a go at a Biology A level paper the same year, forty years after she last studied the subject. A teacher at her school marked it — she got an A. Maybe we need to make our exams a little harsher.

This year, the fuss is all about the SATs. Obviously it’s too much to expect a state authority to grade papers, so they’re handed out to private companies. ETS Europe may not have been the one to choose: a million pupils’ results were delayed and thousands of scripts were marked incorrectly or returned to the wrong places. Heads must roll. The head of the QCA has just resigned, after an enquiry found he had failed to oversee the system properly. More grandees are expected to follow. Meanwhile, the hunt is on to find a new company to take over. With five months to go and profound disarray at the top, school children must be thoroughly overexcited at the prospects of no tests this year.

Quite soon they may not be able to read the test papers. Last week Sir Jim Rose proposed a radical shakeup of the British primary school system. Instead of studying traditional subjects, he suggests that learning should be divided into six broad areas, including “English understanding”, “human, social and environmental understanding” and “personal wellbeing”. This means that history and geography are studied in the same breath, while basic literacy is mixed up with learning a foreign language and spoken communication. The only subject to remain itself is math. The aim of the game is cross-curricular study, in which a topic appealing to children is chosen each half term in the interests of attaining a seamless web of knowledge and making learning fun. A few school are working like this already: a BBC news report last week showed a bunch of kids designing and building an electronic piggy bank. They loved it. I wonder how many of them could read a story.

Twenty percent of children in the UK who go to secondary school do not have the necessary reading and writing skills to cope. If I read this figure in relation to a developing country, I would be shocked. In this bastion of smug imperialism, it’s beyond words. The intellectual baton has been passed, long ago. It’s time we stopped calling other nations stupid.