Schools Out.

So, Sharapova has pulled out of the US Open.  Hopefully she will have more time to sell a few sweeties now.

Its the annual GCSE results day today, and the stats show that the grades have fallen by the biggest drop in years which is, to me, a good thing given the ridiculous situation during the Blair/Brown years of an ever upward trend which purported to show how good their style of education was.  Its not that I'm anti-Labour government, they did a lot of decent things in their time, but its the politicisation of education that annoys me and how they (and others) use the results stats to 'demonstrate' how good their policies were. e.g. In the Brown years, they would trumpet another increase in the number of A* grades, 5 A-C grades etc. etc.  What they didn't manage to convey was that the school leavers were just as think as the previous generations and that these 'improvements' were just because of the education examination process and system, not the real education levels of school children.  For instance, in my day (my goodness, do I sound like an old fuddy duddy?) top grades were quite unusual, even at my grammar school, and A*s hadn't even been invented (I don't think).  A graders were the obvious top pupils and, if I remember correctly numbered about 10 in my year out of around 100, and if you got an A, you were considered to be very bright indeed.  That's 10% if my (grade C) maths is correct.  Now, assuming grammar schools were taking the top 25% (or was it 10%) that would mean that this 10% was actually about 2.5% of the total number of exam takes for that year.  I know that's not the full story, because non-grammar school pupils could have done (and did) as well as grammar school versions, but lets assume that that is balanced by grammar schoolers who did not do as well (like me!) and then it balances out.  So, we have a very small number (2.5%) who got, say, a few grade A's as opposed to today when 21% got an A or A* , and this has gone down from it's peak in 2011.  The conclusion is that kids nowadays are much brighter on average than in the 70s.  Hmmm, I'm sure that's right.