̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - private school

Opinion: ‘Difficult’ Latin risks remaining a qualification for elite pupils

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 12:20:21 +0000

In a recent column for ̽��ֱ��Telegraph, Angela Epstein branded Jeremy Corbyn as “too thick to be prime minister”. ̽��ֱ��basis of this accusation was the Labour leader’s two Es at A-level, among his other academic adventures. In a world where jobs are won on the basis of experience and networks, one might expect Corbyn’s A-levels – taken in the late 1960s – to be ancient history. Yet the fact this argument can be made in a national newspaper shows that school qualifications matter long into one’s life, and are expected to stand for something.

Indeed, qualifications matter so greatly that the Department for Education has for more than a year now been consulting teachers and other interested parties about the reform of GCSEs. ̽��ֱ��final stages of this reform is still underway, and the government is explicit about its intention to make these qualifications “more academically demanding and knowledge-based”.

A key shift in policy is the move to measure schools’ performance or progress primarily on the basis of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), the achievement of pupils in English, maths, science, a language and history or geography – rather than English, maths and three other subjects, as has been measured previously.

What this shift appears to acknowledge by focusing on “academically demanding” subjects, is that grades at GCSE mean different things between different subjects. Not all GCSEs are directly comparable – and those which do not make it into the EBacc are understood to be absolutely “less demanding” as courses.

Certainly, this is backed up by research. In a working paper from 2006, Robert Coe of Durham ̽��ֱ�� undertook a study of GCSE subjects using a statistical model developed by Georg Rasch, a Danish statistician of the mid-20th century who specialised in psychometry. It was a comparison of the likelihood for success in different GCSE examinations, based on a pupil’s ability. Coe’s findings are graphically represented below:

Relative difficulty of grades in 34 GCSE subjects ordered by difficulty of grade C. Robert Coe, Author provided

̽��ֱ��general disparity between subjects is clear. But as Coe comments, one of the most striking things about this data is just how difficult Latin appears when compared to other subjects: it is about as difficult to get a grade C in Latin as it is to get a grade B in chemistry, or a grade A in sociology. One is further able to group subjects between those on the left-hand side of the median line – science, technology, maths and engineering subjects, languages and humanities – and those on the right-hand side, which are more vocational in character.

Degree of difficulty

It is important to remember that this is no reflection of any inherent easiness or difficulty in a subject: sociology would not exist as a degree or research specialism if one could not think about it on the same level as Latin or chemistry. What this data instead shows is that these GCSEs test different levels of skills, some of which may be more readily acquired in a lower number of contact hours and some of which take more time.

Pupil achievement appears to be measurable only in relation to the expectations for an individual exam, rather than across all GCSEs. As a result, these grade levels also reflect the typical profile of those taking these exams. In Latin, data from the Cambridge Schools Classics Project suggests that 97% of the candidates taking the examining body OCR’s Latin GCSE are in the top third of the national ability range. What this means is that a profile similar to the sociology GCSE would be useless for classing candidates.

What these profiles really reflect, however, are the groups one would have expected to take these subjects in the 1950s the peak of grammar school education. Vocational subjects, which one might imagine transplanted back into secondary modern schools, could be taught with the expectations of 16-year-olds mastering skills at one level down from the average grammar school student, studying the subjects on the left-hand side of this chart.

While both grammar school pupils and secondary modern pupils would have studied maths, history and other subjects now on the EBacc, secondary modern pupils would typically not have learned Latin: the preserve of those at grammar or fee-paying schools. Those at the top of their sets in these schools, hoping to gain entry into Cambridge or Oxford, would be the ones for whom it was most important to be qualified in Latin, which was a requirement for entrance into both of these universities until 1959.

Quod erat demonstrandum

Today, in spite of this legacy, it can no longer be assumed that the average Latin learner is at the top of the ability range for their school. Since 2000, the numbers of schools offering Latin has increased dramatically, with reportedly 50,000 pupils starting to learn the language each year. For what must be the first time in Latin’s history in the UK, the majority of schools offering Latin right now are non-selective state institutions. Yet, despite this, the numbers of entrants into the OCR GCSE qualification have declined steadily since 2000. We have a situation where more and more young people are interested in Latin and the ancient world, but ever fewer have a qualification to show for it that will survive the current reforms.

Latin has long been defended as a difficult GCSE on the basis of the challenge it offers to the brightest 16-year olds. But as long as qualifications matter, it should be a concern for us all that the middle-range of schoolchildren in this country are put into a situation whereby Latin is inaccessible to them if they want to achieve that “good” rating of A*-C on their CV and they don’t have the opportunity or time to join an after-school club.

If Latin continues to function as a badge of distinction for those at the very top – an A* more impressive than every other A* – then it is a subject that can never belong to everyone. It remains a tool for social elites, with resources of extra contact hours, study time and tutoring, to be classed on their own terms – to the detriment of those now interested in the subject who never had access to it at school before.

This is an edited version of a talk delivered by the author at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Francesca Middleton, Lecturer in Classics (Greek), ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Francesca Middleton (Faculty of Classics) discusses the reform of GCSEs and Latin's reputation as an academically demanding subject.

General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale ̽��ֱ��

Childrens talk, English & Latin : divided into several clauses

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Graduates who went to private schools earn more than graduates who did not, finds study

fpjl2 — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:59:21 +0000

New research shows that graduates who went to private schools earn substantially more than those who went to state schools. Even amongst graduates who went to the same university to study the same subject and who left with the same degree class, those who attended private school earned on average 7% more.

Previous work by the researchers found that graduates who attended private schools are more likely to enter higher status and higher paying occupations. But, once they matched occupations in the comparison fields for the latest research, latest research showed that those who went to a private school still earn 6% more, on average, than those who went to a state school. This is currently equivalent to around £1,500 a year.

̽��ֱ��findings suggest that even when universities widen participation to students from poor backgrounds, there are social inequalities in the success of graduates when they leave higher education.

̽��ֱ��new study, published recently by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, concludes that further research is needed to determine the causes behind the pay gap - whether it is access to particular social networks or better non-cognitive skills such as confidence or self-esteem. Regardless of the explanation, the authors suggest that these results add further weight to the argument that higher education is not the great leveller it was hoped to be.

“Whilst universities have been making strenuous efforts to widen participation in recent years, what happens after students leave their university is also enormously important for their prospects for social mobility. If higher education is to be a route to social mobility then the link between family background and adult outcomes must be broken, or at least reduced, for graduates,” said study co-author Professor Anna Vignoles, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education.

“These results suggest that there is a pressing need to understand why private schooling confers such an advantage in the labour market, even amongst similarly achieving graduates.”

Researchers used longitudinal samples from the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey to look at gross annual earnings six months after graduation, with a sample of 75,000 graduates and for a subset of these they looked at earnings three and a half years after graduation.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that after six months the graduates who attended private school earned an average of £3,000 more than their state school contemporaries. They then looked at the earnings of graduates who left university in 2007 in January 2011, approximately three and a half years later. After this time the gap had increased, with former private school pupils earning an average of £4,500 more than those who attended a state school - amounting to a pay gap of roughly 17%.

Arguably this might be expected, say the researchers, as some of the higher earnings of graduates who attended private schools is down to the fact that they have better A-level grades and this in turn enables them to go on to attend more prestigious universities and study subjects which tend to be more highly rewarded.

But once the researchers analysed graduates who went to the same university to study the same subject and who left with the same degree class, those who went to private schools still earn an average of 7% more three and a half years after graduation.

Amongst graduates from the same backgrounds, who studied the same subject in the same university, and who went into the same occupation, those from private schools still earn 6% more, on average, than those from state schools.

“Our research shows that, even amongst those who succeed in obtaining a degree, family background – and in particular the type of school they went to – continues to influence their success in the work place,” said co-author Dr Claire Crawford, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Warwick’s Department of Economics.

Implicit within government policies to achieve social mobility through improving school and university results is the assumption that once a person has graduated from university, their family background and the school they went to will cease to impact on how much they earn, say the study’s authors, writing for the website ̽��ֱ��Conversation.

“But our new research proves that there is actually a strong relationship between the kind of schools graduates attended and their success in the labour market. Future research might usefully focus on why the influence of family background lingers long beyond graduation,” they write.

New study shows that - even after controlling for subject, degree class, alma mater and occupation - graduates who attended private schools earn on average 6% more than those who attended state schools.

If higher education is to be a route to social mobility then the link between family background and adult outcomes must be broken

Anna Vignoles

Legozilla

Office Space

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike