Schools and the Light Brigade

In a few weeks' time thousands of teenagers will be going through their Secondary Education Certificate (Sec) exams which have over the last decade replaced our O levels. More than 1,000 of our secondary school leavers will not even bother to sit for these exams. They have given up - and the system abandoned them long ago.

To express the pain and stress that these exams at the end of secondary school caused us we used to refer to them as the Oh! levels. My impression, judging by the way I have seen my daughter and her friends behave, as to how they try to cope with their distress is that the situation has become worse, much worse.

Our education system, together with the rest of our life, has become like a pressure cooker. We make our children grow up in a hurry and then we rush them through the school system expecting them to pass as many exams as possible to continue studying or find a good job.

Thousands of students are studying their teachers' notes by heart to reproduce them when they do their exams. Drilling for exams is not education. That is why we must change what happens in our schools. These changes are required for all students, not just for the losers. The present system is not working for the winners either. The winners are defined by the grades they get in their exam results.

A large number of students go to private lessons. Official statistics put family expenditure on private lessons at Lm3.5 million in 2000. The real figure is probably higher.

When we analyse students' performance we cannot limit ourselves to the formal morning and afternoon school system. We must also take the evening private lessons into account. Honest Church and private school heads would be the first to admit that even their students are going to private lessons and that their exams performance has to be explained also within this framework and not simply that they are superior to state schools.

While exams have a role to play in education, so long as they are a means to an end and not an end in themselves, we must design different ways of assessing our students. We must not punish those who are different and do not conform to the present definition of success at schools.

Cognitive research shows us today that a large number of young people learn "by doing". That kind of learning has been banished from our schools with the result that 2,000 16-year-olds every year leave school uncertified, unskilled and unemployable.

But even those who are succeeding under present conditions need to succeed differently. The challenges and tasks we face in the 21st century demand of us to be different.

Educating our children as if they are Light Brigade recruits will not work today. Ours is to "reason why" and not simply "to do and die". Problem solving, entrepreneurial flair, the ability to design solutions for new problems, the ability to work with others... an examination-driven school system which does not cultivate these attitudes and skills is hopelessly out of date.

We must educate for complexity while exams designed for yesterday tend to reward uniformity and unilinearity. Today's and tomorrow's exams must be designed for today and tomorrow not for yesterday. Reality has become so complex that no simple solution will work. Solutions must arise out of diversity... out of the contribution of different persons with different skills, with different approaches.

Mono-cultural schools are hopelessly out of touch in today's multicultural world. If this world is to survive and thrive we must learn to live with diversity and celebrate diversity as a precious resource rather than as a terrible nuisance and feel nostalgic about a golden age in the past where we dream of people living apart from each other on the basis of class, gender, religion and race.

The celebration of diversity must happen in our schools if the formal education system is to be part of the solution and not of the problem that our world faces.

Mr Bartolo is the Labour Party's spokesman on education.