Is this the end of meritocracy in the UK

If the state education system has been so devalued by continual lowering of grade boundaries and the Oxbridge group make a deliberate effort to skew the entrance criteria to take more State students with lower grades - How does that affect the quality and calibre of students leaving Uni? Are final Uni grades now being dumbed down too? Whose idea was this to dumb down the final University entrance grades? It seems like levelling down not levelling up? Where has meritocracy gone for selection? Why hasn't the teaching of foundation skills at primary school and the subjects at GCSE level been reviewed to check that standards are not going down? Who cares if they are? What has gone wrong with UK schooling after the introduction of the 'curriculum for excellence?' Has social engineering taken over facts? Somebody somewhere knows this and has put social integration and social cohesion before geography and history? Politicians and educationalists don't care but teachers do. Is this why it is too hard to retain teachers because teaching is now so prescriptive?

- It’s hard to retain teachers because the pay is ****.
- Grade boundaries at GCSE/ A - Level have been declining for years
- Grade inflation has also been going on for the last 20 years, ever since Tony Blair wanted 50% of young people to attend HE. The grades needed to be inflated as the total amount of students attending HE can’t go from 5% in the 1970s to 50% in the 2000s without the grades being inflated.

I agree with you. I understand that many amazing teachers are not being retained or have resigned in numbers due to the social interference with curriculums, and prescriptive methods of teaching required to be used. I have no statistics to back my assertion but I am led to believe teachers in classrooms are being used more and more as crowd control and assaulted in ever greater numbers which is a shocking state of affairs.

At University level I think there is a backlash too with many students rejecting the large debt levels required to get any degree at any cost. The dismantling of the old style of bursary forcing many thousands of students to take large loans has only made huge profits for the banks and finance organisations (and the financial gain of politicians associated with them)

The Universities are never more open to corruption, and the loss of meritocracy fosters this.

When, exactly, do you think the UK “was” a meritocracy?

Probably the same time as when you could leave your doors open and no-one would even think of stealing from you, and Bobbies On The Beat would give errant kids a clip round the ear.

back when there was warm beer on tap, cricket on the green, the vicar rode around on his bike and the poors all knew their place.

If the state education system has been so devalued by continual lowering of grade boundaries and the Oxbridge group make a deliberate effort to skew the entrance criteria to take more State students with lower grades - How does that affect the quality and calibre of students leaving Uni? Are final Uni grades now being dumbed down too? Whose idea was this to dumb down the final University entrance grades? It seems like levelling down not levelling up? Where has meritocracy gone for selection? Why hasn't the teaching of foundation skills at primary school and the subjects at GCSE level been reviewed to check that standards are not going down? Who cares if they are? What has gone wrong with UK schooling after the introduction of the 'curriculum for excellence?' Has social engineering taken over facts? Somebody somewhere knows this and has put social integration and social cohesion before geography and history? Politicians and educationalists don't care but teachers do. Is this why it is too hard to retain teachers because teaching is now so prescriptive?

When, exactly, do you think the UK “was” a meritocracy?

Do explain when this golden age of meritocracy was.

<... > it seems there is a plan to reduce the knowledge levels of so many kids and no one is protesting because there is a constant supply of fast food and gaming.

It's not so much when the golden age was, it is more when the UK stopped using meritocracy

I'm not sure when that was, but it seems to have been a gradual mission creep. Inflating the grades, making the exams less rigorous and then easing everyone into HE to massage unemployment figures.

That wasn't just confined to Tony Blair but he created such a short sighted step by trying to ensure everyone had a degree, it consigned so many talented and able people to low paid hard manual jobs because they didn't have a degree. When you see those same jobs now requiring a degree something has gone very badly wrong indeed. It consigns many people without a degree as unemployable.

Yes my ethos is that every child from early years onwards should be stretched to the maximum of their capability, and teachers should be able to teach in a class with children of similar aptitudes without riot control. Children should leave school from first school so proficient in reading, writing, key board and numeracy skills that they can teach themselves. They should have to learn facts and learn by repetition, music and songs. Raise the bar, stretch them all to the limit and have exams and grades that are universally understood to be rigorous Internationally. The saddest part now is we are now unable to have the IB here in the UK because half of our kids wouldn't even get past the first question, so we have to have our own watered down version.

Maybe we do need a complete rethink of what education is for. Some third world schools teach far more effectively with far better outcomes on a massively reduced and limited budget. Why is this? Their poverty levels are off the scale so it can't all be blamed on poverty.

If we cannot allow meritocracy to be part of the educational process we are deluding our brightest and best students and democracy is about fairness. It doesn't matter where these students come from, but it does matter that the grades they achieve are robust and internationally acknowledged. The future of the UK is at stake here but it seems there is a plan to reduce the knowledge levels of so many kids and no one is protesting because there is a constant supply of fast food and gaming.

It's not so much when the golden age was, it is more when the UK stopped using meritocracy

I'm not sure when that was, but it seems to have been a gradual mission creep. Inflating the grades, making the exams less rigorous and then easing everyone into HE to massage unemployment figures.

That wasn't just confined to Tony Blair but he created such a short sighted step by trying to ensure everyone had a degree

it consigned so many talented and able people to low paid hard manual jobs because they didn't have a degree. When you see those same jobs now requiring a degree something has gone very badly wrong indeed. It consigns many people without a degree as unemployable.

Yes my ethos is that every child from early years onwards should be stretched to the maximum of their capability, and teachers should be able to teach in a class with children of similar aptitudes without riot control. Children should leave school from first school so proficient in reading, writing, key board and numeracy skills that they can teach themselves. They should have to learn facts and learn by repetition, music and songs. Raise the bar, stretch them all to the limit and have exams and grades that are universally understood to be rigorous Internationally. The saddest part now is we are now unable to have the IB here in the UK because half of our kids wouldn't even get past the first question, so we have to have our own watered down version.

Maybe we do need a complete rethink of what education is for. Some third world schools teach far more effectively with far better outcomes on a massively reduced and limited budget. Why is this? Their poverty levels are off the scale so it can't all be blamed on poverty.

If we cannot allow meritocracy to be part of the educational process we are deluding our brightest and best students and democracy is about fairness.

Probably the same time as when you could leave your doors open and no-one would even think of stealing from you, and Bobbies On The Beat would give errant kids a clip round the ear.

That wasn't just confined to Tony Blair but he created such a short sighted step by trying to ensure everyone had a degree, it consigned so many talented and able people to low paid hard manual jobs because they didn't have a degree. When you see those same jobs now requiring a degree something has gone very badly wrong indeed. It consigns many people without a degree as unemployable.