Setting the Gold Standard

This year the debate about the GCSE results has extended beyond the day of the results. Usually the morning of celebrations is followed by the afternoon debate as to whether real standards have dropped. The debate then ends and it is business as usual. However the events of last week open up a debate about functional literacy that reaches far beyond the impact on individual schools.


This is not to minimise the impact on individual schools and their students. I have personally witnessed this however the significance of the events this week goes well beyond schools.

In the world of adult learning the focus for many years has been on the number of adults who are not functionally literate and numerate and this has been extended into whether we have the skilled workforce required for the 21st century. There are numerous reports that have addressed these issues.

All these reports assume that there is a standard that could be used to measure functionally literacy and numeracy and a minimum skill level. In respect of skills in Adult Learning world the standard that has been adopted is NVQ Level 2 and it is assumed that you have achieved the standard required to become a skilled worker, albeit with further training, if you have an NVQ Level 2 or you have 5 GCSEs A*-C. If you have not reached this standard then there is lots of funding available you to do so, once you have reached this standard then that funding tends to disappear.

Now I have long argued that adopting this approach is like comparing apples and pears. It is just about a reasonable argument that to demonstrate skills at NVQ Level 2 you do need a significant amount of knowledge, but it is not the ‘type of knowledge’ that is measured by a GCSE.

What however this current debate about the English GCSE exposes is that it is no longer possible to use the ‘exam system’ to determine whether someone has reached the level, which determines whether they are functionally literate. If the decision was made to increase the marked required to achieve a level C by 10 points, as appears to be the case, then that decision appears to be based on maintaining the ‘rigour’ of the exam system rather than on providing a gold standard for literacy.

We wait to see what Ofqual decides to do over the coming week. It will be interesting to see whether they factor into that decision these wider implications.

If they do not then when the next person gets up to say that x millions of adults in this country are functionally illiterate and lack ‘basic skills’, then someone should ask what do they actually mean and how do they know.

Is the e-portfolio movement running out of steam?

It was announced recently that the national e-portfolio in Australia had been cancelled and replaced by a ‘connecting and sharing’ forum. Is this a sign that ePortfolios in Australia is losing momentum?


I attended the national event in Australia a couple of years ago and came away from it with a suspicion that the e-portfolio movement in Australia is being ‘bogged down, with the same issues that affect the discussions about e-portfolios in Europe. There was still too much talk about what is an e-portfolio rather than what they can actually do. The discussion was also dominated by academics without any real attempt to engage the commercial sector.

The announcement about the new Forum in Sydney in September is also accompanied about details of two events. The first event examines ‘ePortfolios as Personal Learning Spaces’. There should be a question mark at the end because there is little evidence that anyone wants to use e-Portfolios as a personal learning space primarily because, in my view; they don’t see the point. This sort of solution has been offered across many Higher Education institutions in the UK but there is little evidence of widespread use.

The second event is about the ‘Using eportfolios for online & Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) assessment’ I am unsure what will be presented but they perhaps should have a look at the Recognise project recogniseme.ncl-coll.ac.uk/ which is already using an e-portfolio for RPL and it works.

I would suggest that the key questions that this forum in September needs to address, based on the lessons learnt from the wider e-portfolio community are;

• Why is the role of e-portfolio in relation to digital identity even being considered when there are far better and more ubiquitous applications that do this like Facebook etc?

• Is the e-portfolio community really being responsible in supporting ‘Do-it-yourself’ e-portfolio solutions when there are already e-portfolios solutions developed that work? I understand that there are clever people who can build a car from a kit but is that a sustainable model for the future production of cars!

The forum also needs to think about what is the point of re-inventing the wheel continually when there are already solutions that are developed that could effectively work in Australia. I am mindful there is a concern that many of these are developed by ‘commercial companies’ and therefore a dependency on these companies could develop. However by opting for internally developed solutions, all that is happening is that dependency on a company is being swopped with a dependency on a group of individuals in an IT department.

Why the development of e-portfolio needs to continue to be pursued is that is tantamount to the ‘bleeding obvious,’ that technology should be able to bring real benefits to assessment and specifically the assessment of vocational skills. The current paper based systems are indefensible in how they divert people from real teaching and learning to bureaucratic activities; their cost and their impact on the environment. However the e-portfolio community should start taking a more responsible approach to moving this whole debate forward or else it will run out of steam.