Plastic Intelligence, EBacc, and the Cognitive Underclass

I will address these issues in the reverse order that they appear in the title.

The Cognitive Underclass

Section 2.2 of ‘Learning Matters‘ is entitled, ‘The educational and social consequences of ‘failure by definition‘.

If a school is defined as failing for not getting pupils to achieve a C grade in English and maths, what does this say about the pupils that find themselves in this shameful category that is causing the failure of their school and the negative labelling of their communities? The failure label will not be new to most of those involved. The whole of the English education system is now structured with threshold ‘Levels’ that all children, regardless of cognitive ability, are ‘expected’ to achieve from the age of three. In Y6, at the close of the primary phase of education the ‘expected’ attainment in the compulsory SATs exams is Level 4. As…