A level results and the subversion of truth – why Christian chaplains are dismayed

Aug 19, 2017 by Andrew Symes

By Gordon Parry, Christian Today.

The Christian Church in Britain has long played a highly significant role in the provision of primary and secondary education, both maintained and independent. In all types of school a Christian chaplain is often a highly regarded member of staff, working alongside both students and staff, offering counsel to individuals and groups as well as representing the life of a school through liturgy, prayer, conversation and debate. School chaplains also ‘speak truth to power’ insofar as they may well convey messages that are unpopular with or hard to hear by vested interests with a school.

One of these messages may well be that not all students will achieve equally well in all areas of school life because there are innate differences between them…

…All schools, even selective ones, contain a diversity of talent. It appears that a confusion has arisen between respecting and working with differences between individual students, while valuing them all equally (an essential tenet of Christian education), and believing that a grading system that appears to downgrade individual effort is to be sidestepped. Schools cannot be seen to be ‘performing’ any worse than in previous years because it would be failing to recognise the work that they have invested in the new system and it would be difficult to praise students for what they have done if it were to be judged inferior to that of their predecessors the year before…

…Schools have significant responsibility for the development of the talents that each of their students possesses but it should not be considered appropriate to massage examination performance figures so as to disguise the effects of a more rigorous examination system.

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