I thought I would start the New Year with warmest greetings to both my readers and a classy headline quoting the Roman poet and satirist, Juvenal. My Latin headline is also a tribute to OCR, the exam board who needed to check a GCSE Latin paper four days before pupils took the exam. With no-one on the staff who knew enough Latin, they sent out the paper with errors in three questions. With further pre-Christmas furore about exam board employees telling teachers their exams were easy and dropping massive hints about the questions in the next exams, I was going to write a pretentious adaptation, like, “Quis judicet ipsos judices?” but while I was checking my Latin, I discovered that the Latin verb “tempto” can mean both “to test” and also “to bribe”, which seemed a bit too close to the truth of the exam scandal. So I gave up on that idea and enjoyed watching Govey, the Education Prefect, running around solving the problems of exams and trying to deal with the teachers’ bit of the government’s efforts to reduce public-sector pensions.
I am now in receipt of a teacher’s pension. In addition, for working three years as a part-time Special Needs Officer, I also get a tiny pension from the West Yorkshire Pension Fund, which runs the pension schemes of several Yorkshire local authorities. The WYPF does not pay eye-watering bonuses to its staff. Neither does it have a glass and steel skyscraper HQ in the City. From an office above a garage in Bradford, it has for several years running won industry awards for being the best run and best invested pension fund. It is a shining example of a well-run and sustainable pension scheme.
The message of government propaganda is that the current levels of teachers’ pensions are not sustainable. This is true. They’re unsustainable because the government spends your pension contributions as soon as you pay them in. The teachers’ pension fund (TPF) is a notional fund – the money you pay in each month is just added to the government’s income. Many years ago when I was an NASUWT official, the union commissioned an accountancy firm to look into what could have happened if the TPF had been a real fund, with real money and real investments. The results were surprising. At the time, allowing for industry-average growth in investment returns, the amounts that had been paid in by working teachers hugely exceeded the moneys paid out in pensions. Although a few teachers lived to a ripe old age, there were many others like my old chemistry teacher who retired on Friday, aged 70, and died cycling home from his retirement party on Saturday. He paid in for over forty years and drew his pension for a day. The NASUWT study showed the amount of money in reserves, if the TPF had been a real fund, was so huge that it could have funded current and future pensions without any further contributions from teachers!
The TPF, of course, is a monopoly, whereas the exam boards are part of the free market. As commercial companies, they now offer study aids and training sessions to back up their exams. At one of these sessions, according to the Telegraph, teachers were advised to “hammer exam technique” rather than “teach the lot”. At an exam seminar on GCSE history, an examiner was asked if pupils would face a question on Iraq or Iran next year. The reply was, “Off the record, yes.” The comment did not stay off the record and Govey insisted that, “We have introduced new regulations … to make sure [exam board’s] commercial activities do not impact on the standards and integrity of qualifications.” As if anyone might suggest that a commercial exam board might make their exams easier or give teachers tips on how to get better results, just to make a bit more money.
I don’t know why Govey is bothering with a wholesale revision of the exam system or substantial changes to retirement age or pension funding. The answer is obvious if you link the two issues. Set up one exam board which just sells exam grades. No papers, no marking, no errors, no standardisation, just £500 for a grade A, £400 for a B etc. More or less the same kids would get the high grades as in the present system. OK, so the poor kids in sink estates attending struggling comprehensives wouldn’t be able to afford much more than a F in art, but Govey is always telling us that’s all they get at the moment, so even they will be no worse off. The money raised could fund a new teachers’ pension scheme which would be so big that you could all stop paying in and retire at 50.
There would be an added educational bonus – freed from the tyranny of exam results, teachers would once again be able to “teach the lot” rather than “hammer exam technique”. Of course Govey won’t do this. As dear old Juvenal put it, “Rarus enim ferme sunsus communis in illa fortuna.” – “Common sense among men of fortune is rare.”