Johann Hari

If Britain’s coursework system were submitted for examination, it would be lucky to scrape an E grade and a place doing Golf Course Studies at De Montford University. This week, the AQA exam board warned (again) that teachers are routinely waving through material that had been “blatantly copied from the internet”, and another GCSE exam authority, Edexcel, warned that schools were now offering so much “help” to students that it amounted to “a kind of mass plagiarism”.

Coursework has become just another way in which middle class parents have rigged the British education system in favour of their coddled children. Last year, the National Union of Teachers surveyed 1700 of its members and found they believe coursework “favours the middle class” and “penalises working class boys”. By the time it reaches an examiner, they explained, several layers of privilege have coated a middle class child’s coursework. My parents and siblings all left school at 16 and view academic work as a mysterious foreign land, but even if I had asked them for help when I scribbled out my GCSE coursework a decade ago, they would – quite rightly – have told me to do my own damn work. This would be viewed as heresy in Highgate or Dulwich, where parents routinely offer ‘helpful advice’ – a rephrasing here, a suggested paragraph there – and employ private tutors to do the same. Some even write the coursework for their kids – I was astonished when a forty-two year old friend cancelled a dinner-date recently because “I’ve got history coursework to hand in tomorrow.”

But the rigging of coursework does not end with Mummy and Daddy. Teachers are permitted under the rules to get absurdly close to writing the assignments for their students. They are allowed (and, in posh schools, expected) to provide “scaffolding” for the essays – outlining the paragraph-by-paragraph structure a pupil should follow. Some hand out “fact-sheets” with useful quotations and suggested arguments. They can legitimately tell a student to “rewrite” their coursework once, twice, or a dozen times, offering “advice” each time. Of course, private schools have far greater resources to give this “help”. Teachers are supposed to be the front-line guarding against plagiarism and cheating, but – in obeisance to the great god of League Tables – they are often acting as its cheerleaders.

Francis Gilbert – author of the excellent “I’m a Teacher, get Me Out of Here!” – explains, “This is particularly bad in the so-called ‘posh’ schools, where the pressure to get amazing results out of indolent, arrogant students is intense.” When Gilbert started working at a so-called comprehensive stuffed with middle class children, he was puzzled as to how the English department where he taught managed to achieve 100 percent A-C grades. The deputy head explained, “We cheat! But everyone does, so it doesn’t matter.” Any child who was falling behind (rare in a school with such ‘helpful’ parents) was placed in a special class where the teacher would write out the correct sentences underneath their sub-literate scrawl, and they would copy her. Gilbert explains, “This was back in the days when English was assessed entirely by coursework. Once that ended, surprise, surprise, the results plummeted.”

Far from growing up too fast – that narcoleptic cliché – middle class teenagers are now almost unbelievably infantilised and over-protected: in 2002, a teacher was forced to quit Charterhouse public school (cost: £18,000 a year) after it was revealed that he had not even required many of his students to complete their coursework. He simply invented high grades on their mark sheets, assuming his boys were A-grade candidates.

But it’s not just the bias it provides to middle class students that should kill coursework. Its credibility has been mown down on the information super-highway. Within seconds of googling, I found companies that promise “coursework on business, economics, politics and many other subjects starting at just £9.99”. Some exam boards even seem to believe this internet plagiarism is acceptable - Dr Ellie Johnson Searle, director of the Joint Council for Qualifications, has described copying-and-pasting euphemistically as “self-teaching”.

Later this year, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is due to issue the results of a two-year investigation into cheating in Britain’s exams. It will be bizarre if they do not declare that the coursework system is corrupt from top to bottom. If it is to survive at all, it should be written under supervised conditions in the school – becoming baggier exams, with a longer time-frame and more scope for research. But it is hard to imagine the government being brave enough to puncture the illusion of ever-rising GCSE grades (never mind provoking the ire of middling Middle England parents). It seems the government prefer a system that rewards the pushy dishonesty of parents and teachers, rather than the abilities of their children.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: A private tutor from London writes: "You are so right about the scandal of GCSE and A-level coursework. As a private tutor in London, I see it all, and it is very hard even to know what "help" from outside adults is considered acceptable or not. There seem to be no rules at all, and the system is clearly weighted against poorer pupils who do not have parents who can help, or tutors, or their own computers. Poorer pupils also often attend worse schools, where they are not given nifty scaffolding and other supports for their "independent" work. Many are lucky if the teachers even cover the whole curriculum.

One reason so much help is provided is that the pupils themselves would be totally incapable of managing the coursework without it. They simply do not have the required reading, research and writing skills, nor the reasoning skills necessary for tackling the maths coursework. Most, frankly, would not know where to begin. These are not stupid kids, but they haven't been taught over Years 7,8 and 9 how to undertake such tasks.

Coursework as it now stands should be abolished - but don't quote me (or if you do, don't give my name)! I'm already treading on thin ice because of my out-spokenness."

POSTSCRIPT: Feedback is very welcome at johann *at* johannhari.com. At the moment I'm getting over 200 e-mails a day so please be patient if it takes me a while to reply - I do read them all.