The computer driving licence¶

The European Computer Driving Licence certifies that its holder can operate application software. It is named after the document a person needs in order to drive a car. In 2017, two hundred and nine schools in England entered more than ninety-five per cent of their pupils for it.

Reading a qualification as points¶

A school performance table counts points. Every qualification arrives at it as a point value in a bucket, and the table has no means of asking what the qualification is for, how long it took, or what a holder can now do. Two years of a subject and a certificate in which menu holds the sort command present the same face to it.

This is not a defect in the table so much as a description of what a table is. Something had to be countable for schools to be compared at all, and what is countable about a qualification is its points.

The open bucket¶

Emma Ing, Ofsted’s regional director for the East Midlands, set out in September 2018 what inspectors were being told to look for, and defined the practice plainly: “Gaming happens when the decisions made about the curriculum favour the league tables, rather than the individual needs of pupils.” Inspectors were to scrutinise “unusual entry patterns” and look for pupils entered for qualifications with significant subject overlap.

The figures she cited are the substance. Two hundred and nine schools entering more than ninety-five per cent of a cohort, and those schools scoring +0.88 in the Open bucket against their own results elsewhere. A cohort of that completeness is not a curriculum decision taken pupil by pupil. It is an entry decision taken about a measure.

Ing also wrote that in her experience most schools do the best for their individual pupils and do not game the system. The schools did not decide what a point was worth.

Syntax is cheap to examine¶

What a qualification of this kind tests is where the commands are. Where the commands are is a property of one version of one piece of software, and it changes when the software does, so the certified skill has a shelf life measured in release cycles. It was never a claim about capability. It was a claim about familiarity with an interface, dressed in the vocabulary of a licence.

The reason performance tables fill up with certificates of this shape is not that anybody prefers them. It is that they are cheap to examine. A candidate either found the command or did not, and a machine can mark that in minutes. Whether the same candidate could build a thing, diagnose a fault, or tell a sound design from a plausible one was not examined, and examining it would have cost an examiner’s time rather than a marking scheme.

So the trade sells what can be marked and the table counts what can be scored, and the two fit together without anybody having to intend it. The qualification was not a fraud. It certified exactly what it said it certified, to anybody who cared to read the syllabus, and the reading was the part nobody had time for.

Subtraction¶

The Department for Education announced in February 2017 that the qualification would stop counting from 2019, and in March moved that forward to 2018. The ground it gave was not that schools had been entering whole cohorts. It was that the qualification “does not demonstrate the characteristics of a Technical Award”.

By November of the same year schools were moving to a different level two qualification in IT user skills.

The remedy for a table filled with a substitutable item is to remove the item, and it works on that item.

The clerk’s brief¶

September 2018: The inspectorate publishes what it looks for¶

Emma Ing, Ofsted’s regional director for the East Midlands, wrote on the education inspection blog on 4 September 2018 that gaming “happens when the decisions made about the curriculum favour the league tables, rather than the individual needs of pupils”, that inspectors scrutinise unusual entry patterns, and that in 2017 two hundred and nine schools entered more than ninety-five per cent of their cohort for the European Computer Driving Licence, scoring +0.88 in the Open bucket against their other elements. Ing recorded that the Department for Education had removed it from the list of approved qualifications. The clerks note the ordering: the qualification was withdrawn first and the inspection guidance published afterwards.

November 2017: The next qualification¶

Within months of the withdrawal being announced, schools were registering in numbers for a different level two IT qualification, reported on 6 November 2017. The clerks decline to record the entry figures, which mix schools with candidates in the sources available, and record instead that the movement took months rather than years.

March 2017: The item is removed from the count¶

The Department for Education announced in February 2017 that the qualification would no longer count towards school performance tables from 2019, and on 29 March revised guidance brought that forward to the 2018 tables. The reason the department gave was a question of classification: “following a comprehensive review of the ECDL, we concluded that it does not demonstrate the characteristics of a Technical Award”. The clerks observe that the remedy was subtraction from a list, that the ground given concerned what the qualification was rather than what schools had done with it, and that lists of approved qualifications are long.

The equivalence¶

The certificate said it examined the operation of application software, and it did. What it was asked to do was stand in a table beside two-year subjects and be worth a comparable number of points, and that comparison was made by an arrangement with no means of telling the two apart. The clerks’ standing assessment is that a performance table selects for qualifications that are cheap to examine, that cheapness to examine and worth to a pupil are unrelated quantities, and that striking one from the list acts on the qualification rather than on the reason it was attractive, which is why the replacement took months.