Education Bill

My Lords, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to enlighten me, as I do not know much about what goes on in schools. Certainly, as someone who was once a university teacher, it never occurred to me that the marks meant anything at all. Is it the case that the pupil is given a mark by the teacher but the pupil does not know the mark and is instead given a grade? Is that what actually happens now? Certainly, what used to happen in universities was that, essentially, you gave students marks and, if those marks corresponded to certain grades but there were not the desired number of people in the grades, you just changed the marks. In other words, the marks were meaningless. What does it mean to be given a mark of 80? It means nothing at all; it is not a measure of achievement because we could have given a mark of 0.8 or 0.08 or anything else. What matters is first how the students are ranked, and you then need some other measure of their achievement, which I do not believe is given in any way by either numbers or grades. Can the noble Lord at least tell me what actually happens in schools? When someone marks the student’s papers, would the student know what grade they would get if they knew the mark? Are the marks adjusted to get to the grades, or are the grades adjusted to make them come out the way that they ought to come out?