23rd January 2026
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
HAPPY FRIDAY We have reached the halfway hump and it’s now a clear run to the half term finish line - three weeks to go, followed by a very short five week half term ahead of Easter. There is much to do. This week I would like to talk to you about competition and results. Specifically, athletics and the 100M final. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics Jesse Owens completed the final in a gold medal winning time of 10.03; the first of four wins. Fast forward to 2009, still in Berlin, where Usain Bolt took to the track for his own 100M final. He set the world record with a time of 9.58 about half a second quicker than Owens. If you ran both races simultaneously Owens would have come in joint last in the Bolt race. Does that make Owens a loser by modern standards? No. You would never make that comparison. Owens is still a gold medal winner and in the context of the 1936 race he was the best. To compare him to Bolt is to ignore the progress that has been made in the world of athletics over the last eighty plus years. But imagine if he were to race alongside Bolt and achieve that time. It would be foolish of him to state that he is still a gold medal runner with that time and has put in a performance equal to that which achieved gold. Why? Because the bar has been raised over that time. Progress has been made. Athletes across the globe have got better whilst the performance of Owens would have stagnated or stalled. This brings me to the exam system that our learners are faced with as I think that the government have created something similar to the world of athletics. Our learners are now entering a world where two of them could gain an identical mark in their English paper but because they took it a year apart the grade boundary shifted and gave one of them a grade 5 and the other a grade 4. Will the person looking at their CV and interviewing them know this? Unlikely. Will they formulate a preconception of academic ability and think one is better than the other? Possibly.
However, what the system does is acknowledge the context that learners take their exams in. To compare Bolt and Owens is to say they are both gold medal winners in the context of their day. Is the time really that important? I will leave that for you to decide. What it does do is highlight the progress that has been made in that time period. Progress is a key measurement of education systems today. This is the system our learners have to face and whether we like it, agree with it, dislike it or disagree with it, it is how we are judged. It is a system with many flaws but one that has raising standards, raising the bar, making progress (in the broader economical, social and physical sense) at the heart of its intention. Each year is another 100M final for our learners that is taken in a different context. If we took a race from last year and ranked the contenders and then reran the race this year we might find that everyone improved. However, fifth place from last year may now be first - making excellent progress. First place from last year may drop down to fifth but, like Bolt, may turn in a faster time. That does not mean that the runner has failed in any form, however, they have made less progress than their peer runner due to their starting point. Learners and schools for that matter are rarely judged or graded independently but as part of a collective set of runners. Their ranking or grade is based as much on how the other runners did as it is on their own race. And because the system is like this our learners, like all good runners, must keep training to better their personal best. However, we must acknowledge that in any race someone will be fastest and someone will be slowest and there will be an average time. That means that fifty percent of the runners will be below average no matter what. That is the unfortunate legacy of this system. It does not however mean that there have been no improvements. When talking