Yep, think school league tables. Absolutely shag-all to do with improving education, .

"How do they do that? They achieve their performance targets. This is fraud."

They do the opposite. Schools want to do better in the tables, so they switch exam boards for certain subjests as their exams are considered slightly easier. Other exam boards then leapfog them and make theirs even easier to get the school's business back.
You only need to look at past papers to see the trend. At school our geology and physics teachers have twenty years worth of past papers. You could see the gradual change.
If they want to improve standards they should have just one exam board nation wide. The same exam for every subject in every school with no financial pressure to make them easier.

That's something that's always puzzled me. I just can't understand why all kids don't take the same exams.

"Because competition is always better."

In France it's part of the teachers duties to write and mark the exams, for no extra pay. Several teachers write papers and one gets picked on the day to be given to everyone. Seems to work ok

How is that any better? If a school is struggling in the league tables, the head can coerce the teachers to write slightly easier exam papers and thereby improve the school's results for that year.

Always it is so. You put people under pressure to meet targets, they will fix whatever system you give them to increase the chances of meeting those targets. Everything else becomes secondary.

Everyone takes the same paper, across the whole country. It's just that the papers get written by working teachers instead of retired/ inexperienced people and the teachers take it in turn to write them, as a draw between the ones with the right amount of experience throughout the country. Seems obvious why it's better.

If they want to improve standards they should have just one exam board nation wide. The same exam for every subject in every school with no financial pressure to make them easier.

Yep, think school league tables. Absolutely shag-all to do with improving education, except perhaps for some original notion of improving things.

However, the number of "there, they're, their", "should of" and "defiantly and definately" fcuk-ups appear to have increased a hundredfold since the tables were introduced; not to mention the piss-poor arithmetical skills - it seems most people can barely add up a couple of numbers without a calculator.