GCSE results day was marked with the usual front pages filled with pictures of beaming students. What you didn’t see was the invisible third of 16-year-olds in England who failed their maths and English GCSEs, the obstacle to their future.

That’s 360,000 failed in a system designed by Michael Gove as education minister to mark out winners from losers. It’s a cast of mind shared by many in his party who still yearn for the 11-plus, which consigned a random number of children to failure before they’d hardly begun. A few councils still do it.

Once failed, this one-third must resit English and maths to do any other course: colleges cannot provide them with a blessed start from failed schooling, as they are refused funds for any student not taking repeated resits. Only about 17% of the wretched resitters ever pass. Quite apart from the despair, David Hughes, head of the Association of Colleges, points to the waste: of the far-too-few 16 teaching hours a week for students on post-16 study courses, resitters must be taught seven hours of hated English and maths that most of them will fail. That leaves just nine hours for the vocational courses they choose. No wonder UCL research shows the damage done: self-confidence is lost, many drop out altogether. That doesn’t happen in Wales and Northern Ireland, where resits are not mandatory for continuing study.

Labour gets........

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