"A working programmer friend of mine wanted to do A-level in mathematics. He could only find one place in London that offers an adults course." I work in Adult

"A working programmer friend of mine wanted to do A-level in mathematics. He could only find one place in London that offers an adults course." I work in Adult Education in the UK, and I also teach in a local Further Education College. You won't find an AS/A2 level course in Maths or any of the Sciences easily now. Its because of 'data driven management', which brings this post back on topic for this forum... The short version: AS/A2 Maths and Science subjects are specialised and difficult. Evening class students have work and family commitments. They start a course with great enthusiasm, then, usually just after the New Year, reality kicks in with the cold weather and the difficulty of finding time to study. People drop out of the course. Those who have the time and self-organisation to make it to the exams usually pass, although grades are not astounding. Data: when you attend a course in a Skills Funding Agency funded programme, your attendance is monitored and used to compile something called an ISR. Your attendance and the outcome of your exams are on the database. Success: The percentage of the students who started left at the end is called 'retention'. The percentage of students who took the exam who pass is called 'achievement'. Success = retention * achievement. "Raising Standards": Success rates are compared with national benchmarks. Courses with pass rates that are more than 5% below benchmark are 'poor quality'. Single course percentages are aggregated (in wonderful ways) to give success figures for departments. Departments have success targets. Easiest way to improve your success? Dump the low performing courses. They happen to be the harder subjects. There is a small industry in specialised data mining and tracking software that will process the database and 'pull out' the success statistics. Most of the applications look like they are written in VB or something similar, but some have Web interfaces. Middle managers in colleges in the UK spend an awful lot of time going through the database reports. So now you know! Next time a politician speaks about 'raising standards in education' be aware that the only way you get fast change in the pass rates is by simply removing the lower scores by closing the courses.