"The highest grade you could get in a CSE was equivalent to a bare pass in O level, IIRC."
Yes. I was rubbish at languages so ended up doing CSE French. Fortunately I managed to get a Grade 1 which was counted as the equivalent of a Grade C at O Level.
Why was this fortunate? Well, I applied to UCL and back in those days (and, up until 2020) they still required an O level pass in a foreign language at O level for ALL courses or you were otherwise required to take and pass a foreign language course before you graduated. So, even though I studied a course at UCL similar to the current MORSE course at Warwick I was also required to have a modern foreign language at O Level.
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"Two bare passes in Woodwork and Needlework..."
That does take me back. I went to an ex-secondary modern and we were the first cohort not to take the 11 plus in our county and the first to go to a comprehensive school.
The school was in a very mixed area in what was then a "New Town" (although it was always a city). It was set up very much to offer practical skills as much as academic skills. There were classrooms full of typewriters, ovens for cookery, lathes and drills for woodwork and metalwork and even, I remember, pouring molten metal into sand casts.
Certainly, everybody was required to do metalwork and woodwork; cookery and needlework in the first to third years (year 7 to 9 nowadays). However, my attempts at both a wooden aeroplane and a stuffed soft toy were equally terrible.
But, despite this, it was very clear that, when given a choice, boys overwhelmingly chose technical drawing and girls chose typing. (by the way, can you even imagine nowadays a school offering technical drawing and typing as subjects in their own right?). Btw, I chose technical drawing and really enjoyed it.
However, things really changed when I got to university. For the first time in my life I came across people who were extremely focused and driven, they knew what they wanted out of life and believed that they could get it.
What was the difference? Well, a lot of the people I met at university came from much more academically focused schools, private schools or just generally from a very upper-middle class background. They certainly hadn't learnt that a good job for a girl was a "nice" office job and they certainly hadn't been taught needlework or typing at school.
For example, in the Hall of Residence where I stayed in the first and third years there were quite a number of students from the various London medical schools.
The one thing that they all had in common was a belief that any job or profession was open to them if they simply tried hard enough - I think that there were actually more women than men studying medicine, even back then, and it simply didn't occur to these girls to think any differently than that she could and would become a doctor. What they also had in common, was a rather different family and school background to mine.
All very different from the sort of environment I had grown up in prior to going to university.
The sort of expectations and role models that you have when younger really can make a huge difference to believing what you are capable of doing. It really can be hugely difficult to even comprehend going to university when you’ve never met anyone who has.