To be surprised you mumsnetters criticised my ex’s school !!

With 2CSE you could actually still have a life, you could buy a house you could own a car. You could potentially better yourself with evening classes you could still exist in the modern world.
If that was what you came out with now as an equivalent honestly, you might as well give up. You would literally have no chance.
You wouldn’t even be allowed to go and do an apprentice electricians plumbers or carpentry course.

This thread is an interesting commentary on the English and their relationship with education.

Some people: 2 CSEs are shockingly poor, rough schools are dreadful, title Tabitha can't fraternise with these people.

Other people: rough is normal, 2 CSEs is fine, practical skills are better and education is overrated.

What we actually need is a love of learning, for all children. Safe, encouraging education. A government and media which promotes learning and education. NOT just school rote learning but a love of life-long learning. Understanding that education should be defensive against things Ike; being ripped off, shit government, media telling you what they want you to think, a lack of critical thinking.

As far as I can tell some cultures, including the Scottish historically, have understood this. Education is the way to stop the arseholes above you holding you down. It's not clever to hate it. Engaging with it means you can rewrite it.

From your OP

FWIW the comp I went to wasn’t short for ‘comprehensive’ - more compost heap - but that’s possibly the subject of another thread. !

All I can say about that - and I think I speak for most of us here - is please for the love of mercy - NO! That is not the subject of yet another thread.

She really is pure comedy 😂😂 what will they come up with next?

Please keep posting OP! 😁

I was of the O and A level generation as was my husband. He went to a grammar school, I got a grammar school place at a GDST school (was GPDST in may day). Neither of us were high fliers, he went through the school system and then to a polytechnic (now a uni), didn't do badly at all. I was kicked out aged fourteen and went to a couple of other schools for brief periods where I did not get on at all well. Was sent to a boarding school for two years from sixteen-eighteen, from which I have never recovered :-). However I didn't do too badly later on so all's well that ends well. Younger second cousins of mine went to local comps and achieved brilliant results going on to excellent careers!

I'm now nearly 75 and am laughing at all this. I have one adult child who dropped out of sixth form and has forged a stellar career.

You never can tell.

In some ways it is indeed pretty delightful that you're bragging that your ex failed 70% of the low level, unchallenging exams he sat.

Strange topic for a thread but 2 CSEs is dire. Older friend says it was very very rare in her SE London comp for anyone to leave with so few qualifications. Anyway, schools can change a lot in 4 years, never mind almost 40.

No, it hasn't been a thing for over 30 years. ILEA stands for Inner London Education Authority. Mrs Thatcher and her cronies abolished it and transferred all the schools to the London Boroughs, which had to set up Local Education Authorities to run them. Nowadays lots of them are run by Academy Trusts, I believe. Privatisation by the back door, surely, but that's another story.

And spending £30 a month on food ,she also seems to have a fondness for sainsbury, s and Greggs .

🤣🤣🤣🤣 not in most people’s world. It could be argued why did he bother.

The op is the gift that keeps on giving. She'll deviate to chart songs or 56 year old men at any moment. Or findus crispy pancakes.....

Meh, I left mine with eight GCSEs plus an AEB certificate in Life Skills and only got stabbed once (wasn't part of the AEB exam, though). Highest grades in the cohort, too.

Strangely, this seems to shock colleagues at work.

GCSE - General Certificate of Secondary Education. O levels and CSE conflated. Not a patch on O levels - having done one and taught the other.

Why is everyone criticising this OP's DP's school? I went to a secondary modern in London. I came out with 7 O levels, 3 A levels and went to university at 18. It was a good school (for me, at least) but did not do a range of things, so I did not do maths or physics, but did do biology (mathematical science required for university). I also learned to sew and cook (of inestimable value esp as cookery included nutrition), to draw (not well) and paint (better - and I still do), as well as learn to love classical music. I did not do Latin (so not Oxbridge), and I wish I had - did some Greek at university.
Many comprehensives don't do a tithe of what I was taught where I live, I'm afraid.
I remember my primary school teacher apologising to my DM that he had not pushed to get me into the 11+ set as I only narrowly failed (both my brothers passed - but there was a higher pass mark for girls in the borough where I lived because more girls passed and there were fewer places; not excusing myself, stating a fact).

2 CSEs at grade 1 is a C grade equivalent in GCSE and probably a 4/5 now in the numbered version.
Anything less isn't a pass.
That was definitely not a good result.

This is the funniest thread I’ve read for a long time 😂

This is such a weird boast.

Why on earth do you care about your exes school's reputation?

Oh bless your heart OP for fighting his corner 🥰

But yeah...2 CSEs is shockingly bad! I'm probably a similar age (we either went down the 'CSE' pathway or the 'O Level' pathway at school. Only the weakest of students followed the CSE pathway, and even then they sat at least 7 of these (sometimes up to 9).

If you imagine an O Level to be the nearest thing to a GCSE and a CSE as being for students who weren't likely to pass a GCSE, that will give you an indication.

To only pass 2 of these really fairly easy exams is not something to boast about, sorry OP!

2 CSEs was pretty rubbish in the 1980s

There were 2 types of exams you could take at 16 - O-levels and CSEs. The O levels were academic and taken by those that did well at 11+ (in the 70s we all took it) - often at grammar schools or the top streams of comprehensives.

CSEs were more practically based qualifications taken by those who failed 11+ and went to Secondary Modern schools or the lower sets of comprehensives. They were introduced in 1965 to give school leavers some type of leaving qualification as prior to this those who didn't take O levels (the majority) left school with no qualifications.

At my bog standard comp in East London - 5 CSEs was considered an OK result with 8 or 9 considered good.

Is this a joke?

People used to say he and Princess D had “three CSEs between them”… pause…”all his”. I have no idea if it was true, I was more silk cut and martini and lemonade, than royal family groupie.

I think the degree from Cambridge was a give, not real. But I apologise for bringing it up, I was just being a butthead.

The history of CSEs is that in 1944 the 11 plus ws introduced to skim off 10-30% of children for an "academic" education leading to O-levels (which replaced the earlier school cert). The rest went either to a technical school (of which very few were built) or normally to a secondary modern, where they left at 15 with no qualifications.

So sometime in the 50s I think, they introduced the CSE so that secondary modern children could have a qualification. So it may well have been more practical. But it was aimed at a lower level than O-level, and I think it was only the highest level of CSE which was a bare pass at O-level.

But it didn't help much because regarded it as a second rate qualification which didn't mean much.

So then they rolled up CSE and O-level together into the GCSE, with the idea that all pupils, grammar, secondary modern, or comprehensive, should be measured on the same scale. A mid-level GCSE was equivalent to a bare pass at O-level.

CSE's were seen as very inferior to O levels. I know as I took 2 CSE's at school but fortunately got O levels as well.