To have not known kids have to attain grade 4 in maths?

It is not compulsory at all. Nonsense.
They can resit alongside whatever they do at college.
They can do Functional Skills alongside an Apprenticeship.
Who has told you this?

Yes but you have years of experience, a teenager with no relevant experience and not even the basic minimum qualifications, to get on the first rung of the ladder is going to find it much more difficult.

@Mangala13 40 and you’ll probably say that it’s all different these days and I do understand that pressures are high on teens now ( my son is in college having got a 2 in maths and is re-sitting but alongside his chosen course) he also has options for functional skills tests which he has passed the first level. That was not available to me at his age.

I have many years of employment left and I am still very much employable ( recent new role) without these qualifications.

I left college at 17 and have worked ever since, starting in retail, then customer service, call centre etc all min wage roles but worked my way up the silly ladder. Not one person has ever asked me for proof of my GCSE grades. I’ve worked for over 10 different companies, if they cared that much they’d ask.

But you aren't 16. You are an adult with higher educational attainment and experience.

What happened in your day is irrelevant. It is much harder today for 16 year olds to continue with further education or get a job without maths and English GCSEs.

You didn't know they needed a grade 4 and that maths and English need retaking until it is achieved or that this has to be done until 25?

I thought everyone knew that young people needed a 4. The retaking until 25 is, I think, a myth.

Requiring a grade 4 minimum is mentioned often enough in the media and by teachers. Pass grades at GCSE were grades A* - C when DD sat her GCSEs and everyone knew that a minimum C grade was required.

@RampantIvy why isn’t this relevant today? I am still being successfully employed ( recently got a new job) without these qualifications

@MyCyanReader Well, you said it was essential for life ( or something like that) and I was adding a different view that it’s not, by my example.

@MyCyanReader @Ddakji

I don’t have a pass In maths GCSE and I retook it twice ( still got a D/3)

I’m doing just fine in life. Earn over £60k with more earning potential ahead of me in an IT technical role. The lack of a GCSE ( or A levels/ Degree) has never held me back

I think 'they could do it in the lesson but they can't retain the information'.

It is really frustrating teaching kids to e.g. find the mean from a frequency table over and over and each time they will act like it is brand new information.

A lot of the time they can do the thing in the lesson. Doing the thing isn't the problem, remembering how to do the thing is.

But what do you think when you look at a Foundation Maths GCSE paper, look at the results and look at the questions people struggle with.

After all those years of maths teaching.

I'd far rather the difficulty of each exam was set more accurately and that grade boundaries were fixed, so that if pupils started getting genuinely better taught and more able, we'd actually get to a stage where very few got less than grade 4!

We do already have this. It is impossible to set an exam of the same standard each year so what happens is that each year a sample of Y11s sit the exact same exam as previous years (the top secret National Reference tests) and those are used to decide whether the cohort has got better at maths/English. If they have, the grade boundaries are adjusted so that more students get a 4.

In recent years they should have been adjusted so that fewer pupils got a grade 4 because of the impact of covid, but they didn't do this.

@MyCyanReader @Ddakji

I don’t have a pass In maths GCSE and I retook it twice ( still got a D/3)

I’m doing just fine in life. Earn over £60k with more earning potential ahead of me in an IT technical role. The lack of a GCSE ( or A levels/ Degree) has never held me back

@MyCyanReader @Ddakji

I don’t have a pass In maths GCSE and I retook it twice ( still got a D/3)

I’m doing just fine in life. Earn over £60k with more earning potential ahead of me in an IT technical role. The lack of a GCSE ( or A levels/ Degree) has never held me back

@MyCyanReader @Ddakji

I don’t have a pass In maths GCSE and I retook it twice ( still got a D/3)

I’m doing just fine in life. Earn over £60k with more earning potential ahead of me in an IT technical role. The lack of a GCSE ( or A levels/ Degree) has never held me back

I agree, we do seem to have a societal problem with Maths and you're spot on with the "I can't do maths, me!" attitude.

"Something" is badly wrong within the 10+ years of supposedly quality free state education. And I think it's time we had some kind of governmental enquiry/investigation into what that is, comparing our way of teaching with other countries, as you quite rightly say, such as the Far East which have much better outcomes in terms of education and growing economies, etc.

Just making kids keep having the same kind of lessons and re-sitting the same exam is typical Einstein's "doing the same thing and expecting different results" lunacy!

I feel as a society in the UK we're okay with just accepting "oh I can't do maths. Hate numbers."

Whereas in other countries/societies it would be seen as shameful to be bad at maths and not something easily dismissed. I've spent some time googling about maths education around the world and looked at the likes of Singapore for example. Also seen what economy is doing better etc.

Well no its not for the foundation paper it's more like 60%+ as has been explained several times throughout the thread and if it was that simple why are a third of pupils failing to get a grade 4 ?

Maths skills are viewed as essential to being able to get a job/be able to function in everyday society. Grade 4 is not onerous for children who don't have learning disabilities - they aren't expecting kids to get 95% of the questions right! The tests are graded on a "bell curve" for fairness, so there isn't a definite mark to aim for, but it's around a 20-25% score (or for those who are bad at maths that means if there are 100 questions you can get 75-80 of them wrong and still get a grade 4 passing grade!).

The notion that children are "forced" to stay in school until age 25 isn't true. What is true is that children are expected to retake English/Maths if they are under 18 years old, or on a 16-19 study plan. But some schools/colleges have a "functional skills" course that is offered as an alternative to GCSEs. Bear in mind that the vast majority of employers and further education courses require English and Maths GSCEs (and preferably science too). It's also the case that children can retake the tests as often as they wish - there is no penalty for doing so. It might be cruddy but it's far easier generally to take and study for these tests when you are a child than it is when you are an adult with responsibilities/kids/and less time/support.

A family member works which children who are having to retake their English/Maths so they can move on with school. Sadly a lot of them just don't care and can't be bothered to apply themselves - for all sorts of reasons. Many do have a learning disability of some sort, but they aren't helped by the fact that most of them seem to drink gallons of highly caffeinated drinks, eat junk, stay up all night on their phones/computer games, and don't have caregivers who give them any kind of structure/boundaries etc etc. They are usually lovely kids and oftentimes very personable and clever (in terms of figuring out ways to avoid doing the work/make jokes) but they often feel like they have been labelled as "thick" and that's that - they think people have given up on them, and that school is stupid (especially given the way that Maths and English is taught often has very little relation to what they see as their day to day lives) and just want to do what makes them happy and don't really have much ambition other than "making tiktok videos".

Sadly these are the kids who most need good grades: they often come from backgrounds of poverty and parental alienation and lack good role models, and have been told they are thick so many times that they don't believe in themselves. Fortunately my family member is excellent at their job and the kiddos respect her and like her, so the number of kids who have been getting the grade 4 they need has increased markedly since she started working with them - because they know she actually cares and wants them to do well. Sadly that isn't necessarily true for many teachers/tutors who can and do write off these kids as beyond help/just there to tolerate.