GCSE pass rate to drop by 23% in 2017

I took a MFL GCSE at my advanced age last year, 30 years after I took my O Levels, so I have a first-hand pupil view!

Back in the 80s I can still remember the French exam, where you were given an essay title and had to write a short piece. It is burned on my memory that the title was "A tiger has escaped from the zoo..." continue. Much of my essay consisted of "Au secours!" There were two translation pieces - from and into - French, and one had no clue what would be in them. I also have German and Spanish O Levels, but I can't remember the exams at all although I suppose they were similar.

Anyway, last year I was surprised - although having experienced a little of ds going through GCSEs - to find that there was so much to learn off by heart. It was soooooo beneficial to those who had "helpful" teachers or parents and indeed those with an excellent memory. Then there was the speaking to be learnt off by heart (something I found very difficult!). I got an A* - but without really having to touch on a tenth of the grammar I learnt for O Level.

I teach MFL and the new GCSE is better than what we have now, without a doubt.

CA is soooo open to abuse and thus the goalposts move - if you don't bend the rules, well, everyone else is, so your students will suffer. So I reckon many many schools bend the rules. Or worse.

At least with the new spec everyone will be at the same starting point.

My concern is that expectations might be too high - the best students will not be able to produce in an exam the same level of French composition as the best students do in a CA. I fear it might take a year or two for that to settle down. Which is tough on anyone in year 9 or 8. (DS2 is in year 8)

At the moment we test for literacy and numeracy during the interview process. We aren't alone, a lot of employers are doing this.

If the 'pass' rate were to stay at 35%, it is possible that employers might just drop the 'good pass' criteria from their application criteria or accept level 4. I think the issue is where that pass rate increases with teachers getting to know the spec and expectations better. If there are enough applicants to sustain setting 5 as a minimum requirement, then those that were told that 4 was good enough in the first few years are going to get a bit of a shock. They might be better of resitting anyway.

IIRC a 2 tier maths GCSE, with a basic 'numeracy' version was one of the options on the table for England. For some reason they didn't go for it.

"a child of average intelligence with that amount of commitment should be able to earn a pass"

I think you've really summed it up for me there, sashh. I really feel (especially with my employer hat on!) that maths/english in particular should be viewed very much like the driving licence. We expect that the vast majority of people - specific problems apart - will be able to pass the driving test, providing they put in the effort and time.

Surely the standard school leaver English/Maths qualifications should be the same - designed to get everyone to an agreed acceptable baseline, even if it takes some more time and effort to get there than others.

I guess the issue is whether you view exams as a method of 'certificating' that students have reached a certain skill level.

It seems to me that instead recent governments (not just the Tories) have viewed them instead as a method of sorting children by some kind of supposed innate ability level. If you want to use them that way, inevitably you have to have many - perhaps the majority - of children 'failing'.

RhodaBull

That is teachers talking about your child.

For some children it is fantastic that they will be stretched and enjoy that stretching and will have less of a jump when they move on to A Levels.

That's fine if you are that child and that parent. As teachers we are trying to get the best out of all children.

My example of the English was that if a child cannot access the content / doesn't understand the words then they have a higher mountain to climb. Reading something more modern (I am not an expert on English) may allow a child to understand the text and therefore allow them to analyse it.

A student I taught last year raised her maths predicted grade from F to an actual C bu attending before school lessons, after school lessons and Saturday morning lessons.

She earned that C, and a child of average intelligence with that amount of commitment should be able to earn a pass.

If you are going to rejig education surely you should have 3 starting points

1. what is best for the child (might be more than one type of school for different children)
2. what employers want in school leavers / apprentices
3. what universities want in applicants

Not what grown up public school boys remember from Eton.

"The reasoning was that CSE commercial arithmetic was what employers wanted not maths. I think to some extent that is true (obviously not for engineers or scientists) and a numeracy / arithmetic qualification would be a valid option."
Interestingly that's pretty much what we're getting here in Wales - DD (currently Yr 9) will take two Maths GCSEs, one regular maths, and one maths (numeracy). As I understand it the plus side is some pupils will just take maths (numeracy) which will be more appropriate for them, the negative is that others will end up studying more maths content in the same lesson time which will be good for higher achievers but maybe difficult for the middle pupils.

What I also don't know is what difference it'll make to Welsh dc coming out of the system that they still have letter grades when England is all numbers.
Just to add to the joys of it all round here, the county is in the middle of a full on reorganisation of the secondary schools. At least - for now - it appears that dd's school isn't going to get the full complement of another school's pupils joining them next year (in the same buildings!).

Thank you Noble for the reassurance that DS's A level maths is more difficult than my O level (shaky grade 6, second attempt). I was worried, especially when a Latin teacher saw my O level paper and reckoned it would have challenged their AS students (and this at a v academic selective school).

Nor just me!

Glad it's not just me then AbsoluteBeginners!

I thought my grammar was good, given that I learnt a lot in taking Latin & Greek to A levels in the dim and distant past, but I'm stumped by a lot of the grammar that my y6 is covering. And no, I can't see the point of whole swathes of it.

@ng, "then knowing the answer is root3/2 is still no help because you would need a calculator to work out what that is!"

OK so it's silly then. DD is maths-whizzy and I can see value in her knowing about the special case triangles in order to answer a question e.g. involving some parallelogram where you have to spot the triangle to figure out whatever, but I'm against questions that need children of any ability to remember that sin(60) = 0.866

Wasn't the first KS2 SPaG SAT in 2013? Y8 DD had hers in 2014 and the L3-L5 seemed fair enough, but although she passed quite comfortably I thought the L6 stuff was extremely irritating and mostly worthless.

So is the extra SPaG challenge essentially because they're accomodating L6 into the universal nuSAT? Or are they now expecting significantly more from everyone?

Yes tiggy The 'problem' with the new primary SATs is that the tests are coming in, but current y6 have only been following the new curriculum since y5. So basically all the grammar that is being introduced from y1/2 upwards has had to be crammed in to 2 years flat. DD2 is doing grammar that DD1 has never done.

I did think DD1 was a bit lacking in grammar knowledge, which did impact her MFL learning in secondary, but what DD2 is having to attempt is over the top, I think. I have to keep looking stuff up. I really can't see any 'value' in a lot of it.

I think schools will do their best, and good schools will put as positive a spin on it all as they can to the parents & pupils (even if inwardly moaning, or moaning on here). No point the kids feeling they are beaten before they even start.

bojorojo Initially the same will get a 4 or above as get a C or above at the moment. The issue is that a year or 2 after introduction, the definition of a good enough pass is being raised to a 5. So all the current 'lower Cs' will have to retake. Plus those who get a 4 in the first year, won't have to retake, but will then go through life with a qualification considered 'not good enough'.

I think Rhoda, there are schools who are happily embracing the new curriculum and especially in schools where there are a high number of high achievers. It will suit the majority of their children. The difficulty will be with the lower middle to low achievers and at schools who struggle to get larger numbers through Maths and English GCSE at C or above.

The government is compiling the league tables on the 4-9 grades the children get so, (so The Sunday Times article said) so if noblegiraffe is correct, the 4 is lower than the C we have now so more children could be OK. That could be good news for some. It also said the higher papers will be graded 4-9 and the lower tier papers will be 1-5. I would like to think there would be differentiation between what is taught at each level because, otherwise, what is the point? This surely would include different literature.

I think well managed schools will be fine, but we know loads of schools are not well managed and are poor at a number of things. The introduction of the new exams will be the latest in a long line of problems.

Y9 here and find it very scary.

We're having a GCSE meeting at school next week when i'm hoping we find out more though in the options booklet, some of the departments don't even commit to which exam board yet.

Options have to be in by the end of the month and my DD has still only narrowed one block down to 3 possible subjects.

As a parent who's eldest did GCSEs this summer, I am already dreading DD2, currently y6, having to do the new style.

I'm old enough to have done O levels. What I really liked about GCSEs is the flexibility for different levels of ability to be taught appropriately but end up with the same qualification.

I don't like most of what I'm hearing about the new maths.
I don't like the restrictive set of books for English lit.
I wasn't that keen on the current GCSE English language so if they make that even more language analytical then that will be of even less value to employers.

If they do something about the MFL system of learning stuff by rote though than that will definitely be an improvement.

(And I agree with a PP who said the amount of grammar y6 are having to do is over the top. I get that knowing what a conjunction is, is useful, but subordinating conjunctions & adverbial phrases? Is that really essential knowledge for an 11yo?)

@pieceofpurplesky,@sashh

Sound to me like we need to openly acknowledge that one size doesn't fit all for English Lit. and perhaps have two tiers.

I'm skating on thin ice with this subject, but back in my day it seemed to be more routine comprehension than arcane literary-guild analysis (which now reaches all the way down into KS2) and my best guess is that the universally accessible input effectively forced geekier ways to differentiate by outcome. If I ran the universe I'd push much of the literary analysis back to A-level and spend more time on children reading/comprehending lots of genres. Differentiate more by ability to comprehend the input, less by talk of authorial intent and so on.

@ng, "memorising these trig values was on further maths GCSE only "

Point taken. This is an aside, but are they supposed to be memorising decimals, or given your sin(60) example, knowing that special case is SQRT(3)/2 and perhaps not having to reduce the final answer to a decimal?