Rant about the new maths GCSEs. Michael Gove you tosser.

Why oh why is it so bad if a child doesn't get the top grade, stop the world I am getting off. If you teach a child that they will get the top grade and they don't, then of course they will feel stupid, surly the answer is to stop telling everyone they are so bloody clever when they aren't.

I don't think you understand the phenomenon. DS is in a selective school he got in on his own ability and was not tutor to get in except explaining exams techniques. His year 7 CAT test put him at "he should achieve a 9" in his GCSEs.

He was an able maths pupil as his maths teachers told us through his 5 years of secondary school. In November he took a mock new GCSEs exam where he wasn't able to complete more than about 40% in total. He then decided he's stupid and said that even if he's achieving 9 in his actual gcse he will not do A level maths. I doubt he turned into a low achiever around Nov/Dec time.

These type of kids are put off doing maths, not all but a big proportion of them. They can't even trial it at AS level, once you choose it you're stuck with it.

Draylon

Glad it's not just me.

Can I offer an additional rant?

IMHO GCSE maths should link to the mathematical side of other subjects . Eg computer science necessarily has maths in it, quite a lot, but I have yet to see children taught the same concepts in maths classes.

I know that has nothing to do with the teachers and everything to do with the syllabus but surely it would be better for every child to access some concepts in different subjects.

Various averages are used in lots of subjects from sociology to geography so that should be in GCSE maths, again IMHO.

I think the current shake up have missed a trick by nor looking at the content of various subjects and looking at overlap.

And getting everyone to a level of functional numeracy is what really matters. Maybe the old GCSE didn't differentiate enough at the top level, but that's a specialised problem; those children were numerate and were doing fine anyway. They were going to go onto higher education. If we want to stretch and differentiate at the top end, that's easily solved by introducing a higher level paper.

I'm a professionalish sort of person with a degree, and all the maths I use in my life is what I learned by the end of about Y7. I never need to use trig or simultaneous equations, but I do need to know weights and measures, arithmetic, time telling, percentages, area and volume. With those skills, I can read a spreadsheet and fill in a VAT return. I can run a household budget and I can run a small business. Those are the maths skills we need to make sure are firmly embedded in people.

How does having more and more, 'maybe/maybe not capable' mathematicians help much?

Accepting for a moment that that's a good description, can you see that having more moderate-ability people studying maths is likely to result in a more numerate population overall, compared with discouraging those people from the studying maths at all?

Person X, sits Maths GCSE, gets a B. Goes on to do Maths A-level, gets a D. Goes on to be a primary school teacher.

Person Y, sits Maths GCSE, gets a 6. Doesn't do A-level. Goes on to be a primary school teacher.

Which do you think will be the better teacher?

If the GCSE maths has put a few children off doing an A-Level in it then they probably shouldn't be doing A-Level maths
It's not putting the children off because they're not capable of Maths A-level, though. It's because it's been rushed in to suit Gove's agenda. So not enough time for examiners to properly show what they are trying to test, to trial their questions and write lots of sample papers to demonstrate what the real thing will be like. Not enough time for publishers to write good textbooks and revision guides. Not enough time for teachers to prep for teaching the new syllabus. All so that Gove can appease people like you who for some reason think that lessons remotely resemble a "funfair".

As cant says, we need more capable mathematicians in this country. These new exams and especially on this timescale are exactly the wrong way to achieve that.

It's worth noting that the old Further Maths A level had a really high pass rate and a high % of candidates got good grades, compared to other subjects. This is because the cohort was very high ability (as could be seen from their performance in other subjects e.g. Maths / Physics). It's a self selecting cohort- children don't do Further Maths unless they're really confident in their ability to do it. A lot used to drop out after AS Further Maths because it was too hard. Whereas actually, those candidates who could get say a C in Further Maths at A-level- I for one think that's a pretty good mathematician and we could do with more of them around.

Under the new system we will have fewer. Capable candidates will doubt their ability and won't do Further Maths or else won't do any Maths A-levels at all. This is basically the exact opposite to what employers and universities are asking for and what we as a country need.

where learning by heart (I'm quite good at SPaG really)

I agree the new exam doesn't sound like it caters lower ability pupils, maybe if Gove have been allowed to finish his changes he could have addressed this.

I don't think Gove cared about low ability pupils. They could have thrown in some harder items to the higher spec and left the foundation tier alone. They could have not pushed schools into forcing some kids to do the Ebacc when it wasn't suitable to them. His whole emphasis was on O level type exams which were never for the masses.

Some stuff I agree with. e.g. old MFL GCSEs were learning by hearts CAs was daft. And reworking CAs numerous times. And progress 8 as a concept.
But making pass grades so technically difficult to get and way harder than needed for real life doesn't do anyone a service. Especially with maths which is so much about confidence.

Many, many competent maths teacher have left the profession because of the eternal, ill thought out, untrialled changes to the exam system, of which this is merely the most recent in a series.

So the chicken is the exam changes, the egg the shortage of maths teachers. Better thought out changes = more, better, maths teachers....

How does having a different type of school - a UTC - change the GCSE qualification?? I'm a bit confused?

Currently all schools - grammar, sec mod, comp, PRU, free schools, religious schools, studio schools - enter pupils for GCSEs because those are the mandated 16+ qualifications.

I haven't seen anyone saying that we have too many people qualifying in STEM subjects to keep the economy progressing? But there does seem to be many people complaining about the quality of maths teachers available. How does having more and more, 'maybe/maybe not capable' mathematicians help much?

I agree the new exam doesn't sound like it caters lower ability pupils, maybe if Gove have been allowed to finish his changes he could have addressed this. More UTC's might be the answer .

Some children aren't academic and perhaps shouldn't be doing GCSE' s.

This was stated upthread. But the whole point of GCSEs was that they were accessible to (almost) all, with different tier papers.

A C/4 grade GCSE should mean 'competent for every day life', especially for Maths and English. You just don't need trig or simultaneous equations for day to day life. Neither do you need to be able to discourse at great length about the language used in a Dickens novel.
In order to make GCSEs more stretching for the top they have screwed them up for the lower 50%. We shouldn't need 'Level 2 functional Maths/English' as that is what a C/4 grade GCSE should indicate.

I'm just relieved that DD1 did GCSEs 2 years ago, and that DD2 has 4 years to go so maybe things will have settled down a bit.

Jamie,

I suppose it depends whether you think that putting entirely capable mathematicians off doing A-level Maths is what this country needs - I haven't seen anyone saying that we have too many people qualifying in STEM subjects to keep the economy progressing?

I expect it to even out for able pupils in the coming years, when all subjects are 9-1. For those like my DS this year, the fact that other subjects were still on the old system made them appear very much more attractive as A-levels ... so without a certain amount of leverage from me we would have ended up with another potential History / Politics graduate with no Maths A-level ...

You haven't addressed the concerns raised about the lower ability pupils, likely to be entering non-A-level routes after 16, for whom this exam does not cater at all.

How old are your children Jamie?

Why oh why is it so bad if a child doesn't get the top grade, stop the world I am getting off. If you teach a child that they will get the top grade and they don't, then of course they will feel stupid, surly the answer is to stop telling everyone they are so bloody clever when they aren't.

If the GCSE maths has put a few children off doing an A-Level in it then they probably shouldn't be doing A-Level maths. There are other subjects available.

Ok so the new GCSEs aren't as fun so children might not do as well. Well am the only person that believes lessons shouldn't be like a trip to the funfair, just get your head down and do the work. Maybe then children will actually find the subjects they are capable in and have an interest in. Rather than picking subjects where they just liked a teacher.

Lets stop University being somewhere anyone can go to with bog standard GCSEs/A-Levels and take it back to less than 25% of the population who work bloody hard to get really good results.

If a parent hot houses a DC into a grammar and they expect the school to grant them a level 9 five years later then its the parents fault, not the exams.

Peregrina,

For the mid level and above students, i believe that next year will be better anyway - and increasingly better going forward - because the main stressor this year was the lack of clarity about materials, questions, specifications or grade boundaries. One at last some of these are 'known', the feeling that 'we have to get full marks on infinitely hard questions on a new syllabus ... oh, and someone has completely changed the goalposts, and maybe we should enter them for foundation' will receded and teachers will be able to more confidently prepare their pupils.

For lower ability children - those who would expect to do the foundation paper and get less than a 4 - I don't think the situation will improve much with familiarity. The paper is simply testing the wrong things for them to demonstrate competence in arithmetic and functional everyday maths, and teachers' increasing expertise at driving them through what are essentially 'the wrong hoops' will only make the situation marginally better. I would like to see an alternative functional maths GCSE introduced (both for these children, and for those retaking post 16), making the current papers effectively intermediate and higher tiers, covering c. 3-9.

Would it be possible to rescue the situation for next year, by adopting the Welsh system? Assuming that looks to be working.

Gove may be back in Government, but it's now a Government on the ropes, so now would be the time to strike whilst the iron is hot (sorry, mixed metaphor!), and say that this isn't working and we owe our children something better.

Reading this thread makes me feel sick, from what i have read the English syllabus and exams are just as bad what on Earth benefit is there to ensuring more children fail and write themselves off as 'thick' ??

My dd has just gone through the joke that is year 6 SATs and if GCSEs haven't improved by the time she comes to sit them I may well pull her out of school, her confidence when it comes to learning is fragile at the best of times

I think the obsession with identifying exception pupils at gcse level is daft - it's meant to be a general qualification - use the a levels to highlight exceptional achievement.

(It is also worth looking at what percentage of students each country excludes from PISA due to SEN. Up to 10% is common, even in countries who, unlike China, have slightly more representative sampling of the nation.)

'China' is represented in Pisa by Shanghai. Quote from the Washington Post:

"Shanghai, which is wealthier than the rest of China and is not itself representative of the rest of China, participated in PISA as a separate education system. After Shanghai became No. 1 out of 65 countries and education systems (the United States came out no better than average, as usual), a great deal of attention was put on its school system, including criticism that one of the reasons it does so well on PISA is that the group of students who are tested as the representative group of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds excludes many migrant students."

Residency requirements for accessing Shanghai's education measn that the children in Shanghai's schools are universally the children of wealthy, middle class families. Anyone else is excluded (including anyone with SEN). It's like using the UK's private schools to represent the UK.

They also top the OECD suicide tables. Not sure this is the way to go.