The DfE needs to stop the farce of compulsory Maths and English GCSE resits

Going off topic a bit here, but not worth a new thread.

In Maths we can say ask if you don't understand, do lots of examples etc.
Where do we start with somebody who is good at Eng lit, but not very good at Eng lang.
I want to help but don't know where to start and will have hardly any input when dd goes back to school on sunday.

That's a different picture to what I was told. At my friends college they were given the impression from their leadership that the reason the college had a massive repayment bill was because not enough students got their resit.
An interesting spin to give to staff.

at the moment post 16 providers have to repay the government the funding for every child who doesn't get their 4 in resit

I did not know this. Words fail.

What you need to do maisy is to stop facifying. It really doesn't help your cause.

How odd.
I have no idea then. Unless there was an obvious English or maths requirement for the course then I'm not sure why.
The only thing I can think is that because the funding of FE resits is such a mess that they're writing their requirements to make sure that they only get resitters who are likely to pass (at the moment post 16 providers have to repay the government the funding for every child who doesn't get their 4 in resit... and yet the pass rate is what it is still.)

I have quoted in a previous post about the other 2 colleges that do the particular Level 2 course ds is doing.

He wouldn't get into a Level 1 course in either.

Whilst I was waiting for ds to register there were quite a few boys and girls coming in with their parents who had failed one or both exams and were registering with the college because they had been turned away from one of the other colleges.

Talked to some of the parents who thought it wouldn't be a huge deal because it isn't exactly a profession that uses a lot of English. They thought they could do a evening class to fulfill the requirements.

As ever noble you've put that better than me. I really should know better than trying to engage with the likes of cakes as I find such pointless assertions and factually inaccurate claims utterly infuriating.

cantkeepawayforever
I would agree. It sounds like one school had an incompetent MAT running it with systemic issues. Combine that with a lack of head and the school has lacked any strategic direction for a few years.
I remember being without a head for a month or so (the head disappeared with no announcement following a damning ofsted which was obvious to everyone). Much as the first head was awful and largely unavailable, no grip on the school etc, it did feel very unsettled for a while. Then a strong head arrived and things started to improve.

Oliversmumsarmy
All do in my area.
If you're just missing one of maths/English then as long as your otjer grades are good then you can do level 3 and resit one.
If you're missing both or your grades aren't as good then you can do a level 2 course and resit.

I've not seen anywhere in my area that doesn't offer level 2 courses plus resit. Having said that I'm no expert in FE funding but anecdotally I've heard it's a bit more precarious than school funding at the moment (which is saying something).

If children are required to keep resitting GCSE English and Maths why not allow children to progress with their long term goals, A Levels, professional training, City and Guilds etc whilst doing the resits.

As it stands only a few places offer this.

If one college is able to offer Level 2 with English and Maths lessons as an extra why can't other colleges do the same. Especially as last year they were doing exactly that

And would probably become very dispirited that they didn't understand it.

@cantkeepaway you say what I think far more eloquently particularly re statistics and expected grades.

Cakes is off on one again.

Mixed ability does not work in Maths for any end. The top, middle and bottom follow entirely different schemes of work. Why would I teach a lower set child the sine rule when they wouldn't be examined on it?

School 1 looks like the 2 years without a head + incompetent academy chain (who may well have siphoned off money for 'central funding' and also imposed swingeing cost cutting of things like support staff, who make a difference) has been the issue.

So how does that explain that 6 years ago School 1 had a much better reputation than School 3. Both went into Special Measures, School 3 came out quickly, School 1 didn't?

(You don't have to answer, I'm sure if there was an easty answer then the school wouldn't be in this mess)

Its the middle and high previous attainers who don't make progress oddly enough. How can this be?

Cakes, as I have dealt in statistics, could you comment?

Apologies for X post.

The difficulty is with schools that once schools have even slightly differing reputations, these become self-fulfilling - and it can take a generation to change them (my DC's primary school was considered 'less good' than other local options because of its particular role before a whole-town re-organisation of schools over 20 years previously).

If 10% of educated, involved parents, or those who care about education, each year choose school 3 over school 1 because of an initially small difference in results / Ofsted, then over time, school 3's results improve (and more involved parents apply there), and school 1's results go down further.

To improve from its current low point, school 1 has to (with all the disadvantages of current intake and issues) produce notgood enough results that parents who would have chosen schools 2 or 3 choose school 1. However, those parents ALSO have to swim against the tide of 'Why schoose there? Everyone says it's terrible', and so however hard school 1 tries, it is always swimming against the tide...

6 years ago when I was applying to schools for dd they were all pretty similar.

Schools 1 & 2 are located in the same town both located on council estates but school 1 also had a nice new housing estate in its catchment (thats where I live). Both schools had previously been bog standard comps with School 1 having the slightly better reputation but they were both academised around the same time and turned into C of E schools. (they were previously non faith) However as both are undersubscribed church attendance was not a criteria.

Shortly after academisation School 1 failed OFSTED, the head immediately went on sick leave and they were without a head for approx 2 years. They were banned from taking NQT's but this was later changed to maths NQT's only. They recently celebrated going into Requires Improvement rather than the bottom category but their Academy Trust were banned from opening any more schools and have now had all their schools taken off them.

School 2 seemed to bumble along as satisfactory, parents sent their kids there becasue they had to, but at that time School 4 (the one in the next county) still had places so those who were interested intheir kids education and could affiord the bus fare, went there. Over the years though school 4 became more and more over subscribed (ds didn't get a place). Schoolo 2 appeared to develop more links with the church and became very "spiritual" - put me off completely. They are still very under subscribed.

Meanwhile School 3 had just come out of Special Measures. It serves a catchement area of tradionally low expectations and always suffered from a nearby Catholic School with Specialist Performing Arts status. It became an Academy and started to improve (my neice joined at this point). It was undersubscribed but year on year results started to improve, it got better Progress 8 figures than the desirable schools across the city and last year, for the first time it had to turn down 35 pupils.

Maisy,

You should stop distorting and facifying what I said. Your post at 08:15:48 is your own bollocks and projections. You clearly don't understand and misrepresent the letter and the meaning of what I was saying. This personal aggressiveness in unwarranted. Your defensiveness is apparent though.

Stick to the facts, like GCSE pass statistics.

Are their actual intakes (as opposed to their apparent catchments) similar? [It's hard data to find accurately, the only real indication is the analysis within their GCSE results on the DfE Compare Schools system]

Or is it the case that because 3 is 'the best', all motivated / involved parents work hard to get their children into that one, leaving school 1 only for those who have no alternative and those who don't have many who really care?

Are any of them faith schools or schools with any hurdles at all to get into them - e.g. specific primary school feeders? (Again, anything at all that requires any additional 'effort' or has any focus other than geographical will tend to skew the intake towards, at minimum, those with less chaotic lives)

I agree. The difficulties my DDs had with primary learning that meant they struggled with SATs, didn't go away the day they started secondary. Those difficulties continue to impact in secondary.

Yes, some children will have been poorly taught at primary, or had extenuating circumstances such as illness. These children will be able to 'catch up' at secondary. But for other children the reasons for lower results in primary will move with them to secondary and will continue to impact their learning.

I've always been against SATS in principal, but having seen many past papers (for English anyway), mark schemes and the sample/past papers my kids did then I agree entirely. I've not seen the format of the new ones but have heard they ar pretty awful.

Ds always scored pretty highly on old Sats type papers and excercises somewhere around a good Level 5 level although he often fell down on the creative writing papers. His grammar, spelling and punctuation are fantastic, and he is very articulate, but he can't write GCSE style. His teachers have tried, I've tried.

Going back to schools and funding though, what I would like to know is why we have 5 schools all within 2 miles of each other, 3 of whichare within walking distance of each other, yet those schools have very different outcomes. If we take the school over the county border out of the equation (it serves a much more affluent catchment for one thing) and the school in the oposite direction where there is a middle school system then we have 3 schools, all within walking distance of my house, all serving fairly deprived cathcments one of which has been in special measures for 5 years and the kids make little to no progress, one of which is supposedly good but has a very narrow focus and the other which appears to be going strength to strength. Money has been poured into all of them wheras ds's school (the one with the middle school intake) has had very little money invested yet gets better outcomes than school 1 by far.

They don’t start secondary school with a clean slate, what they did at primary school matters.

Thank you!

In some ways, SATs (particularly in their last incarnation, which is what they will have been in 2013) are probably a better test / indication of 'functional literacy / numeracy' than GCSEs.

Reading: Read some mainly age-appropriate material, answer some literal and some inferential comprehension questions.

Maths: Carry out some arithmetic and some non-arithmetic maths questions, some using a calculator, some without. Do some mental maths.

Writing: Produce, over a year, some writing of different types and on different subjects. Assses this against a range of different skills, both technical (spelling, punctuation) and about composition / style.

The new SATs tests, and SPaG, are perhaps less good indications of 'general functional skills', but that's a different discussion! The point is that those who did not achieve the expected level in those KS2 SATs were genuinely lacking some skills that are likely to be needed in secondary - whether that be reading for meaning, writing a piece of work on a set subject, doing mental and written arithmetic and applying this and other maths skills to problems - and would mean that those children had to make much faster progress in secondary to 'overtake' 15% of their peers.

Our other local comp I didn’t want him to go to although my Bruce has done very well there because they divide the school into streams with names & certain subjects are only offered to certain streams so he could not have done Computer Science there or been in top/2nd set maths if he was in bottom set English.

I've just been made aware of this by someone who was concerned I had inadvertently named ds. It should read my neice has done very well there. I have no idea why auto correct turns neice into Bruce!

I agree noble.
There's every right to want every child to go to a good school with decent, qualified staff and every right to a good education.

Just making claims that entire cohorts of children are written off and not taught the material to access GCSE is the sort of inflammatory dramatic bullshit that doesn't help push for progress and change. (If anything it just exemplifies the sort of attitudes teachers end up dealing with and then we wonder why there's a shortage).