Is school harder now than it used to be?

It probably depends on how far back we are talking. If we are talking 60s and early 70s, then Latin, Greek and parts of math (calculus) would have been harder, but much of the sciences wouldn't have even been discovered/invented yet - especially coding for primary schools would have been impossible, and the Computer Science GCSE certainly looks like Chjnese to me (and I would argue that Mandarin is harder than Latin but now taken more often than the latter). My dd read books about climate change in reception, featuring the formula for photosynthesis. I think I learned that first in year 10. Also, in my days it didn't really matter how well you did. I went to Oxford with AABB and a C in my GCSEs. Today 1 B at A level and a C at GCSE would mean no chance at a place at leading university ( if there are no mitigating circumstances). Thst's a lot of pressure, as a bad day and a couple of silly mistakes can have life changing consequences.

Yes, functional skills doesn't count for p8, but it does work quite well as a stepping stone to the GCSE and gives some buy in to intervention along the way so they've at least got something.

I'll PM you a summary of what we do.
We have students in all those categories.

Lola they are OK for average pupils not for all. All pupils have to sit the GCSE English for progress 8 - functional skills does not count. We do intervention from Year 7 and if you think that some pupils can get beyond a Grade 1/2 you teach in a very high achieving school and have no clue about the realities.

Do you not teach any dyslexic pupils who cannot access the exam texts, or pupils with slow processing? Or pupils who can't read at all? Or who are EAL?

Between 4-6 is average. 3 is lower ability.

Students who would be academically excelling to get a grade 1/2 and would find it hard to achieve that level shouldn't be being entered for the paper in my opinion. School should be looking at functional skills courses, or identifying them in KS3 (given literacy levels that low don't appear overnight) and doing entry level work with them long before they get to sitting GCSE Level papers, otherwise the school is setting staff and students up to fail.

Some schools in my area give a different KS4 route for students working that low if early intervention hasn't worked.

The difficulty of the paper 2 language texts are questionable at times, but overall the questions across the Lang/lit courses are reasonable for 15/16 year olds.

Sometimes I think it's easy to forget the amount of fudging that went on with controlled assessments and coursework to get the magic C for students in order to boost what would be a weak exam.

@LolaSmiles just to say that 'low ability is not level 3/4. That is pretty average. I teach pupils with 1/2 and lower - they really struggle to read the questions - and the text in is nigh on impossible for them. What we find is they prefer to write nothing and get zero than try and fail - it sounds better. It is too hard for a lot of pupils

I did o levels in 1986 and DD did GCSEs last year. I think the standard was reasonably similar, though I don't remember having to learn quite as many examples with facts and figures for geography as she did. The science syllabus has changed quite a bit in terms of what is included, but is probably of similar standard. Also, we only had an A as the top grade, and a think a bigger proportion of kids got As then than get 9s now, which may put more pressure on the competitive kids.

I did not take exams here but the things that have struck me are the amount of exam papers taken in total at GCSE e.g science 6, maths 3, meaning they can sit approximately 20-30 papers depending on what subjects they are doing. It just seems excessive and more of a mental endurance test than anything.

I think the pressure on schools get passed onto students more with lots of compulsory-optional-revision-sessions-meets-lessons, but I also think intervention culture isn't helpful for promoting students who can cope with pressure and independence.

Also this. The schools seem to give out confusing messages with pressure to achieve and attend optional before school, after school and break time revision sessions for Y11s while also having to offer more councillors and things like meditation and mindfulness sessions for increasingly stressed and students. Don't get me wrong it's great that schools are trying to help kids to achieve but there also needs to be balance.

For example the bottom band for Engoish Literature says:
At the top of the level, a candidate’s response is likely to be narrative and/or
descriptive in approach. It may include awareness of the task and provide
appropriate reference to text; there will be simple identification of method with
possible reference to subject terminology. Simple comments/responses to
context, usually explicit.

It isn't asking much, which is why if a candidate is really struggling to access that level I'd question a school entering a student

The mark scheme accounts for performance at that level, hence 9-1.

I would argue for anyone who would find a grade 1-2 an academic challenge and achievement shouldn't be sitting that course.

There's a massive difference between someone attaining a 1/2, and someone who would be successful if they happened to manage to get a 1/2 and who would have to work hard to attain a 1/2.

I am talking about the very weakest, the ones for whom a grade 1 or 2 is a challenge. I just feel there should be a few more accessible questions to show what they do understand. I think it's very difficult to assess people from grade 9 to 1 in the same exam.

testing
The questions for literature are generally worded in a way that is accessible to people who have a fairly basic vocabulary for a 15/16 year old.
Eg. A question might be about lady Macbeth as an ambitious woman, and any teacher teaching Macbeth would have taught what ambition is because it's a key idea.
Another would be "explore how experiences of battle are shown in..." Again fairly straightforward. If anything the challenge there is getting the higher ability students to figure out how they can take a seemingly very simple question and then bring in their higher knowledge.

Ultimately part of English is vocabulary and comprehension, so whilst it would be wrong to make questions ridiculously difficult to understand, the benchmark for GCSE can't be a rush to the bottom under the pretence of fairness.

I've taught low ability classes with targets of 3/4 and they've got grade 5s.

I don't know how they mark the English exams but most of it is single questions about a text that you have to write an essay in response. It strikes me as very difficult for the weakest students as they sometimes don't understand a key word in the question and simply don't know what to do.

I did O levels in the 80s. DD2 is y10 and DD1 did GCSEs 4 years ago under the old system but with terminal exams.

• I can't see much difference with the new GCSE for maths, though I might not be the best judge of that
• Eng Lit seems about the same (and at least they are doing whole texts now unlike the previous GCSEs)
• History/Geography/RE seem more thoughtful these days. Not just regurgitating facts but looking for evidence, discussing pros and cons
• Science seems to have more content than I had
• Eng Lang seems very technical these days
• MFL I can't judge

So the feeling I have is the new GCSEs are about comparable with the old O levels, which isn't great for the less academic children. I think losing the intermediate tier for maths is a shame, similarly losing the foundation for English and not being able to mix for science.

On the other hand the teaching is better imo, and the resources available are much better too.

I did o levels in 1983 and my son did gcse this year , 2019. Maths and science seemed easier overall, though I think the syllabuses have widened. I did calculus at o level and the gcse equation questions and trigonometry seemed a level down from what we did. English was taught with far more rigour (& much better taught all through secondary) but perhaps that was my school underperforming ) at the end I think the level of difficulty was similar. The gcse humanities covered more ground and while similar in difficulty the syllabuses were scarily large - so harder I think. Languages seemed to have got significantly easier, though my son didn’t engage here so perhaps to get a good mark you’d have to actually work, he got a 5 with very little work or revision throughout 5 years of study. And he got the opportunity to study more subjects than I did from a much greater choice of subjects, which was great. I do think having to cover all 3 sciences to gcse is a big forward step, I dropped one which I have always regretted. There seemed to be huge amounts of spoon feeding now , school providing reams of printed revision notes and work books, and on-line revision resources, while we had none of these and had to rely on our own notes, though we did have much better textbooks, which were possible I suppose because of less change in the syllabuses year on year. I had no target grades, much much less individual feedback, much less exam practise, no pressure really apart from that supplied by myself and family, but also far less supply teaching (which in my son’s case got to a level in a couple of subjects that was detrimental) and my teachers varied more, one or two brilliant, but equally one or two poor, my son didn’t have the poor ones, but also seemed to miss out on the really good ones, everything was focused towards the syllabuses and the end exam goals, it wasn’t like that at my school, in maths for example we worked through text books, the syllabus was not mentioned directly, though I’m sure the text books covered it thoroughly as we got reasonable grades, some people got a long way and were helped along well by the teachers, some didn’t get far and no one was much bothered, exams were rarely mentioned until yr 5 (now year 11). Both my son and I went to large comprehensives.

I think it's not necessarily harder just different.
We learn stuff that would have been seen as much more advanced in the past but leave out things that would have been covered in the past.
Educational requirements change over time.

As only the REALLY clever kids got As in the 1980s and now it's A* for every bugger, I think not!

Actually, I think that what has changed in the most recent round of Maths reform is the combination of different Maths techniques / aereas of study in a single question, and the fact that these are not sgnalled.

A typical Maths question in my day might have said something like 'Differentiate...' or 'Solve these simultaneous equations...' or invoked a series of 'frictionless light pulleys'...or at most asked the student to 'find the gradient of this graph and the area beneath it between x = 1 and x = 15'.

Modern GCSE questions seem to have removed many of these 'signals' and indeed set out to add circle theorem bits into a question that appears to be about vectors, or simultaneous equations into a question about something entirely unrelated. or whatever.

With Maths, I think the degree of difficulty has increased because of more problem solving questions. It is not straightforward to get the higher grades which is a good thing. However it does become disheartening for children who are unable to access more than 50 percent of the curriculum. As a primary teacher, I think we fail to do one important thing that is, properly teach comprehension. That in itself makes a huge difference in the secondary years.

grass
My y8/9 books look like mine from GCSE.
In English the step up to GCSE is challenge within the texts, depth of interpretation and so on so it's much broader.

Personally I like the change. It's much better than what I remember from school: watching videos, designing your own theme park, making leaflets.

Maths is a different beast though and you'd probably want someone like NobleGiraffe to come along and comment.

My son is in year 8 and his maths now looks pretty much my gcse syllabus from about 1995. Certainly he has reached the limit of my knowledge now. I never took it higher than gcse but did get an A* . I dont know if his next stage is broader or deeper.

I did calculus in maths O level too. I wonder if the new GCSE is similar in standard to the O level, which is it might seem harder to some. A levels seem easy as well. Maybe that’s my age!

cantkeepawayforever
I think you're right that it depends on your frame of reference.
I think academically school is more difficult now, but that's probably a good thing as I think a good 50% of my secondary education wasn't challenging and y7-9 were a waste.

Even now when I compare the deal weaker/less academic students get, I think they're getting a better deal in some respects now. There were some questionable practices to get students the magic grade C and it didn't mean the students were actually particularly literate.

Yes definitely. My mum was horrified when we started doing things at A Level maths that she didn’t start until year 2 of her maths degree. Same with gcse science - the stuff that is being taught right now is probably uni level compared to my parents’ generation.

I also think the reduction in special schools, and obviously the raising of the school leaving age, has made school MUCH harder for some pupils who might have left formal mainstream school at a very different point from the age they have to stay to now.

Similarly to @daisypond, I know someone who failed maths O level twice at school in the early 80s, really struggling with it. Many years later, she went to evening classes for a year and ended up with an A at GCSE ( before A stars existed). Yes, she was an adult and more motivated, but I can't believe that was the only difference, and she herself was very surprised.

I did calculus for O level in the 70s, but it was definitely optional (Oxford exam board).