GCSEs in England: which subjects / how many are compulsory? What can each school force kids to take?

My own DC school.has (compulsory)
English Lang/English lit (2)
Maths (1)
Science - Combined (2) or triple/individual (3)
RE - 1 year course (0.5) or 2 years (1)
Then they can choose 3 options if they did full RE, or 4 , if they did 1 year RE

My DC each did short course RE and triple Science so they did 10.5.
However although this is the standard pattern the school offers, I think there would be some discretion depending on circumstances. A friends DC is at a similar, (state) school, they had some MH issues, and took 7 GCSEs which I think was fewer than the standard time table but enough to continue to A levels.

My views are:

1. No it is not great in this day and age to have this religious aspect present in a state funded service.
2. But I understand where it came from and why it continues to exist.
3. I didn't choose to send my DC to faith schools, but if they'd been the only good quality option I could access, I might have.
4. Most people don't care enough about this issue for enough time to force a change. Generally only while they are thinking about school admissions, or if they are properly religious (a minority but a v5ocal one).

We still have bishops in the House of Lords don't we?! What a weird country.

You could start a thread asking for examples of Italian weirdness. Might be interesting!

Yes I agree with @LIZS and others. I think you are splitting hairs @ItalianParent and arguing over a minor point. The school has said RE GCSE is compulsory – did the three teachers say it was compulsory under the law in England? Or did they mean compulsory at the school? Even if it was the first, like I say, I wouldn't look for conspiracy theories and suggest the staff are lying deliberately. Not all teachers know everything about schools and education. Many heads for example seem to have a shaky grasp of the admissions process.

Anyway. I guess you can decide or not whether you want your DC ti take RE GCSE. For me, other factors about a school would be more important, as I said.

What is it you want to find out? If you need to know what options a possible school offers, ask the school. But for me, closeness to home, atmosphere in the school, quality of teaching and approach to SEN support were more important than whether RE GCSE has to be taken or whether students typically take 8 or 9 GCSEs.

Agree. Op, you are splitting hairs and picking unnecessary arguments. Exactly what information were you hoping to establish? Are you currently looking at schools for your own dc application in which case you need to look at the specifics of potential local schools and their policies? Or is your post more of a generalised criticism of the English education system.

The school is free to say any subject is compulsory for pupuls that attend there. Theres one near me where they all have to do History and French for example. Its a timetabling thing.

The school said that taking the GCSE exam (not just the course) was compulsory. This is factually false. 3 teachers gave the same answer.

Is it possible that they meant that it is compulsory to take RE GCSE at that particular school?

DD had to take Citizenship. She didn't want to but it wasn't optional.

@ItalianParent

The school lied about there being a law which makes religious education GCSE compulsory for all

To repeat, taking the course is compulsory for all. RE is compulsory at all maintained schools - School Standards and Framework Act 1998 schedule 19 plus various Education Acts. Pupils do not have to take the exam but they must take the course. Despite your repeated assertions, the school is not lying. There is a law that makes religious education compulsory for all.

My dc do English, maths and combined science as compulsory subjects.

Then they have to pick at least one national expectations subject which are computer science, triple science, history, geography, french and spanish.

Then they pick 2 other subjects from a choice of art, drama, health and social care, food tech, design technology, creative imedia,

I forget the exact number, but, since 2011, between 100 and 200 new state-funded faith schools have been created.

It is actually 95. The church or other faith organisations have provided much of the funding needed to get these schools going, including providing the land and buildings. These new faith schools can only use faith criteria for 50% of their places. They exist because no-one else was willing to put up the funding required to create these new schools, NOT because of an explicit political choice to create more faith schools.

Your child has the right to an education, not to an education at a specific school. They may be unable to get a place at a good school because they are of the wrong sex, or because they don't live close enough or have sibling at the school. Are all of these injustices?

I have an issue with schools lying about it and telling parents that it is compulsory by law to take religious studies GCSE

The school is not lying. It is compulsory by law that students take religious studies, regardless of the type of school. The law does not require them to sit the exam, but they must take the lessons.

You clearly do misunderstand the obvious long term/permanent(?) consequences of the historical basis for the current situation if you think it feasibly could now be set aside.

(a) the school buildings and land are still the property of the church, and they are run under long-standing contractual agreements that give the church a say in how the school is run. Buying out those contracts and acquiring that land would take incalculable billions of pounds - and why on earth would the government spend that money in order to disrupt the successful functioning of so many of the most popular schools?

(b) the legal principles that allowed this settlement to be agreed have established that faith communities are allowed to have schools that prioritise the children of that faith within the state-funded system, and that freedom is still a valued and cherished part of the culture of the UK today. It would be massively discriminatory to say that Christians can have this but Muslims, Jews etc cannot, or that emerging Christian communities in places that don't already have church schools cannot create them if there is appropriate demand. This is about freedom of religion and that's not something that's old-fashioned and inappropriate in the modern day. Other countries have chosen different paths and may have all state schools be 100% secular and all religious schools are private, but that's not the path that the people of the UK chose because the freedom to live out your faith in all aspects of life is a freedom that we cherish more than the different kind of "freedom-from" that is enforced in countries where there is an expectation for public life to be fully secular.

(c) It is an inaccurate mis-stating to say that the system that "everyone should have the right to access, and funded by everyone's taxes, discriminates based on faith" - everyone does have the right to a school place, and I'd be the first to agree that the system is underfunded and many schools are inadequate but everyone does get a school place eventually. It is not "discrimination" when something that has been established and exists primarily for people in category X is run in a way to prioritise people in category X. You might as well say that the Paralympics is "discriminatory" for not allowing competitors who don't have a disability. We as a society have chosen that we want faith based education to be allowed to exist and be run primarily for the people who want their children to have a faith based education. People who are not of that faith are still allowed to access it and often want to do so because the schools that are run on faith-based principles often have better outcomes than secular schools and there are fair and proportionate means for those people to apply for the places that are available once the faith community that created the school has met the needs of that community. Using the word "discrimination" to refer to something that exists in order to meet a legitimate need being allowed to meet that need cheapens the word and makes the argument ridiculous.

I suspect that your real problem is that the secular schools near you aren't getting as good results as the faith schools - and maybe it's true that families that are more chaotic and more likely to have troubled and disruptive kids are less likely to meet the criteria for the faith schools (given that the schools are not allowed to actually attempt to measure the strength of someone's "faith" but have to use proxy criteria for verifiable facts about how often the family attends church/mosque/synagogue which takes time and effort to be able to prove) which would naturally lead to the secular schools having bigger challenges. The remedy is not to attack the freedom of faith communities to have faith schools that meet their needs, but to campaign for a more equitable funding model that gives more financial resources and support to any school with a more challenging intake demographic.

To be clear about the status of these subjects, the National Curriculum has English, Maths and Science as compulsory subjects to the end of KS4, which is when pupils take their GCSEs. It is not compulsory for students to actually take these GCSEs but, given that these subjects will take up a lot of teaching time, it makes sense for them to do so.

Academies are not required to follow the National Curriculum so they could, in theory, allow students to skip these subjects. However, their performance in league tables is damaged if students don't take English, Maths and Science. So, whilst there is no legal requirement for students to take these GCSEs, in practice all schools in the state sector will insist they do.

RE is also a compulsory subject to the end of KS4. However, it is not required for the school performance measures so schools take different approaches. Some take the view that students might as well get the GCSE since they have to study the subject, others take a different view.

Regarding faith schools, @KindlySurfiingPlatypus is correct. Faith schools existed long before the government decided to fund education. It wasn't until 1944 that faith schools became fully state funded for running costs. Voluntary Aided schools still have to find a proportion of their capital costs.

The land and buildings used by faith schools belong to the relevant faith, not the state. In return for allowing the state to use their land and buildings, they want to continue to prioritise children of their own faith. Note that they are not allowed to exclude children of other faiths, and many faith schools reserve a proportion of their places for other faiths. However, for some popular faith schools the reality is that you aren't going to get a place unless you fulfil the faith requirements.

If the government chose to stop faith schools giving priority on faith grounds, the Catholic church would close all its schools. Some other faith schools would also close. The government cannot legally seize the lands and buildings without compensation, so abolishing faith schools would require them to either buy them or build new schools. Either approach would cost billions of pounds - money the government doesn't have. It is therefore unlikely to happen.

Something you may want to consider is how triple science is taught.
At DD's school triple science took up an option so, pupils who took double science had 4 subjects that they could choose over the compulsory subjects and the triple science students had three to choose from.

If RS GCSE is compulsory it is often taken as an extra IME. At my old school everyone did the short course (half a GCSE) though I am not sure if that still exists. It didn't reduce the other choices. I do see that some schools may have it as an option tho.

If a school says the GCSE (rather than the subject per se) is compulsory then it is at best misleading parents. But it wouldn't surprise me if there was no malice. Schools often don't seem to be aware of such details. I wouldn't worry about a hidden agenda of lying tbh.

If you have concerns about a school and its GCSE offer, just ask the school.

Is your issue actually around the religious studies issue? Your original post was broader. I was actually as surprised as you when I realised how this aspect of the school system functioned...and I'm British! I think I have come to accept that this is one of the remnants of living in a very old country (United Italy is very youthful by comparison) with lots of leftovers of the past such as the church influence on education. I also think Britain has a lot of cultural Christians with no real religious belief (I'm one) and as religions go, traditional CofE is pretty homeopathic, although you have to watch out for the enthusiastic evangelical bits.

There's a campaign you can join here if you like:

Religious schools – Humanists UK https://share.google/lJP3WGFgqc35IL1D7

For what it's worth, my daughter's school requires all students to sit RS GCSE short course in year 10 as a public exam practice and opportunity to develop essay and critical thinking skills.

This is a total misunderstanding of why state-funded faith schools exist. The church is not interfering in state education, the state has negotiated an acceptable way to interfere in Christian education.

The churches were providing education long before the state decided that education should be state funded. For centuries there was no fundamental right to education, you got educated if your family coukd afford it or you went to a charitable church school if one existed in your parish.

The schools providing education to the children of the parish already existed and the state could not and did not steal the church's property and couldn't have afforded to buy the many thousands of school buildings from the churches so came to an agreement with the churches that the school properties they already owned would remain the property of the churches, but the state would start to pay the staffing costs. The church schools were allowed to continue to prioritise local Christian children as they always had done, but with leftover places (and where necessary expanded places if the demand for school places was high) going to other local children.

It would be totally fine for the state to build and run more secular schools so that they didn't need to piggyback on centuries of Christian philanthropy that established church schools long before the state worked out that an educated population is a good thing. That would leave the church schools able to continue to provide a Christian education to anyone who wants one with less state interference. But the state can't afford to do that, and in any case the demand isn't there because people who aren't very interested in faith nevertheless notice that the faith school gets better outcomes and want to get places there.

It may be that the particular teacher either misunderstood or explained it badly.

It is true that Religious Education is compulsory by law. It is within the schools discretion to choose whether to do that as a minimal non-examined subject, or whether to timetable it as a full GCSE option, or whether to have a 2-track system for some pupils to choose between these, but it's perfectly reasonable for a school to choose that the best way for them to meet their legal obligations is to teach the full RS GCSE syllabus to all pupils and to not have the resources or timetable time to offer a downgraded non-exam RS option to some in order to facilitate more flexibility of other options.

Generally the schools that require all pupils to take GCSE RS are the ones with faith-based entry criteria, and it's generally the people who played the system to get the faith school who then complain about the school being run in a way that prioritises faith-related matters.

Timetabling is a nightmare that causes huge headaches and having one option that most-but-not-all kids take is particularly difficult to manage. If the majority of kids at a school are from families who prioritise faith and are likely to choose RS then it's much more sensible to make it an obligatory subject for all than it is to do the necessary juggling to make separate provision for the minority of pupils who don't want to do it.

You could start only the compulsory GCSEs in yr 9 and not start the optional GCSEs until year 10, allowing students to choose their GCSEs in year 9

@ItalianParent yes it's misleading. Core RE is compulsory, all children need to do RE until 16 so a lot of schools just make them do it as GCSE as they need to teach it anyway. Both my children's schools (grammar and comprehensive) allow them to drop it and just do core RE, which is a couple of lessons a week where they just discuss ethics. It is annoying when you need to waste am option on something you're not interested but also anecdotally, it's one that DC seem to get high marks in so maybe that's why the schools like it.