to think the tories are making education elitist?

[ThatVikRinA22]

just watching the news, they are making the A levels harder, saying they are too easy

my boy did maths and physics and trust me - they were not too bloody easy!

my dd is doing GCSEs now, (at 14!! too bloody young imo!) and was doing one science syllabus, the government changed it recently and now, where she would have been awarded a C, she ended up with a D. The science teacher had a rant about the tories at parents evening....

so, now A levels are going to get harder, getting into uni is going to be harder plus more expensive, does this spell and end for opportunities for all to go to uni?

is it going to be the reserve of the very bright and the very rich?

A levels should go back up to the standard they used to be. What's the point in them if everyone does well? There needs to be something to work hard for.

A poster on here a while ago said that you don't need a degree to become a nurse; there is still another way of qualifying.

By September 2013 the Nursing Diploma will be phased out and all Nursing students will need a Degree.

LeQueen - neither did teaching.

That's part of the problem. When you compare numbers of kids going to university now to a decade or more ago, it becomes a bit meaningless. All the old polytechnics and volcational colleges were turned into universities, and the diplomas etc into degrees.

I suspect you'd find quite a lot of those essential professions were staffed by people not drawn from that 10%, because they didn't have degrees. Not because they weren't clever enough, but because the job then didn't require something called a degree.

Also was there not real crisis in recruitment of Nurses and Teachers 10 years ago.

Not sure universities are best equipped to input into a-levels - especially as a starting point. We should be looking at the desired output from uni students, e.g. what do employers want/need, what does academia want/need, what do we want to promote as a society (some of the 'softer' stuff) and work backwards from there.

I thought you did need to do a degree to train as a teacher 10 years ago.

Teaching in state schools in Scotland had always (well, as a minimum for the last 40 years) require not only a degree but also a PGCE in the subject you are teaching

I think you'll find that teachers had to have a degree from about 1975.

A level Biology does not have less content now than when I took it in 1989. It has more.

I don't know what SEA means by "teachers of A level Science need to be tested more".

Getting different bodies to deal with A levels and GCSEs seems rather disjointed to me. It's all very well making sure that A levels prepare students for university, but what about making sure that GCSEs prepare students for A levels?

I teach at A'Level. I am not a teacher as such, I teach in facilities that kids visit for school trips and have done (several different places) for the last 15 years.
I still teach content but I also teach the ability to think, in a way that I definitely didn't learn myself.

So, for example, I teach (will out myself hugely here!) conservation issues off the curriculum. Issues the planet is facing, species conservation etc etc. But, alongside this, I 'teach' the ethics. Which involves drawing the kids into some very intense and difficult discussions about the rights and wrongs of different actions, using real world examples, where conservationists have to make decisions that could affect the survival of species, or of people. It can be uncomfortable stuff. There is no right or wrong, there is opinion. Yes there are facts to base it on, but in every single case the facts will be different, and the opinions of how the facts should be used, and the weight given to each one, will vary depending on who you ask. Just as there is in the real world from where the discussions are drawn, where the people making those decisions have no definitive answer but do what they can for what they believe to be the best and have to be able to justify it in the face of differing opinion.

My point is, if we withdraw to a 'fact-based, content-based' system, we would lose this. Yes the kids would know more (equations for photosynthesis, details of metabolic processes), but if any of them wanted to go on and work in this field (and as a conservationist, we need all the supporters we can get!) they'd be sorely disappointed very fast with the reality that it is not a 'fact based, cut-and-dried' environment. And I would have done the profession a disservice in generating students who believed that somehow all the answers were out there if you just looked in the right book. They may not all go on to university so I cannot assume they will get that level of ability there.

This is what I mean by working out what we want A'Levels for. Someone who can recall a fact isn't necessarily the best person for work in the job I'm in. You can look things up. You need someone who can think for themselves.
Do we want the kids to be able to regurgitate facts? Or do we want them to be able to take some of that information, process it, and use it to make decisions that mirror those in the real world, justifying their decisions and weighing it all up appropriately?

I heard Michael Gove on the radio a while back say that Science was just a series of facts to be learned. Someone that ignorant should not be messing with Science education.

Oh God, it's getting late and I'm not making sense. (As much fin as it was cleaning up toddler vomit at 1.00 this morning, it has left me a little tired now!)
When I said off the curriculum, I meant I teach stuff the kids need to know from the curriculum. As in, I take the curriculum and lift stuff off it to know what I need to teach. Not that I'm some kind of loose cannon teaching what the hell I like.

And with the teachers and degrees thing, I have no idea when it actually changed. I just know my parents are both teachers and neither have degrees - they went to teacher training college but what they did was not called a degree. That was really all I was trying to say - that you need to be a bit careful, because name changes of both institutions and qualifications over the years mean you might not be making accurate comparisons, and saying 'More students go to uni now than they did 40 years ago which means some of them shouldn't be there' is a bit pointless. Because some of the kids 40 years ago would have been studying in FE/HE whatever, they just wouldn't have been classed as uni students doing a degree.

I heard Michael Gove on the radio a while back say that Science was just a series of facts to be learned.

That will probably get you an A at A level right now. Which is why there is a problem....

No, it wouldn't. It really wouldn't.

It did in 1989...

And he was saying that he wanted to move back to that, not away from it.

Obviously most subjects require a combination of analysis and knowledge of facts.

There is certainly a style of education that is too much about rote learning of information. There is also a style of education that is about encouraging pupils to express their own opinion and form arguments even when they have no real knowledge on which to base that opinion.

The latter style of education clearly has more potential to turn out people who will make decisions in the workplace but have dangerously high self esteem.

Hopefully a balance can be found between the two styles by most teachers.

I don't want my students to express their own opinion. No idea why that would be relevant in either of the subjects I teach to A level. But I do require them to be able to apply the knowledge that they have to new situations, and to analyse and evaluate data and conclusions drawn from that data. And so do their exams.

And, again I can only speak for my own subjects, but encouraging a student to express their own opinions would be pretty disastrous in terms of their results...

I think perhaps the issue with what you are saying BBTS is that conservation management is not an A level subject. It is a specialist area that should require at least an undergraduate degree. I don't think there is a need for A level biology students to be able to do the kind of things you describe. There are specific models and frameworks for how environmental managers make decisions. Environmental managers shouldn't just be doing what they believe to be the best; they should be basing their decision making processes on specific procedures developed in conjunction with the social sciences.

I also think there is a kind of misunderstanding that sciene equals facts and ethics equals analysis. Both involve facts and analysis. There are facts in moral philosophy. Certain arguments are rational and some are not - those are facts. I would say that the kind of things TFM is describing are sensible types analysis in A level Science. What would help prepare students for university would be to actually teach them a GCSE ethics course, where they learnt some basics about how to argue rationally drawn from philosophy. They would then be able to use their scientific analysis of data and using facts in novel situations, and be able to discuss the ethics of that science based on a sound factual base of how ethical arguments are formed.

Slack hope they're reading whole books rather than just edited highlights.

A Level Chemistry in 2010 was taught in first year degree in 2000, fact.

Reduce the numbers going to university, by all means but A Levels are fine IMO.

The content of Maths A-level has been reduced and deliberately so. I read somewhere that the old A-level content was equivalent to current A-level maths plus AS Further maths. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Maths needs to be made more accessible to sixth form students as there are many, many degrees out there which need some level of post-16 maths. If you see Maths A-level as merely preparation for a maths degree and set the level accordingly, you will be setting it too high for large numbers of students who need post-16 maths. Further maths is becoming more available for students who wish to study Maths at university. However Maths A-level is still seen as too difficult for many students and lots that will need post-16 maths don't take it, or take it and drop out as it is too hard. What is really needed is more maths qualifications available at sixth form that go beyond GCSE, but aren't as hard as A-level (or even AS level), for Maths A-level to be left alone (and definitely not toughened up - that would lead to a disastrous drop in numbers taking it) and for Further Maths to be pushed so that Maths departments at universities can use it as a means of selection (at the moment it's a nice-to-have because not enough sixth forms offer it).