To think that this is terrible news for my children's education?

[ICameOnTheJitney]

Axeing of Soft GCSEs to hit Drama and PE

Exam board insiders confirmed this weekend that subjects such as law, media studies, drama and PE were at risk of being culled from the list of about 58 GCSEs. One source said that as many as 20 subjects were under scrutiny

Why the arts? And surely PE is a VALID subject...not all children are academic and we NEED PE teachers and drama teachers and actors ffs!

Please tell me why, if this happens it's a good thing?

Friday lunchtime clubs are one of the hardest parts of my job:

Transcribing parts so they are suitable for our pupils in windband and orchestra,

Setting out 70 chairs in a specific order on Monday lunch and then 40 heavy duty stands

Ditto for Tuesday lunch

Preparing worksheets for Theory club

Photocopying music for windband and orchestra

Transcribing choir music out

Making backing tracks for choir

Putting out 100 plus chairs arranged in voice types for choir

Tuning instruments/restringing instruments

And then, giving up your lunch to try and cram a 20 minute rehearsal in whilst kids are chewing on a sandwich whilst trying to play the trumpet etc

All unpaid btw

I do realise that you were talking about debating club.

That sounds a heck of a lot easier to organise than our clubs

Oh I left out doing the same for string ensemble, wind ensemble , chamber choir and 6th form choir

I haven't had time to read the thread but I think it sounds like a positive idea.

In the olden days there weren't O'Levels in PE or Drama. PE was a module on education degrees I think and hopeful actors and actresses went to RADA. My mother went to the Royal Ballet School but she didn't doM an O'Level in Dance but she did matriculate (I think that was the equivalent of EBACC by the way). My DH is a lawyer and a very successful one - he didn't get there by doing O'Level or even A'Level law although he did read Law at Oxford.

Nom please don't think I don't value the arts.

I'm a writer.

I also spend an absurd amount of time and money and effort ensuring my own DC have liberal access to all forms of culture.

I definitely do think it has value.

However, if I look at my younger self, I see someone from a very disadvanatged background, with no cultural capital to speak of, who propelled myself to Oxbridge to study law. It was my dogged attachment to acadmia that stood me in good stead.

I picked my my cultural capital at university and later in life when I had money and access.

So do I think a love of Shakespeare can warm the cockles of a shelf stacker's heart? Possibly. But frankly, I'd take a solid set of academics that could lead to greater earning power an day of the week .

There is nothing stopping anyone running a Debating Club or an Acting Club and, indeed, at my DD's French-English bilingual school there is both Acting and Debating, in English (the minority language). Acting Club starts in Y1 and Debating in Y5 and both carry on more or less right through until Y13. DD also attends Acting workshops in English on Sundays from time to time, in another location.

What happens is what I am pretty much sure happens everywhere: the DC who enjoy Acting and Debating Clubs are those who are better at speaking English than their peers and are self-confident in front of an audience. The others tend to drop out pretty fast. And where do DC gain their superior initial speaking skills?

stillenacht. you need my ds. he has just been made a music monitor/prefect something or other.

Hi bonsoir. Its funny about drama. but my ds who has verbal dyspraxia has discovered a love of and a talent at drama. while in normal speech he has problems word finding, when acting another part of the brain is used, and he is utterly fluent.

Its rather amazing! I can't tell you what a dramatic (no pun intended) boost to his confidence at school this has been.

Madame yes we have prefects... They have just been appointed. Whether they will help or hinder remains to be seen (usually just a lovely thing for Ucas statements!)

I know! But he is genuinely thrilled. And gets to boss bigger boys around!

i noticed when the teachers where on strike recently a teacher holding
a sign saying pupils are humans not profits .Well a few years ago the schools round here tried to push pupils on to b techs who didnt want that id a child wanting to do science gcse and a levels and the school trying to stop that it was easier for the school to come out better the more they put on btechs and did they make it difficult and make you feel like the worst parent yes but my child knew what she wanted and is now in final year of science degree but still hates the way she was treated at school when she didnt tow the line and chose for herself , When teachers really start seeing pupils as human biengs deserving to make thier own choices with the help of parents who generally know thier children well maybe it will be less about school profits

Apologies for the delayed response, we had a (very welcome) surprise visit!

Cignolimama - Sorry, I should have been clearer: I was talking specifically about folk culture (i.e. "live and unsigned" music, dance, art, poetry etc) being inaccessible, not mass culture. I deleted a bit of my post for the sake of brevity, which basically argued that we need these subjects in school to encourage people to become active interpreters of and contributers to culture, rather than merely passive consumers (as the "culture industry" encourages us to be). I think that this is a problem in most affluent countries, because the culture industry grows as disposable income increases. (I know I'm drawing very heavily on the Frankfurt School here, but I think it's still relevant.)

As far as the "gulf" at university goes... I don't think it was just "superficial gloss", although they certainly had that. The students from private or selective schools definitely had more presence: they were generally able to "cut through" if more than one person started to speak at the same time, could get away with speaking more slowly without being interrupted, seemed more mature and worldly, and had perfected the kinds of non-verbal communication that Obama uses so effectively. They also approached every meeting as a networking opportunity rather than a discussion/meeting between acquaintances, and made a point of inviting us all to their am-dram shows and comedy nights in between meetings even though they were obviously planning to spend the evening with other attendees who they knew better (most were studying Law or Medicine, so had their own course-specific am-dram societies). Naturally, they also made better first impressions: more eye contact, more confident handshakes, speaking with chest rather than head voices, etc, and they seemed to assume that everybody was interested in them and what they had to say. And, of course, they all made damn sure they were sat as close as possible to the most important people at the table . I did learn a lot about how to perform from watching them, but I think the inner confidence and self-assuredness they had was probably as important (or even more important) than the outer illusion, and unfortunately that's something I can't "adopt" at present (although I'm working on it).

Thinking back, my experience of that programme made me feel pretty much the same as my first out of two interviews for English at Oxford. I got 2/10 for that one, even though it focused exclusively on modern English novels, which later became my specialism at university (and which I was clearly excellent at, because my marks were outstanding all of the way through). In contrast, I felt perfectly comfortable with the (very intimidating) Medieval English interviewer, who gave me 8/10 even though I admitted that I knew nothing about his subject at that point and was presently most interested in Terry Pratchett, Kazuo Ishiguro, and other contemporary authors... I'm not suggesting that the first set of interviewers marked me down because my face didn't fit, which is what I felt at the time - in retrospect, I think that my lack of "gloss" and self assurance meant that I didn't perform at my best, and they didn't have the skill to see past that or put me at my ease as the second interviewer did.

WordFactory - I agree that there's a balance to be struck, but I really don't think that devaluing arts-based qualifications or reducing their accessibility is the way to do it. Overhauling the curriculum to ensure that arts-based subjects do involve a lot of relevant theory, challenging source material, formal analysis, critical evaluations of others' work and the students' own productions would probably be a better way forward.

I can't understand why so many people work from the assumption that the study of the arts is a luxury for students growing up in a knowledge economy. Attending a play is a luxury, certainly. Studying a subject which cultivates creativity, abstract and critical thinking, an understanding of how power works on an interpersonal and societal level (and what problems and limitations are involved), the ability to present yourself confidently and convincingly, an appreciation of how language can control or facilitate thought, and (IMO most importantly) ... That sounds pretty much essential to me, if you want to succeed, and a disturbingly low proportion of children have people at home who can compensate if all of that is taken away from them at school. Plus, if we made all disadvantaged kids suffer a "rigorous, traditional curriculum" which many would struggle with and benefit very little from, a high proportion of them would still have to be shelf stackers, but without the solace and escapism that the arts provide.

Marney, pushing the Btechs would not have been the decision of the teachers but the Head. We don't have that power.

Bonsoir - You said "What happens is what I am pretty much sure happens everywhere: the DC who enjoy Acting and Debating Clubs are those who are better at speaking English than their peers and are self-confident in front of an audience. The others tend to drop out pretty fast. And where do DC gain their superior initial speaking skills?"

All the way through school, I had a reputation for being articulate and naturally good at public speaking. Sadly, the Cambridge educated teacher who led the debating society retired as soon as I got old enough to join, and the debating society folded because nobody else had the experience needed to run it (which I imagine is the reason why many schools no longer have one). My only experience of public speaking in secondary school was the GCSE oral assignments for English Language, which AFAIK has been scrapped for the next cohort of students (and won't count towards the final grade for students who have just done them). I learned enough from my English Language feedback to get Firsts in all of my presentations at university, but nowhere near enough to hold my own in the university debating society or (more importantly) the special programme that I was selected for. That was the case despite having very supportive MC parents who helped me to gain my superior initial speaking skills. In retrospect, I desperately wish I'd done Drama - I really think it would have helped me to present myself with the kind of confidence, self-assurance, and poise that I would need in order to network more effectively and interview better.

*"have been scrapped." Sorry, can't proofread my posts in the little text box because my zoom function doesn't work in Ubuntu...

Thank you so much Nom! I appreciate your taking the time to write about this. I've felt the difference, seen the difference, but hadn't known how to articulate the difference, which you've just done very elegantly.

Nom I agree with that.

Rather than remove the GCSE status attributed to these disciplines, I'd rather see the curriculum reflect their acadmeic side.

But it won't happen. There's just too much resistance from teachers and parents who will say either that they are already sufficiently acadmic, or they will say we need to offer them in the current format to bolster the self esteem of less able pupils.

You can see on this thread; the attachment to the status quo is mammoth!

wordfactory, it is quite charming that you think that resistance from teachers would make the slightest bit of difference to Gove's plans.

Gove doesn't rate non-academic subjects in the slightest, any resistance to beefing them up will come from him. Suggesting that teachers and/or parents are resistant to beefing up qualifications is ignoring that a large number of qualifications have already been beefed up in the last couple of years. Maths, science and others have been made harder already, and will be made a lot harder again in 2015/16. BTEC has already been made harder by the inclusion of an externally marked exam.

Saying that teachers are resistant to change is something you see quite often in the daily mail. Teachers aren't resistant to change, that's ridiculous, teachers roll with changes every single year.

We are resistant to shitty curriculum changes, however, unfortunately we don't have any power to stop them.

I haven't seen any teachers in this thread objecting to beefing up PE and Drama, btw

My son's headmaster (son finished 6th form in May/June) who regularly has articles published in the Times and Telegraph has asserted publicly that the oral part of the GCSE English curriculum was and is a complete waste of time.

Further our DS was offered an unconditional place at Oxford on the basis of his interview without ever having joined the debating society and without ever engaging with drama.

I really don't think either are essential. I can see there is room for some of the non essential subjects but I think the situation has escalated out of control with far too many BTEC students thinking that a Music Tec Level 3 is going to help them a achieve a career in music or win X Factor with very little talent and with little or no formal music training. I really do think the situation has got a little out of control.

FWIW our dd wants to be an actress and we will support her in that and will support her through RADA or something similar but it is on the understanding that first of all she will achieve some formal professional qualifications so that whether she achieves her dream or not she will be able to earn a living. And her dream isn't pie in the sky - she is already working hard to achieve it but I won't specify for fear of outing myself. However, she isn't doing GCSE drama, although does want to do A'Level drama (although this has severely limited her choice of 6th form school) and I don't think it would make a great deal of difference in relation to her overall success as a potential actress.

The arts are extremely accessible in my experience and do not necessarily required an arts based curriculum with formally recognised qualifications to confer experience or knowledge in them. If one is truly talented there are specialist professional routes to facilitate their study which do not generally require a GCSE in them.

I can't really see where you are coming from nom one debates by researching one's subject, by generally conversing with one's peers, and it is something we all do on a daily basis. Many many MPs weren't members of a debating society; my DH wasn't yet reasoned argument of specific and arguable points is how he makes his living.

Too often nowadays success at something like art, music, drama, dancing, is an expectation because one can get a qualification in it when actually what one needs is some raw and exceptional talent.

Re Oxbridge admissions, wordfactory, instead of blaming schools for their poor state school intake, perhaps they need to be more active in their recruitment instead of expecting everything to be served up to them on a plate, just the way they like it.

Incidentally, Gove has actively damaged state school applications to Oxbridge by removing AS-levels. Cambridge University specifically asked him not to do this as they said that a state school pupil who had never considered Oxbridge might be given the confidence to apply by an excellent set of AS-level results.
But Gove does what Gove wants.

noble we do an awful lot to try to widen access!

I personally do an awful lot. And I aint paid for it!!!

Why can't state school pupils have that confidence and expectation instilled by their teachers noble? My DH did and he went from a Northern Comp to Oxford because of an inspirational History teacher.

And yes, I agree the removal of AS levels is not a good move.

If you actually read what I say, at no point have I defended Gove.

married and therein lies the rub.

It is not for the universities to lower their expectations and standards.

They have already introduced the contextualised offers, and have introduced far reaching access schemes.