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?

Forgot to say my DH says his most useful O levels have been maths and Technical Drawing - certainly not history etc.
Different subjects matter to different people and to different jobs.

If school is not about preparing people for the work place then what is it for?

Jesus Christ. I'm out of here.

Married, I certainly got the impression that you wanted academic selection to get your DD away from the poorly behaved oiks.

It's funny that on MN people are usually quite clear in their understanding that streaming is a bad thing, that kids should be setted by subject according to their ability in each subject, with fluid movement between sets. However, take streaming to an extreme, place the top stream in a different school and allow no movement between streams and MN are all for it.

Kids can do well in maths and English and do part time college courses in nannying, hairdressing, motor maintenance.

But you linked poor behaviour with academic failings in your first line.

So when should they be sorted noble because the current system of no sorting isn't working. When dd attended an oustanding girls comprehensive the principle reason it was turning into a disaster was behaviour

No school and no child should ever have learn alongside assault, theft, intimidation, constant disruption and danger. Once that gets sorted out in the UK then I think any tinkering with the academics will be more reasonable and more justified.

For noble and millymolly two sentences from my 9.54 post. I am sorry if it wasn't clear. My principle issue about state education - from my experience of it is that behaviour isn't dealt with properly and until it is no child regardless of their ability can possibly fulfil their potential.

You said that the system of no sorting wasn't working and then immediately talked about behaviour so it seemed you blamed poor behaviour on the lack of selection.

As to when should we sort, if you are talking about into different streams, one studying academic subjects and one being prepared for call centres, then as late as possible. Post GCSE would seem reasonable. That doesn't mean that kids should be forced into nothing but academic subjects up till then, but that they should be given the opportunity to mix and match according to their talents and interests. There has to be chances for late bloomers - with foundation and higher tier papers at GCSE, the decision to enter for one or the other can change right up to the wire. Kids can take vocational courses alongside academic ones, meaning that they can still access A-level in certain subjects should they choose.

But don't you think noble as Bonsoir said earlier that it is very easy to identify non academic children very early on if one is realistic?

I think the problem is that schools are just too big and the system of one size fits all just doesn't work.

they should be given the opportunity to mix and match according to their talents and interests.

A problem is whether the best judges of what they need are themselves, their parents, the school, the government or ...?

See for example here.

No married, I don't.

For example, I taught a child in a mediocre middle set maths in Y7 who went on to excel and ended up with a top grade in further maths at A-level. I have taught other children where it has suddenly made sense and they have then made rapid progress.

Progress isn't linear, ability isn't set in stone, and labelling children at an early age isn't helpful.

My DH failed the 11+ and then messed up his A Levels first time round. He now has a PhD, is widely-published, has taught at Oxbridge and is well-respected in his field.

Anyone trying to label him at him aged 12 or 13 would probably have put him in the non-academic box. Shows how pointless such labelling is, really.

Friday, not clear what the link is between the blog and a mix and match approach? Are you suggesting that white working class kids are funnelled into less academic subjects whether unconsciously or not?

Are you suggesting that white working class kids are funnelled into less academic subjects

Yes.

And that would go double in a world in which that determination is done at an early age. Working class children arrive in school typically slightly behind those from pushier more affluent/educated backgrounds. It takes some time for that to equalise out. Early selection onto "pathways" would be essentially by class.

That's why I said I was against selection onto a particular pathway. I agree with you there. That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for vocational or other options, alongside an academic core and other subjects pre-16. In fact it can be the making of some kids.

A two tier system where if a kid takes a motor maintenance course then they are stuck doing foundation maths and media studies instead of English lit isn't good.

I think we're on exactly the same page.

There's no inherent reason why trade/craft courses should be lower status. But they are, in part because they're all too often fairly obviously childminding rather than training: for example, there are hairdressing NVQs taken by people under 16, when there are H&S reasons why people under 16 can't do most of the tasks involved.

And as you say, the axiomatic assumption that people doing those courses should be doing foundation maths is just patronising crap.

"A two tier system where if a kid takes a motor maintenance course then they are stuck doing foundation maths and media studies instead of English lit isn't good."

ITA noblegiraffe and have really enjoyed your posts on this thread.

If school is not about preparing people for the work place then what is it for?

Having just been around several prospective secondary schools the heads talk in each one was all about teaching children for the work place. Giving them skills for the work place. So the schools themselves are saying that is what they are there for. Only the really failing school said anything about fostering a love for learning. Most I got the impression were exam factories. Pass enough exams to get into uni then get a job.
Great if your child is bright and academic not so great if your child cannot write and wants to act.

School is about helping children enter the real world as well-rounded citizens, with a sense of their place in the world, an idea of their heritage and the tools and resilience to tackle the problems they will face. IMO.

If it was just about workplace preparation then why would we teach any of them Shakespeare? More useful in that sense would be how to minute a meeting.

not so great if your child cannot write and wants to act.

An argument which would have more weight were successful actors not, largely, a pretty successful lot educationally. Run your eye down leading men and women of note and observe that more than a few have good degrees from Oxbridge and the Ivy League. There's a thing in Maths called an Erdos Number, which indicates how close you are to publishing with the great Erdos: Natalie Portman's is five (the same, as it happens, as mine), for her publication under her birth name while she was a student at Harvard. Claire Danes (Yale) and Damian Lewis (Eton) are hardly lightweights on Homeland, are they? Perhaps they could talk about their work with Jodie Foster (Yale) and Dominic West (Eton) before having a comflab with Thompson, Brannagh, Atkinson, Fry, Baddiel (didn't complete his PhD), Russell Beal (didn't take up PhD funding following glittering First), Punt, Dennis et al about Cambridge. Even those that didn't go to selective universities and high end public schools were serious candidates to do so (the account of why Helena Bonham Carter, South Hampsted High School Westminster sixth form, was turned by Cambridge is hardly one of academic failure). Jason Isaacs (Habs, then Law at Bristol) may be a bit redbrick to the Oxbridge/Ivy types, but it's hardly an easy course to get on. Child stars? She may not have completed, but Emma Watson was by all accounts hardly out of her depth at Brown or Worcester College. And so on, and so on, and so on. There are some actors who, of course, came through LAMBDA, RADA, Central and so on: those are hardly places without some intellectual heft, either. David Tennant may not have studied English at University as such, but you're hardly going to be one of the better Hamlets and one of the best Richard IIs of your generation without a deep and profound understanding of the text.

There are for practical purposes np jobs for illiterate actors outside the porn industry (there's an exception, just about, for extremely good looking women who have made careers as models: #everydaysexism). Theatre, film and TV acting are all about text. It is a cruel illusion to tell people that there are careers in acting independent of significant academic success: there simply are not.

If it was just about workplace preparation then why would we teach any of them Shakespeare?

I think several posters here think that culture is not for the working classes as it will only give them ideas. It was Lenin, I think (oh, history: another thing presumably to be cut in our new "preparation for the workplace" education system) who remarked that he could not listen to Mozart (oh, music: etc) because it made it hard for him to kill people.

the heads talk in each one was all about teaching children for the work place.

Meanwhile, the middle classes send their children to schools that don't think like that, and we wonder why social mobility is stalled.

At the comp I attended in the 1970s, there was a pretty clear division after 14 between an academic stream (O Levels in traditional subjects, A Levels, university at a high rate for the era) and a non-academic stream (Woodwork, metalwork, typing, etc). After all, there were limitless numbers of jobs at the car plant for people who could wield a screwdriver and those that were a bit better and could use a lathe could aspire to be toolmakers. And in the offices, there were serried ranks of women (it was women) typing letters and filing paper records. Hell, it employed twenty thousand people.

The factory is now a carpark, a Sainsbury's and a housing estate. When the school crashed into special measures about five years ago, less than a third of the pupils (in large part the children of my contemporaries) had a parent in work, and FSM was at something like 80%. Those workplace skills, with a lathe and a screwdriver and typewriter: how were they working out, again?

Never mind there being no jobs for life, there are essentially no careers for life either.

Society, and the world, is changing too quickly, and over a near-fifty year working life people are going to have to do lots of different things, many of which don't yet exist. If they can't learn, they won't work. It's as simple as that. Vocational training of the 1970s was, in significant part, for jobs that no longer exist, either because they've gone elsewhere or because they no longer exist anyway (how many jobs are there for audio typists or shorthand typists these days, eh?) Many of those jobs that do still exist have changed almost beyond recognition. If all school does is "prepare you for the workplace" then it has failed, because within twenty years, it will be a different workplace, and those that cannot adapt to that will find the world a very cold place.

"If it was just about workplace preparation then why would we teach any of them Shakespeare? More useful in that sense would be how to minute a meeting."

The problem with most schooling is that it is far too focused on Shakespeare and not nearly enough on minuting meetings. School needs to be about both education and preparation for the real world.

Bonsoir, the problem with preparing for the workplace is that the workplace is not a fixed thing. The jobs a lot of these kids will have in the future don't even exist yet.

What workplace would you have us prepare them for?

friday your Erd?s Number is 5? what do you do?! The closest I've come to Erd?s is reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, so I'm impressed :)

My PhD supervisor has changed areas, but started out as a pure mathematician, and we've subsequently published jointly. So I get vicarious maths cred from my work in a related field, even though I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a mathematician. Young Natalie did the same thing: it's a very numerical piece of work, and I assume there's a pure maths heritage to some of the co-authors.

Understanding, summarising and writing down the contents of a conversation (taking minutes) is a universal, transferable skill.

My DSS2 is in French Première (Y12). DSS2 is lucky: he was born with enormous aptitude for many things. Nevertheless, he has preferences, and (French) literature is not one of them. He, like every French child in lycée général, must take his French bac final examination at the end of this school year. Because he is conscientious and because he is very, very clever, he is consistently coming top of his year group (of 90) on common tests. He can write powerful analyses of Madame Bovary, La Princesse de Clèves etc etc that his French teacher (whom we know well - DSS1 also had him) tells him are some of the best he has seen in 5 years at this school.

Yesterday, DSS2 needed to write an email requesting information for further education. I was not surprised (because I have already been through all this with DSS1) that he needed my help all the way - I basically dictated a three line email. DSS1 is now pretty much autonomous when it comes to writing "business" emails (in university or internship contexts) but school did not teach him how to do that. I did.