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?

'Education is...far too focused on Shakespeare and not nearly enough in minuting meetings'

Now I would say that minuting meetings belongs in tertiary education while Shakespeare and other cultural capital should be explored as fully as possible at school. Those considered less academic or les interested need to 'own' the authors preferred by the dominant culture, or else their exclusion from it increases.

When I taught I always taught Shakespeare to the bottom sets. My techniques were different - they were active, out of seats, using bits of language etc. teaching minute taking to children still getting to grips with the possibilities if language is not much fun by comparison . i know I was not there just to have fun but I do believe it was a better use of their time.

I feel the same about novels - you referred earlier to people not enjoying reading a lot if novels. I agree if you mean - ad I think you do - heavy duty reading, but there is no child who doesn't enjoy and benefit from reading, or having read to them 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or Of Mice and Men' etc.

The selection thing is really hard for teachers and ibthinknis why so few comment on these threads. You see probably 150/200 children a week. It truly is harder to categorise them than you might think, no matter how interested you are, as a parent, in education and what you observe in your children's classes.. Their strengths vary enormously between subjects and from year to year.
I did once say on a thread like this that in practical terms I wonder if the best place to practice selection, if it is deemed desirable, is in selecting the lowest 20 % rather than the highest.

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

One way to teach that might be by understanding, summarising and writing down the contents of a conversation between Hamlet and Laertes, might it not? Universal and transferrable, yes?

Bonsoir, note taking from a variety of sources is part of the UK national curriculum. I agree it is a vital skill but would say that in my experience it is one the the harder skills to teach children.

Hear hear Friday!

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

Well, my fifteen year old daughter is similar competent with literature, at a very academic school, and over the half term wrote her CV, wrote letters to prospective work experience providers and sent them off (some by email, some by post). Out of interest I looked at them before they went and they looked fine: certainly at least as good as I'd have been able to do. Perhaps GCSE English is doing a better job than the French system is?

At my school the kids have to write letters as part of their work experience. They also have to write a job application for their desired post and then be interviewed for it by a panel of local businesspeople.

Perhaps French schools should introduce work experience?

Friday ds and dd can read of sorts, it is the writing that is the biggest problem.
Try telling Orlando Bloom, Charley Boorman, Tom Cruise, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Hampshire, Jay Leno, Christopher Lowell Keanu Reeves, Keara Knightley, Billy Bob Thornton, Vince Vaughn and Henry Winkler they should have gone into the porn industry because they have problems with reading and writing.

Maybe you know more than me but have never come across being asked anything about what degree or qualifications someone has when in an audition. Usually it is more of a general chat and a read thru of the script and if you have the right look for the part.

"One way to teach that might be by understanding, summarising and writing down the contents of a conversation between Hamlet and Laertes, might it not? Universal and transferrable, yes?"

No. Following a real-life conversation and understanding the nuances is a much more difficult task than following a written conversation. It is also the skill that real life requires.

There is plenty of work experience in French schools. But that is not the skill that I am referring to.

MillyMolly, dyslexia does not preclude high intelligence and is said sometimes to be linked with increased creativity. Successful actors could, in the main, have even highly successful in many fields.

"Bonsoir, note taking from a variety of sources is part of the UK national curriculum. I agree it is a vital skill but would say that in my experience it is one the the harder skills to teach children."

So we cop out and teach Shakespeare instead?

It is not my experience that it is particularly hard to teach those skills - I teach them regularly on a one-to-one basis when coaching applicants to UK universities. However, my experience is that teachers are not usually very good at those skills themselves (I correspond with teachers about references and grade predictions). It is very hard to impart skills that you don't possess!

I agree that it isn't always taught very well because it is a difficult skill.. You are probably doing it the best way possible - one to one and to older students who are of university standard.

It seems a bit harsh to describe teaching Shakespeare as a cop out, but i see what you mean. When teaching a whole class it is certainly easier to engage them with Shakespeare and then with practising note taking (or other language activities - I would usually use literature as a startI point for these). It is also easier to differentiate this way.

Teaching university applicants one to one is a different situation and your students are lucky.

Perhaps I should have said it is one of the harder skills for children to learn. I am sure that if you possess the skills and have practised them professionally then you will be more skilled than many.

"I am sure that if you possess the skills and have practised them professionally then you will be more skilled than many."

I am under no illusion that I have a different skill set to teachers of literature and am more knowledgeable about the demands of the business workplace. As I said earlier, I do believe we should teach Shakespeare/Flaubert etc to school children. But I don't think that even the best pupils are prepared by the teaching of literature for the use of language that all workplaces require, now and in the future. We concentrate on certain aspects of language to the detriment of others through habit more than anything else, and don't raise enough questions about how our DC will need to use and understand language out there in the real world.

Slipshodsibyl, thank you for being one of the only people who haven't denigrated my dc on this thread. Both are dyslexic. Dd has just been through the educational psychologist and is in the bottom 1 percentile of some aspects of dyslexia. Her singing teachers thinks if she gets the right breaks she should make it as a singer. Her drama teachers think exactly the same. Ds is younger and is teaching himself the piano, he too wants to be a singer or actor and has already been approached by a director because of his acting in a play. No one has ever mentioned that any success in this field is dependant on getting any academic qualifications.

This is terrible news for your children's education OP. It is so sad to see teachers beaten down like this .

slipshod the problem with selecting the bottom 20% (and based on what?) is what would you be selecting them for?

Oh, it's one of those "diagnosed with dyslexia" top trumps games, where someone cuts and pastes a list and hope no-one either checks or knows why it's mostly wrong. I can tell, by the way, that it's cut and paste because I seriously doubt that you have the career of a minor American TV presenter of DIY shows, the equivalent of Handy Andy, at your fingertips.

To take the most egregious examples, Winkler has a BA from Emerson College and an MFA from Yale School of Drama. Jay Leno likewise has a degree from Emerson (it's a fairly big deal on the east coast, kind of a combination of St Martins and RADA).

Billy Bob Thornton started, but did not complete, at a four year liberal arts college (ie, a university). That means he must have at least graduated high school and achieved a decent SAT result.

Orlando Bloom attended academic private schools, and completed A Levels.

Knightly started A Levels in English Lit and Classics and, as her IMDB bio says "She was not officially dyslexic as she never sat the formal tests required of the British Dyslexia Association. Instead, she worked incredibly hard, encouraged by her family, until the problem had been overcome by her early teens." I can imagine there's quite a lot in there to annoy people who work in dyslexia.

And in any event, given her mother's a successful actor and writer and her father a successful actor it might be a little hard to draw strong conclusions about much of her career. Likewise Charley "son of John" Boorman, who again attended academic private schools and did A Levels.

Cruise went to a seminary on a church scholarship, which implies a fairly high level of literacy.

Vince Vaghn graduated from what, by American public school standards, is a very academic high school (SAT mean scores of 600 in every section, so a mean SAT score of over 1800? I know people who've taken the SAT from super-selectives in the UK and not got remotely close to that).

I'll give you Susan Hampshire and Keanu Reeves.

So let's rephrase that. "If your father is extremely rich as a director of a multinational company able to fund your mother opening a school solely for your benefit, or you're one of the most beautiful men of your generation, then lack of academic success is not necessarily a bar to becoming an actor".

friday16 - some of your posts are useful and thought-provoking. I don't understand why, from time to time, you feel the need to adopt such an aggressive posting style. We'll read you and think about what you say without the sarcasm

There isn't even agreement about what should be in the British curriculum let alone enough teachers with the full range of skills - the world of business is unfamiliar - or hours in the day.

Pragmatically, wouldn't tertiary education be the best place for development in this area? I'm not trying to cop out when I say it's a hard skill for children to learn. It is a higher level skill and takes ages of practice in the classroom.

Noble giraffe, I'm not sure how to select or if it would really be a good idea. In practice, I feel that this group are least well served at present and least able to access what we are giving them. They are also presently less likely to improve over time as they become increasingly disengaged. I remember that they took up a lot of my time and energy.

I see here people regularly asking for the top 5-10% to be selected, but I think that this leaves too many capable children in the 'second tier' and in any case, feel there is far less of a problem teaching the most able students with the next 40% of ability. If we could make the most of the ability of the bottom 20-25 % I feel it would benefit society.
I don't know if I am right but if selecting is felt to be necessary then that is where I might think of doing it.

I think there is an issue in maths where the bottom sets are faced with the same content over and over again. In Y11 your F and G kids (level 3/4) are trying and failing to master the same content that they failed to master in primary school, and this can be exceptionally demotivating. They can't access new topics because it is a spiral curriculum which requires mastery of the previous level so they get stuck in a maths Groundhog Day.

Other subjects though, there is always something new with which to engage these kids. It would be patronising to assume that low achievers can't get anything out of Shakespeare, and to conclude we shouldn't bother trying.

If we could make the most of the ability of the bottom 20-25 % I feel it would benefit society.

First, we need to figure out how many of them struggling because of actual deficit of ability and how many because they have been denied good education, support and encouragement. The pupil premium rate at two schools near me differs by a factor of twenty-five: 2% at a state VA grammar school, 50% at an outstanding comprehensive less than a mile away. Now isn't that interesting?

Taken at face value, it implies that I could do married's selection of the most able without even having to look at their work or their faces: I could just ask if they've been on free school meals at any point in the past six years, and if they are, assume they're not grammar school material. I'd be 98% right: the exam excludes almost all people on FSM, so just excluding them all to save everyone the effort would have a very low error rate. Now I don't believe this for a second, and I can make a pretty good guess at the reasons for this massive disparity. But then we get to rehearse the whole "why the abolition of the 11+ was a popular Conservative policy, whose main supporters were the educated middle classes" argument.

There's a popular view amongst the more determinist that intellectual capacity is some sort of fixed quantity, and it's a zero sum game: we can only improve the education of the "most able" at the expense of the "less able", and vice versa. But the overall education of society has massively improved: university takeup before the second war was less than 1%, and no-one rational is suggesting that that somehow marked the "real" level of either demand or ability to benefit, or indeed that we as a society have a need for a massive standing army of manual labourers who left school at 12.

Debate about The Flynn Effect notwithstanding, it is clearly the case that in 1930, or 1950, or 1970 there were a massive number of people who could benefit from university education, and therefore potentially contribute more to the economy with the additional skills that they would obtain, but who didn't go to university for bad reasons.

When people talk about there being "too many" people going to university, they tend to (a) set the Goldilocks-esque "just right" level around the day they passed their A Levels (wouldn't want to claim that they shouldn't have gone themselves, now, would they?) and (b) talk essentially about increasing the value of the golden ticket to those that win it, at the expense of those that don't. So if you reduce the number going to university, you increase the premium they can charge over their lifetime. But society as a whole suffers: more people being better educated is overall a good thing, even if it means that lucky people with the best degrees can't make quite as much money. Skilled societies are richer than unskilled societies, and a less educated Britain would be a poorer Britain. And make no mistake: nostalgic cries for a return of (essentially) the secondary modern are about less educated Britains. We would all, collectively, suffer, even if individuals would do better out of it.

Now follows a lot of cutting and pasting.

Cruise spent his childhood trying to hide his dyslexia from his peers. Diagnosed at the age of seven, Cruise describes his younger self as a "functional illiterate". He could barely read in high school or through his earliest roles.

Charley Boorman attended Sibford School, a Quaker school near Banbury, Oxfordshire, England from 1980 until 1983, where he received extra lessons in a specialist department catering for pupils with dyslexia.[1]

Henry Winkler “You learn to negotiate with your learning challenge. I improvised. I never read anything the way that it was written in my entire life. I would read it. I could instantly memorize a lot of it and then what I didn’t know, I made up and threw caution to the wind and did it with conviction and sometimes I made them laugh and sometimes I got hired.”

To quote a few

You can get GCSE's and A Levels with out being able read or write, it is called a scribe, a person who sits with you in the exam, who reads the question and writes down your answer. So not being able to read or write does not preclude you from taking exams.

The Cruise quote is from a self-help book, "The Ace Principle: 15 Success Principles to Absorb Comprehend Excel in Every Area of Life", and has then been recycled. I suspect its origins are are an interview in People in 2003. I am guessing that if you read the whole article, you might be slightly less willing to see Cruise as a role model for dyslexics, or much of anything, given he says that all you need to do to overcome dyslexia (or not, see below) is to become a Scientologist and pay large amounts of money to use L Ron Hubbard's "study tech".

Although it's not entirely clear from the article that he even says that he is dyslexic. "Many people had tried to teach me, but no one had taught me how to learn or how to study; I had been told I had all the symptoms of dyslexia, but no one had given me a solution." is somewhat ambiguous: it reads more like the standard "I couldn't (do thing), but thanks to Ron I can" mantra that Scieno's favour.

Given Cruise made it to the senior year of a Catholic university and has extensive licenses for aircraft, I'm inclined to see the whole thing as part of his scientology narrative. Struggle and adversity, overcome by LRH's tech. Cruise hasn't just got a private pilot's license, he's got instrument rating and is licensed for multi-engine jets: have you seen the exams you need to take for that? And you sure as hell can't use a scribe for them, either.