To wonder about CSEs v O Levels

[Bakance]

My partner has a brother much older than him - my DP is youngest in large, working class, Irish Catholic family. No one in their family has passed ever gone on to higher education - none educated beyond GCSE level.
Partner's eldest brother did 6 CSE exams big absolutely no O-levels at all - would he have been considered below average academic ability ?

Manchester gave me an EE offer in 'any two A levels, including General Studies'. Interesting to hear that they were one of the few to count it.

Someone mentioned Oxbridge offers were 2E grades at Alevel. My dsis applied to Oxford in 1987 and she was told by Oxford that if she passed the interview then she could choose to take their standard offer which was 3As grades at Alevel or she could take their entrance exam and if she passed that then the token offer was 2E grades at Alevel. What surprised her most was when she got to Oxford quite a few students who hadn’t taken the entrance exam got in with much lower Alevel grades B,Cand even Ds here’s looking at you David and Ed Miliband.

I was rubbish at school ( especially maths) but I came out of my rough secondary school with four o levels ! One was an A in English lit.
Still felt an underachiever, but this thread has cheered me up a bit.
I have a few CSE's ,but not 1s
Maybe I wasn't as bad as I thought I was ! lol
( but I did struggle a lot at school )

I have to disagree with you @ButterCrackers . Everything was not based on class but on brains. Clever children passed the 11+ and no one was tutored for it in the 1960s. It genuinely gave bright WC kids a shot at a more ambitious curriculum. If you were among the most literate, numerate and logical 20% in your class, you passed and got a place at the grammar school. Read the autobiographies of the numerous politicians (both major parties) who went to Oxford after grammar school.

We knew, albeit quite briefly, a family whose children all passed 11+ but allowed only the eldest to take the grammar school place (the uniforms and activities were often expensive). Of three brothers, the one who went to university eventually ended up a full professor at a top university, but his younger brothers didn't fail, though they left school at 15/16 as wages were needed. One ended up running the Canvey Island oil refinery and the other started a large printing business, via trade skills and brains. There were then more routes to success that weren't purely academic. My grandad left school in the late 1920s at 14 for an engineering company as an apprentice but ended his career as a senior director at an aerospace firm still considered a world leader now. The establishment needed, sought and cherished raw talent.

Edited, but for clarity of reading, not message.

Not in my experience. The grammar school system in my area was class based. If only what you write would have been the case then the school would have reflected the local society. I hope what you state applied to others though. I hope that a fair system existed somewhere.

We were tutored for our 11 plus! Every morning at primary school! Verbal reasoning. Maths and English. Every day - first lesson was verbal reasoning. We got 1/3 through in a class of 39. This was mid 60s. My mother did more work with me at home. We definitely had a mix of dc at my grammar but it was small town rural. When I was there, I remember one dc going to Oxbridge. None in my year.

I've also seen my DH's school magazine. It included A level results and destinations in1971. A very sought after grammar. Lots did 2 A levels. Some just did Maths pure and applied! Very many, the majority, didn't go to uni. They joined local firms or went into teaching and civil service in a whole variety of training roles. Likewise my school. Politicians going to Oxford were not the norm from working class backgrounds. They were the exceptions. The norm from ordinary grammars was 0. Year after year.

I’m 52 and was the first year to take GCSE’s. It’s nonsense really because if you weren’t in the grammar band you could only get up to a C taking the lower papers (now foundation) so no different to the old CSE/O levels. I scraped through with about 6 GCSE’s at poor grades. I don’t know anyone from school that went to university. I think about 6 friends stayed on in 6th form .

I think it may have worked as planned when manufacturing represented more of the economy than it does now, and where industries were concentrated on particular regions. The heavy engineering industries and the West Midlands in particular, were able to provide a depth of skills, an FE/night school infrastructure to support it, and a lot of competing companies so people could change jobs as they pursued greater success.

In deepest West Cornwall in the early 1960s we definitely weren't tutored for anything. Not with 40-odd per class. Reading, writing and arithmetic mostly. Singing lessons were at 11:00 on Monday with the BBC Schools broadcast. First thing every day was handkerchief and nit inspection!

The grammar school system gave WC dcs a real shot at social mobility, 5 successive prime ministers: Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major were educated in grammar schools after that the majority of PMs were privately educated. I think because grammar schools were everywhere up to the 70s most dcs weren’t tutored as there wasn’t the pressure there is today to get into the few remaining ones left but there definitely dcs who were tutored by parents who were in the know and didn’t want them going to secondary moderns

i went to a comprehensive which had been the city’s grammar school. If you got into the top 3 classes you were known as the grammar stream and everyone in them did Olevels and most went onto do ALevels. I remember sitting English, Maths and science tests in my last year of primary school which occurred in one day and we weren’t told about them beforehand this turned out to the tests to stream us for secondary school.

Not sure Callaghan went to a grammar. It's all very well picking up on a few politicians but even by the 60s, not many true working clsss were in my grammar. Definitely a few. Tutoring tends to mean paying privately. Tutors were not used because school work wax geared to the 11 plus. We had 2 maths papers, English including an essay, and verbal reasoning. We covered the type of questions we might get every day. Obviously we did a maths curriculum as well but other aspects, eg English literature, sciences and humanities were virtually absent. When I got to the grammar these subjects were a total unknown.

@ButterCrackers

Grammar schools (in the state system) were set up because of class. After WWII there were not enough people to fulfil certain jobs, so grammars were set up to allow some WC children to become managers and supervisors.

A lot of grammars were previously private that converted to grammars in the state system.

@Mycatsmudge

Check out the actual status of the schools they attended when they attended.

Harold Wilson went to the same school as my mother, she attended after passing her 11+, Wilson attended when it was private.

even by the 60s, not many true working clsss were in my grammar

I went to a grammar in the 80s and there were. Although it depends what you mean by "working class" - I mean their parents weren't all bank managers and doctors - for example, one worked in a building society and one ran a TV repair shop.

It isn't like that now - superselective and takes from a massive catchment.

My Grammar was started in 1474!!! They are not necessarily from the 20th century. Many old grammars exist! More expansion was after the 1942 Education Act. Many started out as church schools.

In the 80s I got a CSE Grade 2 in Maths as I was too shit at it to do the O level.

I am paid shedloads now and am very good at numbers. Go figure.

Mistake! 1423. Here's a picture of where it was until 1901. The doorway is my DHs old grammar. A much later school.

The discussion about exams and the education system is interesting but what I’m wondering about is why the OP seems to want to label her BIL and is interested in what exams he took when he was 16.

@SpentAll
Teachers are not always good or correct. Many people can out perform school results. School is not applying maths at that level. Work does.

My comprehensive school was originally a grammar. It started in 1616 and became a comprehensive in 1971.

I started at a grammar in the late 70s. Most had disappeared by then, but my borough kept them. There was no tutoring then. My primary school did no tutoring. We had a very limited curriculum - I think it was normal. Mainly maths and English. An occasional bit of history and PE and art. The first we knew about the 11+ was sitting a practice exam one week. We took the actual exam the next week. Every child in the borough. Approximately the top 25% got into grammar school. I went to one of the girls schools. There was a real mix of backgrounds -working class, some office workers, a few nurses, lots of teachers, one or two doctors, solicitors etc. No one was really well off. I certainly wasn't - FSM.
Probably 2/3rd went into the sixth form, with about 1/3rd of them doing a secretarial course. The rest did 3 A levels, with a handful doing 4. Many went on to uni/poly. A few went to Oxbridge, a few did medicine.

Yep - I don’t think the teachers were awful in my case, I just wasn’t engaged and as you say real life work maths is a different beast.

I like problem solving so algebra comes easily. But don’t ask me about angles or shapes as they don’t figure in my interest or work!

I think the reason this is relevant today is that a lot of people are again advocating for education to be differentiated between “academic” (ie O’Levels) and vocational (CSEs).

I was in the first year to take GCSE and some of my friends older siblings took a mixture of O’Levels and CSEs and it made life very burdensome for university applications to have this twin track approach.

As PPs have mentioned the previous system was riddled with class bias and prejudice about the expectations of people from different backgrounds. A lot of the time people were steered towards CSEs because of crude judgment made by teachers on the basis of how they spoke or which neighbourhoods they grew up in. It was laughably two dimensional.

GCSEs are not perfect but I think it would be a real mistake to go back to such a class ridden system. Children ended up basically locked out of the prospect of higher education sometimes because either they were at a school which didn’t cater for academically capable children or because of the prejudices of the teachers.

I’m all in favour of improving vocational education and allowing people whose skills are oriented toward trade to specialise but it should allow for more flexibility than that system allowed.

Yes! What was this with only doing part of the syllabus? Can you imagine the furore now 🤣
It really was disgraceful

I think that’s why Oxford used to offer two Es, because you had to get two A levels to get your tuition fees paid by the LA and any living grant.

@Rainydayinlondon

Parents were so grateful that dc were at the grammar, no one would complain. You would just be told to leave. We were just told that being able to answer enough questions was ok! My over riding memory of school is teachers arriving for lessons, teaching from the front and us taking notes. Where parents could supplement learning, dc did better. Where they could not for various reasons, dc really didn't achieve what they could have done.