To be surprised you mumsnetters criticised my ex’s school !!

[Jumell]

My ex went to an all boys’ comprehensive school in London. It’s been slagged off to the ground on here as being rough, not being the school of choice for MC parents, results are dire etc etc .

However he did leave the school in one piece and with 2 CSEs no less!! (OK showing his age a bit!) But the pearl clutchiness about his school on MN is immense !! 🤣 - I didn’t do CSEs btw so don’t truly know how good 2 CSEs is.
He left school in 1986 FYI - I was still a young school kid then, Dunno - was 2 CSEs good for 1986?!

FWIW the comp I went to wasn’t short for ‘comprehensive’ - more compost heap - but that’s possibly the subject of another thread. !

Lots of schools in London were feral in the 1980s. Mine certainly was. Most are much better now but it's hard to overcome a school's reputation. The bollocks i read about mine...

2 CSEs wasn't great, even then.

The old system of school exams in England (and I think Wales and NI too - different in Scotland) had two types of exams.

GCE stood for General Certificate of Education. There were two levels - O (Ordinary) and A (Advanced) Levels, taken at 16 and 18 respectively. Only a small minority of the school population took A levels. Most kids didn't take O levels either.

CSE - stood for Certificate of Secondary Education. The highest grade you could get in a CSE was equivalent to a bare pass in O level, IIRC. The idea was that they were more accessible and should prevent children leaving with nothing, as most did before then.

Two top grade CSEs in English and Maths - good.

Two bare passes in Woodwork and Needlework - not so great.

So we’re supposed to congratulate him on leaving his school with no longterm physical damage and minimal qualifications?

I didn’t do CSEs btw so don’t truly know how good 2 CSEs is

😃

Fair enough .. I’m a GCSE person being a tad younger ..

I love that you're using the fact he left with 2 CSEs as evidence the school wasn't as bad as MN states, then literally in the next breath admitting you have no idea what it means and asking MN if it's good or not.

Come on - 2 CSEs are a fair old effort !

Dunno - was 2 CSEs good for 1986?!

No.

It was the equivalent of probably achieving 2 grade 3s at GCSE. Unless he got a CSE Grade 1 - in which case congratulations. He scraped two Grade 4s.

HTH.

Well as I’ve had relationships surge men with 0 quals I thought that 2 CSEs were .. well ok ..

CSE grade 1 was designed to be equivalent of an O level grade C but exact parity wasn't always possible due to different syllabus or assessment arrangements so CSE was seen as less valuable even when top grade.

It’s pretty dire. I have no idea which school you are talking about (and funnily enough schools can change quite a lot in 40 years) but you aren’t convincing me that MN posters are wrong to say they wouldn’t send their kids there.

No. Coming out with two cse is appalling. And what grades were they? They needed to be above grade 3 to be equivalent to an O level pass.

TBF that was all some of my friends took away from secondary school

Fair enough - I hated school but was better at things like English etc than purely practical subjects that I was dire at !!

He did really badly.
If your normal type of man has zero qualifications and your ex had barely any then maybe try dating a man with a bit more about him?

Me too !!

There were also Additional levels between O and A. This was in 1980.

I took my Maths and Biology a year early and then the Additionals the year when I turned 16.

2 ? or did you mistype 12...

I have too and they were perfectly nice boys (we were all teenagers at the time, I was in 6th form, they were working). But I didn’t take their lack of qualifications to be evidence of what an amazing school they had been to

Somewhere 40 years ago is not going to be the same as today.

@Jumell I'm not trying to put him down. Qualifications aren't everything and perhaps he has had great success after school. It's not a measure I would judge him by.

I just don't think "2 CSEs and all of his limbs" is much of an advertisement for the school is all.

There were CSEs, O levels, AO levels, A levels, and S levels.

I think the king has 3 CSEs?

His results were shit.

CSEs were for the lower achieving students. They typically took 7-10 of them. Scraping through school with 2 CSEs is basically failing pretty much everything.

I'm a bit boggled that you thought "two CSEs and no one stabbed him" was evidence against the school being shit. Even in the 80s, that was... not good. Better than "functionally illiterate", but not good.