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. !

I have no idea wether your Ex,s school is a good school or not but given he left it nearly 40 years ago its bound ti be a different school now ti whst it was the. The teaching staff will all be different for a start.

The top 20% of children sat O levels, I got 7 O levels and DH got 10.

2 CSE was pretty dire, you would expect 5 and I’m pretty sure children generally sat 5 subjects.

Two top grade CSEs in English and Maths - good. No, not good. Equivalent to mediocre GCSEs in English and Maths.

How do you not know that 2 CSEs is crap? 2 O levels wouldn't have been great either, nor would two GCSE which replaced both.

In 40 years a school will have changed so much that it’s irrelevant what your ex got, even if the school was ranked top in the country in 1986 it could still be an awful school which only gets dire results now. Your ex’s results have no bearing on what kind of school it is now, although as it happens his results sound like they were below average for their time so maybe the reputation of the school hasn’t changed much.

Fair enough yea 7 he said

I thought more course work went into a CSE - and they were more ‘practical’

Your DH left this school nearly 40 years ago so it has probably changed a bit!

Two CSEs was poor (the whole idea of CSEs was pretty weird), but some kids didn't get any so he's two up on them. As long as he achieved something later, who cares.

If he enjoyed his school days and the boys were not too delinquent, I'd pay no attention. However a lot can change in the years since he left so don't judge fellow posters too much.

I'm an old biddy now but have seen the status of schools go up and down, then up again, in my lifetime. Parents can only choose based on the here and now.

CSEs were practical and perfectly respectable, but many children got more than 2 of them. The top grade was equivalent to the lowest O Level pass grade.

I think King Charles has two A Levels, and an Oxbridge degree

The King also has a degree from Cambridge. (Yes, I know normal entry criteria didn't apply in his case.)

I'd forgotten about AO levels. At my school there was just AO Further Maths available for girls doing Science A levels but not Maths A level. (It was a girls' school - not saying the boys didn't have to do the AO level!)

No idea how CSEs were marked but I know A levels were marked quite differently from now (O levels too?). Nowadays I believe the grade boundaries are decided as actual marks in advance, so if a candidate gets (say) 80% or over they get an A star, 70-80% they get an A, etc etc. If the majority of candidates get over 80%, they all get an A star. The mark is awarded for reaching a certain level and says nothing about how everyone else did.

Decades ago what they decided in advance was what percentage of the candidates should get each grade. So if there was a subject with 6000 candidates and they'd decided that the top 10% would get an A, they'd rank all the marks in order and the top 600 got an A even if the actual marks were quite low (e.g. if it was a really tough paper). You were being graded on your performance relative to everyone else. An A was rare because that was how the system was designed.

He said the school was violent

but we’ve all experienced a bit of rough I’m sure !

I remember being surprised at the time, at my deeply nondescript comprehensive, to read somewhere that the average level of attainment at 16 was a grade 4 CSE. Most pupils in standard classes would have taken around 8 of them. Some O level candidates would have sat more papers if they'd taken a couple a year early.
Anyway. 2 CSEs wasn't great, even then. But I suspect that's not really a surprise, OP.

What do you think your DP's school experience in 1986 has to do with that school now? The school is like trigger's broom. None of its constituent parts are the same as they were then.

He has 6 O levels so if he does have CSEs they weren’t his only qualification 😄

Good in the context of only being allowed to take CSEs, maybe. A girl came to my school for sixth form who had previously attended a comp where the headteacher attempted to get rid of O levels and make all pupils sit CSEs. His logic was that a top grade CSE was as good as an O level pass and it was elitist to have a two tier system. There was apparently a revolt from the parents of the more able children who wanted their children to go on to further and higher education and he had to backtrack. (This was the mid to late 1970s.)

CSE's were seen as very inferior to O levels. I know as I took 2 CSE's at school but fortunately got O levels as well.

The history of CSEs is that in 1944 the 11 plus ws introduced to skim off 10-30% of children for an "academic" education leading to O-levels (which replaced the earlier school cert). The rest went either to a technical school (of which very few were built) or normally to a secondary modern, where they left at 15 with no qualifications.

So sometime in the 50s I think, they introduced the CSE so that secondary modern children could have a qualification. So it may well have been more practical. But it was aimed at a lower level than O-level, and I think it was only the highest level of CSE which was a bare pass at O-level.

But it didn't help much because regarded it as a second rate qualification which didn't mean much.

So then they rolled up CSE and O-level together into the GCSE, with the idea that all pupils, grammar, secondary modern, or comprehensive, should be measured on the same scale. A mid-level GCSE was equivalent to a bare pass at O-level.

People used to say he and Princess D had “three CSEs between them”… pause…”all his”. I have no idea if it was true, I was more silk cut and martini and lemonade, than royal family groupie.

I think the degree from Cambridge was a give, not real. But I apologise for bringing it up, I was just being a butthead.

Is this a joke?

2 CSEs was pretty rubbish in the 1980s

There were 2 types of exams you could take at 16 - O-levels and CSEs. The O levels were academic and taken by those that did well at 11+ (in the 70s we all took it) - often at grammar schools or the top streams of comprehensives.

CSEs were more practically based qualifications taken by those who failed 11+ and went to Secondary Modern schools or the lower sets of comprehensives. They were introduced in 1965 to give school leavers some type of leaving qualification as prior to this those who didn't take O levels (the majority) left school with no qualifications.

At my bog standard comp in East London - 5 CSEs was considered an OK result with 8 or 9 considered good.

Oh bless your heart OP for fighting his corner 🥰

But yeah...2 CSEs is shockingly bad! I'm probably a similar age (we either went down the 'CSE' pathway or the 'O Level' pathway at school. Only the weakest of students followed the CSE pathway, and even then they sat at least 7 of these (sometimes up to 9).

If you imagine an O Level to be the nearest thing to a GCSE and a CSE as being for students who weren't likely to pass a GCSE, that will give you an indication.

To only pass 2 of these really fairly easy exams is not something to boast about, sorry OP!

Why on earth do you care about your exes school's reputation?

This is such a weird boast.