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. !

Nb forgot to add in my brothers school it was olevels or nothing. I suspect this was the same in private schools especially the likes the Royal Family went to.

Into Cambridge? No, absolutely not (possibly another uni' but definitely not Oxbridge). But that wasn't the point I was making - I was correcting a pp who said they thought he only achieved 2 CSEs.

How many did he get?

I found an article in the Tatler

he achieved five O-Levels (GCSEs) and two A-Levels; a B in History and C in French. He then went on to Cambridge University, graduating with a 2:2 degree in History. Allegedly, his bodyguard who attended all his lectures with him sat the exams too - and beat him to a First.

I think we can all agree that 5 Os and BC at A levels would have been unlikely to get him into any university.

They would have hot him into a polytechnic, my sister had a B and 2 E,s and got into a university that had just become a university having formerly been a polytechnic, a B and a C would have given him more points I think than a B and two E,s

Me too. It's phenomenal.

I think we can all agree that 5 Os and BC at A levels would have been unlikely to get him into any university.

Not now, but they are quite respectable A-level grades for the late '60s, when not many people got As, unlike today where many do.

That was more likely 20 years after Charles was at uni (late 60s), I think early 90s? Plus 3 A levels is very different than 2 and 5Os would have been unusual in the university population.

Interesting that you say that. 2 rather than 3 A levels would I think have been unusual and 5Os more so. He definitely was waved through, but I think probably in everyone’s best interest he was.

2 CSEs is dire HOWEVER do not start comparing then with now. No one ever took 10 or 12 exams, no one came out of your bog standard comp with 10+ O levels.

I ended up with 1 O Level and 4 CSEs however I did move schools in the 4th year (yr 10)

As other POs have said, it can take a couple of generations for a school to lose a bad reputation.

I'm 51 and left school in 1990 I think we had Easter leavers?

You're right. It was much later than I thought that kids had to stay on until the end of what's now year 11 (in England).

From Wikipedia:

Education Act 1996
Between 1976 and 1997, the minimum school leaving arrangements were:

• A child whose sixteenth birthday falls in the period 1 September to 31 January inclusive, may leave compulsory schooling at the end of the Spring term (the following Easter).
• A child whose sixteenth birthday falls in the period 1 February to 31 August, may leave on the Friday before the last Monday in May.

Under the Education Act 1996, a new single school leaving date was set for 1998 and all subsequent years. This was set as the last Friday in June in the school year which the child reaches the age of 16.

(Since raised to 18 effectively - law now says 16-18 yos should either be in full-time education or in at least part-time training/education, I believe.)

Can only agree, sadly.

People in the 70's and 80's got into Oxbridge with two E's at A level by "passing" the entrance exams and an interview.
In those days you needed to get 5 O level passes and 2 A level passes to get into university (IE fees paid, access to maintenance grant and travel costs) some non Oxbridge courses insisted on slightly higher than that.

At the other end of the academic scale there was no need for exam passes to get into most jobs

Whilst 16-18 year old are supposed to be in some kinds of education or training I don't know how tightly this is monitored
My son is 18 at Xmas and at college ,he was speaking to a neighbours son yesterday who was also in his year at school I'm not sure what happened, but the lad didn't sit any GCSE,s and didn't enroll in college and he's working with his dad ,but with no GCSE,s that can't be an apprenticeship.

A 2 Es offer was as I understand a sign that the university was satisfied that you met their standards without waiting to see your A level results (if you applied before you'd taken them). It was described as a matriculation offer because that was the minimum standard required to matriculate, or register as a student. I got one for my course, which I think was standard at the time. The Admissions Tutor was a lovely, lovely man who saw no reason to put applicants under undue pressure and used the interview as a way to find out how interested we were (and, I suppose, whether we would be interesting people to teach and have hanging around the department for three years). It will have helped that most of us had had an excellent grounding in our subject at school and he knew he could rely on that. Worked very well. Next to no dropouts or failures in my time there.

And interview questions were something like "Is that right that your father was at this college?", "Is your mother the Queen?"
And you got jobs because daddy/dad/the old fella put in a word

I came out of a bog standard comp in 1989 with 10 O Levels (4xA, 5xB, 1xC for the Maths I took a year early) and 3 A Levels! Of course it was possible. My peers in my small sixth form all had similar results and went on to university. I had 5 university offers for the year I left school and 5 more the year after because I decided to change course. Bog standard comps were just that, the standard - if you were bright and applied yourself there was no reason why you couldn’t get great exam results.

How were you doing, O,levels in 1989?
My sister ,s year was the first year to sit GCSE,s in 1988

I think she meant she took A levels in 1989 so Gcses in 1987

Presumably she did her O levels in 1987 and A levels in 1989.

Ah sorry I read it wrong yoy must have O levels in 1987?
And Alevels in 1989,

People have the strangest ideas about comprehensives.

They took everyone. The brightest were not creamed off by grammar schools so it was entirely possible to leave with 10. Even at my low-achieving school, there were a fair number leaving with 10 O levels A-C. Just not as many as there should have been.

Errr this. It’s not a dumping ground for the thick and lacking. Leaving with 10 doesn’t sound that shocking to me. I also know 2 people who went to separate comprehensives and got PhD’s from excellent universities

A girl I was at primary school with did exceptionally well academically later on. I know about this because her mother attended the same church as my parents so I got bulletins for years. She went to the local high school, which was a comprehensive, and on the strength of her O and A levels taken there ended up with a first degree and a Ph.D. in a STEM subject. I believe she's a professor now with a long career in scientific research to her credit.