To think the 2 tier GCSE system is wrong

[countingdaysuntilretirement]

My dd is in year 11 and will be doing her GCSEs in June. There has been some discussion on whether she would be sitting the higher levels or not - she's borderline on most. I have only just realised that you can't get lower than a grade 4 if you take the higher paper - if you do badly you don't get a grade 1,2 or 3 but are simply ungraded. But if she takes the foundation level she can't access the higher grades.

This means children are having to take a gamble with their papers. I would have thought the higher level would just add an additional paper or layer - not that you risked losing a GCSE altogether if you had a bad day.

Can anyone rationalise this for me?

I’m shocked there is only two papers for maths now. I say the higher paper as it started with questions at a C grade so yes if you didn’t get enough of those right you’d fail. But no one sitting it would have done that.

If that was any chance of happening but you were ok at maths you’d do the middle paper, couldn’t get any higher than a B but meant you’d likely get your C and wouldn’t fail.

People who struggled did the lower.

Seems odd they would remove it. It must be people getting whatever is the equivalent of an A or A* now must be filling out a load of easy questions at the start of the paper?!

I agree. We had 200ish kids in my year at school and we were split into sort of low/medium and high groups for most subjects, across half the year. But for maths we had 8 sets. The difference is huge. And many subjects not covered in the lower groups. The exam would be ridiculous to cover all.

That's because the content of the English paper is accessible at all levels with a differing degree of sophistication determining the grades. In Maths that would not be possible, for the pupil who finds Maths challenging it would be wasting their time to try to teach them the A*/A level work.

This is why the intermediate paper needs to make a return.

With the three levels a pupil who didn't do well up to Year 10 would be entered for the Foundation Paper, with no chance of getting a 'Pass' grade. No matter how hard they tried in Year 11, and many 'saw the light' in Year 11, they had missed too much of the content to move up to the Intermediate paper, I know because I ran catch up classes in Year 11 for those wanting to tackle the Intermediate paper and it was rarely successful with all the other demands on their time. That was why the two levels were introduced giving everyone the chance of a Pass grade.

Yes, in theory it would help those around the grade boundary. The problems I see are these though:

• If you had the same number of foundation and higher questions as currently, it would make a ridiculously long exam.

• Foundation student would likely spend ages over some long, hard high level questions. These students would run out of time, fail to complete all the easier questions, and end up with no marks for easy questions they didn't do, and no marks for hard questions they got wrong. They'd fail or get a very low pass.

• Higher students would spend ages rushing through low mark, relatively simple foundation questions, and then not actually have time to complete all the complicated higher questions, so they would get a low grade because they had only shown their low capability not their high one.

Thanks for expanding on your method @NeverDropYourMooncup. Out of curiosity I had a quick noodle around on Bromcom Vision to see what the picture is in my trust.

We are a medium trust across one region. All of our secondaries are non-selective and there is a handful of super-selective grammars in our region who might hoover up the children who were out of the state sector for primary. Our outcomes mirror the national picture quite closely.

Across the MAT in years 7-9 the percentage missing KS2 data is about 8%. We don’t have any specialist places so we have very few children who would have been withdrawn because they were working at pre-KS levels. Obviously the current 10s and 11s have none at all. If I had access to historical data I suspect this might have been higher in those cohorts with large influxes of HK and Ukrainian children but this has settled down as their younger siblings attended primary and took SATs.

I don’t know the details of the Maths paper as I’m an English teacher but I do think it’s an absolute disgrace that they removed the tiers for English. It’s now completely inaccessible to a huge number of children.

Wait there is no lower and higher paper anymore in English?! 😳

Not since the introduction of the 9-1 GCSE in 2017.

Scottish Standard Grades used to have 3 levels, and a few had 2.

For the 3 level ones it was foundation, general and credit. I was in credit classes and so sat credit as default and general as back up, but it was a harder choice for those in general - give credit a go, knowing you hadn't covered it all, but hope general was a safe result if credit didn't go well, or do foundation just in case something went pear shaped in the general papers on the day?
Credit was 1 or 2 (top grades).
General 3 or 4.
Foundation 5 or 6.
To do Higher they generally expected a 2 or above overall.

It was more complicated in that many subjects had 2 papers at each level, so most folk sat 4! Some people passed one paper at one level and the other paper at a higher or lower level.
Science individual subjects were only 2 levels (credit or general), science mixed subject was also only 2 levels (general or foundation).

To top it off we were at the time when S grades were just being introduced and some subjects were still ordinary (O) grades, making for more confusion!

Hope your daughter gets the support needed to make the correct choices.

How weird. Changing it to the numbers seemed like a daft idea too I didn’t know they also did that!

There's always been two tiers (actually when i did it, i've just been reminded there were 3) - I was put in for the middle paper (they just put us all in for that, regardless of skill) so I got a B for my Maths GCSE - the highest mark possible. I don't doubt I would have got an A in the higher.

Falling off the bottom is because a paper can only be so long - they can't test well at both ends of the level all on one paper. I would think that if you fall off the bottom of the higher, then you can just take the lower later on though - it's not as though they'll leave you high and dry with nothing, retakes have always been a thing.