To think that 4 G.C.S.E's needed to do business studies is ridiculous

[magicalmadmadamim]

My eldest DS is 16 and been at college since September. He has 2 G.C.S.E equivalent certificates in English and Maths.
I'm sure back when I was in college business studies was always a foundation course?
He really wanted to do business studies and they have put him on some really rubbish courses that he is super bored with.
Is it me or is education getting much harder now?
Hardly any of his school friends passed any g.c.s.e's :(

that makes it even worse that they were friends. How humiliating for his friend.

so in a nutshell you son has been neglected by his parents - the one he lived with working all the time and then his mother elsewhere.

I am not surprised he has acted out being the class clown for attention. You have repeatedly excused his poor behaviour. I was born in August and have 8 GCSE’s. If the whole year got poor GCSE’s I would be wondering why the school were unable to teach students to achieve them, and what parents were doing to support their children to hep them achieve this.

noone will employe him no matter what course he takes of he continues to act like this.

Getting 5 GCSE passes at grade 4+ is the baseline required by pretty much all employers and further education providers for someone to show they have enough sense to absorb fairly simple information and follow instructions. If someone only has 2 then it sends a clear message that either that person is really very stupid or they are really not at all motivated to put any effort into academic achievement. Wouldn't it be more sensible for your son to spend a year or 2 reaching that baseline standard and getting a sensible number of GCSEs and then progress to the next level once that step is done. The point of GCSEs is that they are a general spread of knowledge over a wide range of subjects - your son may not thrive in business if he is so ignorant of every realm of human knowledge.

Ridiculing a Muslim boy while he was praying and then putting it on TikTok for more people to ridicule him? I’m sorry but that absolutely is bullying. And discrimination..

In my book it’s far worse than the chair throwing and other things you consider more worthy of expulsion.

You seem incredibly laissez-faire about everything.

that makes it even worse that they were friends. How humiliating for his friend.

so in a nutshell you son has been neglected by his parents - the one he lived with working all the time and then his mother elsewhere.

I am not surprised he has acted out being the class clown for attention. You have repeatedly excused his poor behaviour. I was born in August and have 8 GCSE’s. If the whole year got poor GCSE’s I would be wondering why the school were unable to teach students to achieve them, and what parents were doing to support their children to hep them achieve this.

noone will employe him no matter what course he takes of he continues to act like this.

OP, most parents teach their children from a young age that actions have consequences. In the absence of effective parenting, your ds is having to learn this the hard way.

I doubt the bullied kid thinks they are friends.....

I would love to know what his grades for effort and attainment as well as behaviour have been since yr6.

I'm fairly sure they'd be a pattern of absolute shocking given this additional information.

OP clearly is in complete denial.

I hope this thread is giving you food for thought, OP.

I’m not going to get into his behaviour but.

He needs to knuckle down and pass the year, and then try to get up to 5GCSEs next year. He should have a tutor in college you can speak to.

After that, he could look at T Levels.

In the absence of anything else he should commit to finishing the year.

Then depending what qualification he gets from that he can move up a level.
Then in his third year he can go up a level again.

The really good thing is that because he has the FS Maths and English at level 2 he doesn't have to spend time in GCSE maths and English lessons unless he wants to. Depending what his academic ability and his motivation actually is it may or may not be worth trying to get these at GCSE.

If this year he is on a level 1 course (sorry if I missed it), then next year he could do a Level 2 Diploma which is 'equivalent' to 4 GCSEs at grade 4+. Then he still gets a 3rd year at college for free.

They need a certain number of passes to show that they are capable of applying themself to the work or there is no point in them doing the course. DD needed 5 GCSE's to get onto an Acting course, due to the level of writing. They had to have maths and English as 2 of those.

Your son clearly didn't bother with school. If he has done these qualifications now then maybe he wants to change things. He can turn that around with college courses if he applies himself and works hard. There are various Level 2 courses that lead on to a Level 3 the following year. It means 3 years at college, but could get him qualificiations. Or he does a Level 2 and then finds an apprenticeship. But he will need good attendance at college.

If he is finding it boring, could he talk to the tutor who might be able to give him some different/harder work?

For the record,DD has various SEN and struggled at school and got 8 GCSE passes from 4-8, failing only French which we totally expected. If your DS didn't get 1 GCSE then something seriously went wrong through his entire education.

and I agree with PP, you are totally minimising his behaviour that got him expelled. Schools quite rightly clamp down on racist bullying.

Your kid sounds a bloody nightmare, his dad works long hours and you’re “doing what you can from a distance” - I’m guessing you don’t live local to him.

OP, sorry but it’s time to take off the rose tinted glasses of your precious boy. He’s a disruptive student at best, a naive racist at worse (the Muslim child being his ‘friend’ is neither here nor there. It’s racist whether meant maliciously or not)
He’s failed his GCSEs and frankly, needs to buck up his ideas.

He needs more parental involvement and guidance that doesn’t come from his mum with a “boys will be boys gosh everyone’s so hard on you!” Approach.

I had to have 5 A-C GCSE’s to study for a BTEC at college in 1997. It’s not unreasonable at all.

He didn't put it online somebody else did. It was long gone by the time i found out which was less than 24 hours later. There was no malicious intent and they are still friends.

The question you ask in the first post, OP, about whether education has got much harder - no, not really. It is unusual to leave school with nothing but two Functional Skills qualifications (which are definitely not GCSEs - you have been misinformed on that). It is unusual to be excluded for racist bullying. And for him to sit all his exams and pass none of them in the school he was moved to suggests that his long history of disruptive behaviour in lessons resulted in him learning nothing for five years.

Did he actually show up to all his exams? Even when I taught bottom set, the ones who turned up got a grade even if they didn't hit a 4 or a D (before the grades became numerical). Yes, a few of them got an F/G or 1/2 - those were the kids who really could hardly read or write, or the ones who really struggled for various reasons. It was only the couple of kids who sacked off the papers altogether and went and got stoned in the woods when the exams were on who came out with no grade at all (and they were capable of passing, they were just on a self-destruct mission).

I suspect there might be a lot you aren't aware of, and if you've mainly got your son's side of the story then I think his behaviour has been a lot worse than you realise. If he wants to succeed one day in business, he will have to knuckle down to get the qualifications required and he will have to understand the severity of the racist behaviour because that would get him sacked in a heartbeat. He needs to know that and he needs to know why that is. Dismissing it as teenage horseplay doesn't help him at all.

Op, I really think this is the point at which you need to help him learn from his mistakes.
It's not easy having teenagers, they have this knack of being impulsive and doing their own thing, however, you can empathise with his feeling on the course while helping him to understand the reality of where he now is and what limited options he has.
Stick with this bit and by this time next year after a lovely long summer, he'll be much more where he wants to be.

I'm not sure what you expect any college to do OP?

He's shown he's not academically capable,
He's shown he's not willing to work hard
He's shown he's willing to humiliate a more vulnerable pupil (vulnerable by being in a minority)

Why on earth do you think any college would want to take him, let alone put him on a better course? Because you said so?

You've misunderstood. OP has said (in later posts) that he got grade 1s and 2s in his GCSEs. These are not normally considered passing grades for the purposes of moving on to higher level qualifications. (Most colleges seem to want 4 at a grade 3 or 4 or higher to study a btec level 2 qualification.). Separately, at a different school, he got Maths and English functional skills certificates, which OP has said are equivalent to GCSEs (presumably she means equivalent to GCSE's at a high enough grade for the college to count them).

So his behaviour was disruptive over a period of time and then involved in racist bullying. He sounds disengaged and disrespectful. Was there any realistic chance of him passing gcses before he was excluded? Stop minimising his involvement and acknowledge he has been let down by both parents who seem reluctant to get involved. Did you say whether FS was entry level, L1 or 2? Do you even know?

He was harassing a Muslim boy at prayer. Even if they are still friends it doesn't matter. It's still completely not on. The other kid has been put in a position where he has to put up and shut up to stay in with others. Schools are absolutely zero tolerance because of this. Women put up with being sexually harassed for all kinds of reasons because they feel they can't complain.

Who put it on tiktok is irrelevant. He still did it.

It's not ok.

It's still racism. It's not big, clever or funny.

You defending him is part of his problem. He can do nothing wrong.

Except this is very firmly wrong.

Your attitude needs to change as much as his otherwise your son is completely fucked.

The government relatively recently changed the conditions of funding for colleges so that students who got a gcse grade 1 or grade 2 in gcse maths no longer have to resit the gcse.

this is because it’s very difficult to get from a grade 2 to a grade 4 which is the grade at which you don’t need to resit any more.

instead the colleges are supposed to make sure these students continue studying English and maths but at an appropriate level.

functional maths (which is the one I am familiar with as a maths teacher) comes in several levels. There is entry level 1, entry level 2, entry level 3, then level 1 (equivalent to grades 1-3 or in old money D-G) and then level 2 which actually is a gcse equivalent.

when they say that functional skills are welcomed by employers what they mean is that they are NOT welcomed by universities or other academic institutions - they count so you don’t have to resit but not a good idea to try getting into university with them.

As I understand it, a 2 at FS ( 1 being lower) is supposed to be considered a 3/4 at GCSE. However that's probably mostly true for very vocational courses , many employers will not understand FS and feel on much surer ground with gcse. It's bad enough they've had to get used to the change from letters to numbers. More academic courses may want to see GCSEs.

With a tried history of a good attitude at college and having demonstrated ability, this is likely to become less important as he will have tutors who know him.

I'm in the situation where because of bullying and other trauma my teen can't attend school and won't be sitting her GCSEs so I'm sorry but I'm not very sympathetic to your son who clearly has made life difficult for the teachers and other pupils.

We are hoping she can have fresh start and will be able to do a level 1 in business administration and GCSE English and maths. It's not what we hoped for and way below her capabilities but it is what it is. I suggest that your son finds some humility and knuckles down.

Teens are not ‘overgrown children’. They’re actual children at varying stages of development. Despite your take on why you think he shouldn’t have been expelled, the fact is, he was. Presumably you appealed the decision and it was upheld? Being summer born has some impact on children in their early years, but very little impact as they get older. By the end of primary school, that impact is barely noticeable. Having taught Year 6 for many years, I can categorically say that the term of their birth has never made a difference to academic achievement.
Your DS sounds like he believes he knows better than the professionals. Sadly, there are too many 16 year olds with this mindset. They soon learn, however, that they’re wrong and the professionals are right.

I think the knuckle down for this year is the right decision. I also think the school were reasonable to exclude him.