I'm not sure if I'm intelligent or not - my oldest did not do well at school, he has a very 'spiky profile' where he attempted to argue how easy calculus was with me at 13, but doesn't get standardised spelling and has to be dragged through writing more than a couple sentences together, and living in an area that, while improving, has long been discussed as an educational blackhole. The school he was meant to attend ended up not taking an entire cohort because of issues that meant the Department of Education stepped in, meaning he ended up on a part-time timetable in a programme for children like him who were at risk of getting nothing (because even in maths, writing it all out is essential, and he is still low verbal most of the time). Years on, we agree it was the best of a bad situation.
Getting him to 5s in maths and English, it largely was going through practice papers and mark schemes over and over and over until he could see and reliably reproduce the patterns of what he needed to do to get the marks. It also really helped he was on reduced number of GCSEs so he could focus just on the essentials. While not the best, it's better he has 5 decent GCSEs than failed at the standard 8-10, and it got him onto the BTEC, that got him onto the cadetship he is on now.
I was fairly annoyed last year when my DD2 was taking GCSEs and she had couple friends who were known to be failing in Year 10, but no reduction to GCSEs were made. One of them was booked into a similar programme my son did for Year 12 at the start of Year 11, it was was just expected that this is what that child would need to pass, but had to go through and fail 10 courses first. It's ridiculous, but since COVID, that programme is no longer available before Year 12 and some schools just either aren't equipment to give that extra time for those core subjects or for other reasons fight tooth and nail against dropping GCSEs.
Precisely. If we are saying a third of children are leaving school without maths and english GCSE, their parents and state education are failing these children most terribly. Shame on the parents, it’s pull your socks up time.
I agree many children are being failed; however, to my knowledge, GCSEs are graded on a bell curve - so even if all kids did better, a certain percentage would fail because that's how the system is set up.
I know with my oldest, he had a lot of frustration as he looked at older bell curve charts after taking his and he saw that in combined science with the same score in one year was a 6-5 and in another year was a 4-4. So to him, it was that one year the same score would look great for next steps and another it's not considered a strong pass. It was a bit demoralising, because it wasn't just how hard he worked, learned the material, and how to apply it, it had to be a competition with everyone else his age.