To think is unreasonable to request GCSE for certain jobs?

[Twinkletwinklittlestar]

Do all jobs really request GCSE in the UK? There is huge emphasis on them in schools so trying to understand. Eg: chefs, clothing shop assistants, stock rooms, deliveries, waitresses, catering, etc.

I am a foreigner, didn’t do GCSE, got jobs easily, Levis never asked me for GCSE. Then studied ACCA and I don’t think they asked for this either,

Is really further education and jobs unavailable for people who didn’t do GCSE or fail them?

I’ve had jobs since I was 15 years old and never once have I been asked for any evidence of GCSE or A-Level performance, or even my degree! They were all more interested in my previous work experience and the school qualifications were just taken as given. You could just make them up on your CV and most probably no one would ever bother to check, unless you put all As and weren’t very good at your job or something.

As pps have pointed out, when grammar schools were in place across the country, there weren't so elitist. In my working class grammar school in the north of England, 40 per cent of children went there, and the school contained a wide range of abilities. Where I live now, there are a very few surviving grammar schools and they ARE elitist - taking about 10 per cent max of each year's cohort.

The 1944 education act intended to set up 3 types of schools: grammar, technical and modern, but this hardly ever happened.

The selective grammar system is not perfect - no system could be. But I really believe it was better on the whole for the country and for individuals. To me (working class northerner) it's no surprise that social mobility has stagnated. The grammar schools were the engine for that. And no-one had tutors to shoehorn them in in those days!!

As long as the high schools (or secondary moderns, as they were called 🙁) have a stream for borderline students who just didn't quite make the cut at 11, and ensure they are given the same opportunities, I think the system could work well for all children.

That paper is indeed very basic.

I would think anyone on here could do all those questions.

But that's OK - they're precisely the sort of questions you need to be able to answer if you're not pursuing further academic study and leaving to get a job.

I'd be worried if 16-year-olds with no learning difficulties couldn't answer those questions.

But you don't need to get 100%. Every pupil will have different things they "get" and things they struggle with. The questions in this sample paper
cdn.sanity.io/files/p28bar15/green/d7131939f5fcfc425c7068d43b28b6ddde2791f4.pdf
from AQA really just require very basic arithmetic to solve but you only need to get about 55-60% to get a grade 4. It's fine to struggle with a few of the questions, some people will find the graphs or the 3d shapes more challenging for example. But you score marks for being able to state that one fifth plus one fifth is two fifths, and being able to count that there are 6 sides on a picture of a hexagon for heaven's sake. This is not challenging. To be unable to score a point on half the questions, which would be indicated by a grade 3 or less, you would have to be either functionally innumerate, or incapable of reading and understanding the question, or incapable of focusing on a task for 90 minutes, or perfectly capable but choosing not to. None of which are attributes that are attractive in an employee.

The fact that 30% don't get at least 4 on their first attempt is not an indication that the exam is too difficult for 30% of the population. The vast majority of that 30% are kids who chose not to focus in lessons and chose not to do their best. After a few years of maturing they get there in the end. The ones who intellectually cannot get to the point of being able to cope with roughly half the questions on a paper like this are not suitable for most kinds of employment but some opportunities will nevertheless still exist doing things that don't require any kind of understanding of number.

It can depend the job/sector you work in if your qualifications are checked.

Education..safeguarding means you ask for verification of everything. Insurance/Banking/air industry...professional accreditation means they have to check each potential employee claim/qual..to prevent fraud/crime...or risk losing their accreditation.

Teeny office down the road..maybe not so much.

And a lot of recruitment agencies will do a verification check (ask school/unis) to confirm what is stated...rather than asking for certificates.

And also, sometimes what is no longer necessary to "check".

If, like a PP you need a degree to be part of a professional body..the the prospective employer can check you are in that professional body....yes?...well then that ticks the degree box..ypu don't need the degree certificate...the professional body covers that.

You have A levels...you did enough to get onto the courses...so no need to check GCSEs.

Exam centres are the problem here - not everywhere has an independent one. Exeter University is running an interesting pilot re an exam centre for home Ed students that might offer a way forward.

I think you are overestimating.
There are regular threads on MN with people being unable to do percentages and also very regular threads where people don't understand order of operations.

I can’t agree that that’s not elitist as that’s 60% without access to academic education.

In practice for women that would mean if you had a bad test day you would spend a lot of your secondary education on cooking & household skills. When I was younger, I thought that grammar schools sounded great (as I assumed that I would pass the entrance) - I’ve changed after listening more carefully to older relatives.

I think it comes down to what you believe qualifications are for.

Are they a sort of congratulatory award on leaving school? Or are they are hard assessment of what you've attained educationally so that employers and other educational institutions can judge your aptitude for employment etc?

I think they have to be the latter.

If grammar schools were reinstated generally there would have to be a different arrangement for those who hadn't passed their entrance exam, as I mentioned in my post. I don't think this was the case in the past with Secondary Modern schools. I agree that provision there wasn't always great.

At a local high school (in this 10 per cent grammar school area) the head ensures that there's a stream for able children who might be late developers, or just had a bad day on the exam date. They are given the same opportunities and high expectations they would have had in the grammar school.

As a teacher it came as a shock to me that not all children or parents have high aspirations. I remember one parent telling me that her choice of secondary school was based on 'not wanting her son to be under any pressure at all'. He didn't have any LDs, as far as we knew, or could judge.

I understand that some children don't want academic pressure and learn in a different - often more practical and less abstract - way, and their education needs to be of a different character to that of grammar schools. My son thrived on the intense, competitive atmosphere of a grammar school, but my daughter was totally different and therefore they went to very different schools.

The issue is plenty of pupils can do lots of things that its very hard to get evidence for under the current system and are written off by an exam that used as evidence of something quite different to what employers actually need but its just used as a proxy.

The gcse is better preparation for further study than the workplace in my opinion - which means the least academically able are then the least able to demonstrate what they can actually do, which is often useful to employers.

It was incredibly hard to find ways to evidence what my son can do.

I was interested to see the responses as I agree with @TeenToTwenties - I think we underestimate the levels of literacy and numeracy outside the Mumsnet middle class bubble. If young people cannot pass these papers even on the second or third attempt (standard in the FE college I work in) - what do they do then? They're still members of society with something to contribute. They're not stupid or worthless.

Yes. In the process , o levels were dumbed down. Gcse is nowhere near as difficult as an o level.

In the 'olden days' not all kids took cse. I had a friend who took English and maths. I don't think she took any other subjects. I had another friend who did typing at school. She went on to work in a trying pool. She probably had cse English too. I suppose the modern equivalent of a typing pool would be a call centre. Many call centres are overseas.

After the introduction of gcse we had coursework, to make it easier for some kids. I know someone who got 10 A grades. Her parents did her coursework.

Then we had controlled assessments. With all the hassle that entailed. Chasing absentee kids, marking, moderating, getting kids to redo it to improve their marks.

Then we did away with coursework and increased the number of exams to be taken. Now parents are complaining about that.

Somewhere along the line, progress 8 appeared. More pressure for the kids in order for schools to tick a box.

Now. Wales is bringing back coursework/ controlled assessments. The teachers are moaning about increased workload.

God knows what Bridget has in mind for England. However, I predict it will be a disaster.

I could pass it, but I don't remember having learnt how to work out probability, so I'm not sure I'd get that right, and I don't know what factorise means, do I don't know what to do there, but I suspect with a bit of revision I could*. However, there are probably people who would look at the paper and just panic when they see a word and don't remember what a word means.

• I might be incorrect about this. I am learning Welsh as an adult, and I have a huge memory bank of words in English where I know I've seen it and used it in Welsh, but cannot remember what the word is, or I read a Welsh word, recognise it as a known word, and the English word will not come. Occasionally I can get there via German or French. I had no problem learning vocab at school, but now I'm in my 50s, it's much more challenging getting it to stick. However, as an adult I have opted not to pay exam fees, so not an issue there. Although I failed my last techy exam at work.

I'm in my 50s and still doing homework and studying for exams. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

I completely agree that the current system (one size fits all) is totally screwed up.

I support the idea that non-academic students (say, those not planning to enter tertiary education, or those who would honestly prefer to leave school at 15 and get on with real life) are just not valued or understood by our current system.

Way back youngsters left school at 15 and got a job where they were trained/supported/encouraged by older colleagues. They felt like adults and found satisfaction in the independence which came with earning a wage and being part of the adult world. These kids didn't want to read Shakespeare or do calculus - but if they wanted to, they could take academic study up again later).

I'm not suggesting the world is like that any more, but I think the forcing of such young people into a route which is really for very few has done untold damage to them and to society.

Tony Blair's utterly misguided plan to send 50% of youngsters to university was bonkers. University is really only suitable for at most 20 per cent of us. He claimed it was about valuing students more - but I think it was just the opposite. It suggested that actual jobs of the sort that school-leavers might get were beneath them and that only university was the way to go. Thank God there's been a reaction against this, but the damage has been done.

Grrr. Could witter on for ages about this, but I think I'll just go and chew the carpet!!!

But the sort of practical, real-life maths and English which is needed by less academic students is not being taught efficiently then? Or is the syllabus emphasising the wrong things?

They need the 4 basic operations, then fractions, percentages, proportion/ratio, a bit of geometry and for this to be based in real-life contexts. I don't know if probablity, for eg, is something most people need to calculate most days???

All the jobs you cite require a base minimum of being able to read and write and do basic maths. Why would you recruit someone without them when almost everyone has them?

But reading, writing and basic maths are not GCSEs

I got a fail ( grade d) in o levels maths. Nothing at all wrong with my numeracy

Because its a lot more than reading' writing and basic maths
My really struggles with maths and just cant pass itl
Yet as a type1 Diabetic he has to calculate his insulin dose up to 5 times.a day so he can do basic maths

But almost everyone doesn't have them. Only about 2/3rds do.

Exactly

For a young person leaving school struggling to get 4s in maths/English, the best thing is to try to access work experience or alternative qualifications that supersede this.

You can often go into areas like care work without GCSEs and once you have some experience this can matter more than a low grade GCSE.

Having a maths and a literacy qualification suggests you can do maths, read and write and turn up first to school and then to an exam. Employers constantly complain about school leavers not being able to do these things; it’s like a quick check to show you can.

Relevant experience or equivalent/higher level qualifications can supercede this requirement but given how basic GCSEs are, I'd be concerned about hiring anyone without them.

But by the way GCSE grade boundaries work, no matter the quality of education, approx 30% would still fail. They increase and decrease the boundaries depending on how well each cohort does.