To think that secondary schools need to offer core subjects like maths?

[Feelingoptimistic]

I am just shocked that apparently there are some secondary schools in the UK that no longer offer what I consider to be core subjects, like maths, physics and chemistry. To be honest, I think that a school that does not offer these subjects is not a "proper" school. Of course, not everyone has to do these subjects, but they should be offered and promoted.

The thing is that there are many jobs you can't do without those subjects (engineering, medicine, anything science related, anything related to IT, etc.)

I am reacting to this article:
www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/19/traditional-alevel-subjects-dropped

My dd is only very young, but I would hate to find myself in a position where she is forced to go to such a school and misses out on a good education.

Sorry - rant over, but I am really puzzled by this. I went to a state school (not UK) and did all those subjects with pupils from many different backgrounds...

Well you need maths A2 and sometimes further maths AS to get on the course, so that helps a bit. Also, lots of science courses are 4 years now instead of 3. Physics lecturer friend of mine from RG university says a lot of the first year is catching up to where A levels left off back when we did them (in the 80s).

Sadly, top notch universities will favour candidates who have also done further maths. This is an opportunity open to my son, who is in a private school, but not to the young people at the local state secondary. The end result is that "harder" more technological courses at university (such as engineering, which is my son's choice) will become increasingly available only to people from higher achieving schools, be they state or independent. This is the flipside of curriculum "accessibility"- to make subjects perversely less accessible at higher levels.

Oh. My background is independent school separate GCSEs in 1990, then 4 A-Levels at state 6th form (maths, further maths, physics, chemistry).

Then physics degree and my maths folded quite quickly - TBH the further maths was getting a bit tricky anyway and in the degree I cwas good at the essay chatty stuff (was great at that!), and reasonable at the practical stuff and the more basic (for that level) maths (triple integrals etc), but lost the plot on the deep multiple dimensional uncertianty stuff a bit.

So how are the students now going to fare? When I was there they were dropping the entrance grades to get people in to get the money - the drop out rate was huge. Then they lowered the percentages for degree classifications.

Fine... but what happens with things where you can't move the degree goalpost like medicine?

Good question.

This was on Wikipedia:

The Government introduced a non-statutory entitlement to enable all young people who achieve a level 6 or above at Key stage 3 and who would benefit, to study Triple Science GCSEs from September 2008.

And:

An increase in the number of students studying Triple Science GCSEs has been identified as one way to encourage more young people to take science subjects at A-level and to continue into science in Higher Education.

MY CV sounds quite similar LTOS, but I predate you by a bit. There are relatively very few physics graduates these days as it's perceived as a hard subject at both A level and degree level & more people opt for an easier life.

duchesse the further mathematics network provides a route for anyone to do further maths whether or not their school teaches it by distance learning. It is recognised that with their help children can quite easily do AS level fmaths, so most courses expect that level from children whose schools don't offer fmaths and suggest catch up work before they arrive & run some catch up classes when they do. It's a tougher expectation to do the full fmaths A2, but it can also be done. Children from schools that do offer fmaths are expected to do it & their offers reflect that. Because maths A levels are modular there is quite a lot of knowledge that can't be assumed to be known even if children have 2 A levels (you don't actually need any applied maths for instance)

Milly, I know about that initiative - it's still not in place in many schools yet though. My worry is that the GCSE science corses are so dire that doing even more dross actually might put more people off taking science further than it encourages.

Snorkle, how do you think GCSE Science should be modified?

Oh i gave one head a very hard time about this double science dumbing down stuff. She explained that as A levels were massively dumbed down there was no need to do triple sciences and double science was perfectly adequate.

At least it helped the elimination process ...

My mum and dad have just retired and are (were?) maths teachers. They taught further maths between them and have done for at least 15 years or so.

From what they have seen, maths is getting "easier". Having modular exam papers means that you can gain a further maths qualification without needing to do the levels of maths, especially mechanics, which was needed a few years ago.

This will have a knock-on effect at universities; I can't see how it couldn't. There are fewer people able to teach subjects at a higher level, fewer people studying them and degrees will have to take this into account.

Someone (sorry I forget who) earlier in the thread mentioned AS Chemistry being where you were told where GCSE was wrong - in my experience of degree level chemistry you then found out A Level was also wrong and actually no one was sure what was right .

So what is the solution? I don't really know as there are problems whatever you do.

Simply making GCSEs harder again won't work, (even in a tiered way so the full ability range can still achieve something - and it IS desirable for everyone to be able to access science) as people won't do them if they're seen as too hard relative to other subjects and we already have attrition attributed to this.

I wondered if some qualification that is worth say 4 GCSEs (on top of the double science ones) that actually has some challenging input and was geared at say the top 10-20% would do it (so instead of triple science you could do a hard multi-science award that went even further than separate sciences do, and was worth more too - maybe it could be introduced as part of G&T), but while the grammars & independents might embrace it there would probably be some other schools that would struggle to resource the teaching/timetabling for it (if they can't manage separate sciences they would struggle imo) and it would be manifestly unfair if this was a pre-requisite to A level & yet wasn't available at all schools. ANd if it wasn't a pre-requisite to A levels there wouldn't be a lot of point. It would be difficult to accurately judge who was/wasn't capable - you would be creating science streams at quite an early age & there would be bound to be lots of children in the wrong stream. Capable children still might not choose it & then be unable to do science A levels later if they wanted to. So probably too many problems with this.

Taking the ethics and moralising out might be good too, BUT, I'd like to be sure some of it at least is somewhere in the curriculum (just not everywhere). It's not a bad idea to make sure children know smoking is bad for them, so long as that's not all they know.

I actually think the tories might be onto something by simply introducing more credit for harder subjects at GCSE/A level - it might stem the decline & maybe reverse it a little, but wouldn't be a radical change.

I do think the current setup lets 'sciencey' children down & puts some of them off. And having to finance 4 years at university instead of 3 simply because the others can't keep up is more than a little irritating. But if children can be encouraged to do and enjoy the courses then it's not a bad solution I suppose.

So making the courses relevent, interesting & exciting and using extra GCSE/UCAS points to make them more attractive too would be a good start.