News today: Most GCSE equivalents axed from school league tables

[LittenTree]

here

Which is what happens when you try comparing apples with oranges in the first place... or create a society which only values academic achievement and treats all else as 'dross for the stupid'.

Evil - the ebacc highlighted the fact that whole schools had given up MFL for all of their students (prevalent in the Sec Mods in two of the grammar school counties) : which is failing their upper students - those who only just missed the 11+ cut
and what I mean by "basic" teaching is that schools had been encouraged to just bulk the numbers (with the silly BTECs deemed to be 4 GCSEs ) rather than concentrate as Fraktal says on core numeracy and literacy.

When I was at uni, many non academic people did HNDs which were fully respected and much lamented

Gove is an arse, but the rot was started by Bliar wanting half of all children to get degrees - which was a stupid idea even before affordability was taken into account.
My client who digs holes LIKES digging holes and he need no qualifications other than GCSE English and Maths to do it.

"Silly BTECs"? "basic teaching"?

but i like the BTEC course..... I don't think its silly and I don't think its easy to teach. Its takes a great deal of my time to plan just how I am going to deliver it actually.

Migrating
I do not know which one you teach but I'll hazard a guess that its trickier for you and more rewarding to your pupils than any number of badly done MFL
BUT
the system is insane in the way the results were 'fixed' so that grades could increase year on year - statistically impossible and not borne out by the employment experience of the students

and Evil yes, I do firmly (based on DH visiting well over 100 schools a year) believe that weaker schools allowed basic teaching of core skills to slide, knowing that they could pad their results later - to the benefit of them not their pupils

I may be wrong, but there are no 'league tables'. The govt made schools publish information that previously they had not to help parents make a decision. It is only the press and parents that then ranked schools based on this info. If you base your school choices solely, or even mainly on the number of 5 a-c GCSE's, you do not deserve to be a parent.

I think the change is a good thing. Schools will stop using the btecs inappropriatly. Up until now they have been used to inflate point scores, meanuing that not only have students been made to take them against their best interests, but also the grades awarded have been so ridiculously high in a lot of cases as to make the qualification meaningless. At least it is more likely to be used properly and graded fairly now.

talkinpeace - your dh 'visiting schools' does not qualify you to say if vocational qualifications are viable. I teach a subject that can be examined in both the 'academic GCSE' and 'BTEC vocational' route - and I firmly believe that my students gain far much more education/experience from the vocational path to enable them to fully appreciate the subject and they are more able to tackle the A level setting then if they go with GCSE academic path

youngermother, leaving aside your rather bizarre remarks about who does and does not deserve to be a parent, the DfE provide all sorts of gizmos on their own website to 'rank' schools - they call them 'Performance Tables'. I don't think you can say the press and parents have made this up.

One of the problems is that Gove is setting the stakes so high with his academy agenda. I'm sure that most heads didn't go into teaching to spend their time working out how to offer courses that keep their results ahead of being called 'failing' and having academy status forced upon them, but that's the grim reality of education within the auspices of this current administration.

cricket
I'm trying not to out DH, but put it this way, heads value his views on their curricula as do heads of department

if you teach a subject as both GCSE and BTEC, how do you compare the two sets of syllabus, coursework, competence
are they equally important to the students who complete them
or is one four times as hard (on a pro rata basis ) to the actual student

as a comparison from my field
Accountancy Foundation degrees are not valued highly
First year AAT on the job training IS valued highly
different horses for different people but one is not made to artificially 'match' the other

Even as a parent, visiting schools with a view to sending my children to them, I know that TalkinPeace has a point about what some schools did with regard to padding out GCSE results with BTecs.

I think providing vocational options is great. But TP isn't pulling what she says out of thin air - some schools really did that. Indeed, so many of the ones I visited that my surprise on this thread has been realising that this isn't nearly as routine as I had thought.

I'm quite pleased with the change but would be upset to see BTEC's leave the curriculum

I teach both BTEC and their GCSE/A level equivalents at both KS4 and KS5 and there is no way they are the same level. At A level, we move students failing the A level onto the level 3 BTEC course.

However, taught well they are a valuable course providing a route in education which suits some students better and for some subjects the BTEC route is better preperation. It was just the comparison of the two qualifications that I disagree with. I hope they also review the weighting for UCAS points as well.

I'd like to know why they made the BTEC so easy to pass. Seriously, every year when I submit the marks I spend a week mumbling about how bloody easy it is to get pass/merit/distinction whilst my A level kids have slogged their hearts out and end up with the same UCAS points.

I actually find is surprising how difficult some of the content is on the BTEC course. When compared to the GCSE equivalent it's relatively similar, obviously they cover the same parts of the NC but a lot of the harder concepts can be quite challenging.

Ofcourse, the BTECs are designed for all pupils (A*-G) and not just for the less academic. However, the pupils have to work hard to cover all the coursework and it takes a great deal of planning and marking too.

Is there a list of the equivalent qualifications that will remain equivalent?

I'm not familiar with the whole list but I know my subject has been reduced from being equivalent to 4 GCSEs to now only 1 GCSE.

Anyone know about BTEC Music or Music Tech? (Only cos dd wants to do these!)

Some of the BTECs are ludicrously easy. For instance, my daughter's school did the Sport BTEC in the way it was designed to be done, 3 periods a week for 2 years. For this the school gets the equivalent of 2 GCSEs. My son's school does the same Sport BTEC in 2 periods a week for 1 year, just on the grounds that 'you may as well be doing something in PE that you get a qualification for'. In both schools most of the kids pass. My daughter's PE teacher told me it was difficult to fail.

As a supporter of vocational education, it makes my angry that it is equated with easy. There is no reason for a vocational course to be easy, for it not to be demanding and rewarding to do.

The same goes for Science BTEC, described vaguely as vocational, but with no obvious vocational content - not concentrating on actual skills connected with actual real jobs in the real world. Its basically Science for people who aren't any good at Science, which is a good idea, but why pretend that it's 'vocational' and worth 4 GCSEs?

And another thing - I can't decide whether Gove is being brave here or stupid or has something else up his sleeve. What's going to happen next year when League Table results plummet for the first time, which is what will happen if they do prevent 'gaming' the system and overvaluing of qualifications. In particular, what will happen with all those 'failing' schools which became academies, miraculously pushed up their results, and now will fall back to 'failing' standards? The government is still putting so much emphasis on this narrative of the magical ability of academies to improve results.

Well they won't plummet next year becauase a) students have already chosen their options and b) they're not being dropped until 2014. So it will only effect students starting their GCSE programmes this September - so mostly the curretn year 9s, with a few year 8's who do some subjects a year early.

and by then the coalitin probably won't be in power so they won't care about standards apparetnly dropping!

gasping, League table results for academies won't 'plummet for the first time' - over a quarter of secondary academies results have declined this year and over a third are below the 'floor target'. Become an academy doesn't 'miraculously push up results' - many are 'failing'.

There's something on the BBC website today about the over-use of vocational qualifications by academies to game League tables:-
www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16858868

What is happening when academies 'fail' is that another academy chain is brought in and when that also 'fails' the door will be open for procurement to for-profit companies aka charter schools in the States.

Which I suspect is what Gove was really after in the first place.

Or as is the case with my local Academy school, when OFSTED get fed up the happy clappy head of the group will stick his head in the sand and go la la la really loudly
there is NO SYSTEM in place to remove the sponsor of an academy (unless prh can find one as they are clever like that)

Really? Surely the S of S could just pulled the plug on funding the school? This would be a de facto removal and the free market in all its glory.

yup, they probably could - but what then happens to the children?

Education is not a free market and never will be

Well, I'd like you to be correct but unfortunately we're on the way, I think

I don't think anyone in the coalition could give a shit what happens to poor
children - numbers living in poverty have already increased considerably and will continue to do so.

Gove is very clear that he 'hasn't ruled out' the possibility of for-profit schools in the UK and indeed a Swedish for-profit firm has just been given a £21million contract for a free school.

I think that Engineering counts as 2 GCSEs. But that might be because it takes up an entire day per week. IIRC. DS decided not to do it anyway.

None of the new specs are "worth" more than one GCSE, but there are only 6 new specs initially IIRC. The old spec BTECs are still the same and will, in effect, still be "worth" 2 or whatever to the student. Schools cannot report them as more than one for performance table purposes. The same goes for double award GCSEs.