Rishi Sunak axes A-levels and reveals ‘Advanced British Standard’ replacement

[HarrowToCroydon]

Title says it all. Teachers here please opine. Not writing for any article. Parents of 3 children, 2 still in school.

Btecs are being phased out, the list of Btecs that are being defunded is being published in June 2024. Instead the DfE wants students to take T levels but you need 5 x grade 5 to take T levels. At the moment it's estimated by the SFCA that 155,000 students won't meet the criteria for A levels or T levels in 2026. I guess by allowing Eng and maths to run alongside T levels they will be able to increase the number of students who will qualify to take them.

Students who can take A levels or EPQ's are not the focus of this change. It's aimed at the 1,000's of 16 yr olds who don't meet the criteria for A levels.

@tennissquare Yes I know BTECs are being phased out. I just don't see why.

(I don't think it is hardwired they have to have 5 at grade 5 however, but if that level of academic ability is needed it just shows they're draft as they leave nothing for the grade 4 pupils to do.)

@TeenDivided , I know, it's crazy! It's because the DfE have spent over £1billion on T levels so they can't be allowed to fail.

I think it depends on the child tbh. A highly academic child heading to Oxbridge especially for arts/humanities is probably better off with a system that takes them from the classroom to the library. Someone less academic but with a more technical mind would probably be better off with an old style apprenticeship than 2 more years of education with compulsory maths and English. I grew up in Portsmouth and all the technically minded boys wanted an apprenticeship in the naval dockyard. To get one meant you needed to pass the naval apprentices exam so they were motivated to study enough English and maths to get through. Sadly Maggie Thatcher decided to scrap the apprenticeships......

@ImAKnitter

That list is wrong as I know of 2 state sixth form colleges that offer ib not on that list

It's for the manifesto - will only happen if they win the next election and then can be bothered to do it.

Personally, ex-lecturer & teacher here, I think it makes sense not to specialise and close down all options at 16 or even 14 (depending on how you look at it) when you may now go on to live another 90 years and may need to work well into your 70s. So, I’m reserving judgement, but I’m very doubtful that there will be the investment in place to fully support this and include everyone with the very different programmes that will be needed.

It might be better to facilitate access to education later in life to support career changes. You can't educate people at 16-18 for everything them may want to do until they are 70.

Very good point.

I also have experience of teaching A levels to students with majority grade 4s at GCSE (where they may not have been able to carry on at their school sixth form, if it even exists). It is not pretty and I can’t really say that it is providing the best for those students, or for anyone. FE is in a rolling crisis though, has been for a while, and something needs to be done.

The logistics would make it tricky. I honestly find it incredible they make these announcements without asking even an ordinary teacher or having a basic think for longer than a minute.

1. I have taught IB- which is basically what's being proposed here. In many ways it's great- but it's not as suited to weaker students as A-levels, so I think this would be complicated to implement without substantial adjustments. Half of that is the literacy and numeracy component. 30% of students have to resit English GCSE anyway- but then maybe this would be factored into the plan.
2. Never mind finding enough teachers (which, as others have pointed out, will have implications right the way back to university), there aren't currently enough rooms in most schools, so new buildings would be required. Studying 6 subjects rather than 3 will require more lessons to be timetabled simultaneously than is currently the case. A lot more lessons. We have 550 students in our sixth form- that's a whole new double storey building.

Fine. I've no problem with it so long as the weaker 50% of the population are actually considered (and the Tories seem to forget about)- but it would need major educational reform over a decade or so, huge funding implications....and I'm not sure why.

Not wrong, but incomplete.

I thought there would be more than 22. 😀

I don't have any personal experience of the IB but my understanding is that it includes a compulsory foreign language.

I can't imagine that making a foreign language compulsory to 18 would go down well, given that many students don't even study one till 16.

It might be better to facilitate access to education later in life to support career changes. You can't educate people at 16-18 for everything them may want to do until they are 70.

Agree. I did a-levels at 18 but the college I did them at had huge numbers of adult learners. They offered about 10 different gcse subjects as a year long course and loads of a-levels including some as evening classes and lots as a 1 year course which some people did as a resit to get a better mark and some did as a first go. There was vocational stuff too - some full time over 2 years and some just an evening a week for 6 or 8 weeks. There were subsidised courses and you could just pay to do stuff that interested you. Loads of adults sat a-levels that they studied at evening classes. Now it’s just access courses but most of those are full time. You are funded from 16-19 and then that’s it, if you haven’t got the right grades or the right subjects by then then too bad.

Significant point you mention here. That the children who were keen to work at the Naval facility, plucked up the strength to do Math and English.

This of course can be viewed in many different ways.

• motivated children who work hard can pass maths and English first time round
• only children who had the ability to pass set their sights on a Naval apprenticeship
• children who fail just haven't tried hard enough (NB the system is now set so around a third have to fail due to marking on a curve)
• making pupils continue maths and English to 18 will remove incentive to really try to pass in y11 as they'll be stuck with it anyway for another 2 years

I think that the dockyard exam was set a bit differently to O level - so it was more about how you'd solve problems in daily life than lots of theoretical algebra - didn't mean that they weren't using trig tables just that the questions were framed differently. I suspect that therefore people who were more practically minded saw the point of answering them. I know that the English test was also pretty practical - drafting a reply to a letter and a comprehension test on a non fiction text. Again probably more to the point than a piece of creative writing.

It might be better to facilitate access to education later in life to support career changes. You can't educate people at 16-18 for everything them may want to do until they are 70.

You mean, go back to what we had 25 years ago?? We used to have very good adult education options which included GCSE and A level, trades, vocations, etc. We had three "adult" education colleges in our town alone, in addition to schools and colleges aimed at 16-18 year olds. I used to teach accounting to adults at one of the colleges! All that was just swept away with the obsession for getting 50% of kids to Uni and colleges to concentrate on 16-18 year olds.

It's amazing how things go full circle in politics!!

How life, learning and education should be.

Bit more nuanced than this. If child has an interest in something, they will work their socks off to achieve it.

Yep, couldn't believe that even the current English "LANGUAGE" GCSE curriculum doesn't seem to include a non fiction comprehension, nor writing a letter, etc. Even the Language GCSE seems to be obsessed with "literature", i.e. a comprehension on a piece of fiction, writing a story or poem, etc. What about "real life" English? When I did it, decades ago, we'd have a comprehension about a set of instructions to make something, or a recipe, or a non fiction piece (maybe historic or about animals etc).

Same with Maths, yes, they include simple and compound interest, but they teach it in a difficult to understand (for less able pupils) way based around algebra, rather than simply explaining the total costs of borrowing, real life examples of how compound interest works, etc. Totally inaccessible for pupils with poor Maths skills.

We need more "real life" skills being taught as part of English and Maths in a way that's accessible to weaker students to at least try to get them engaged and more prepared for the realities of life after school. When I look at today's GCSE curriculae, I could almost weep that it's mostly all aimed at the more able pupils, no wonder so many "less able" students feel disenfranchised and no wonder there's so much disruption and bad behaviour in schools.

I was reading my OH's model railway magazine the other day. There was a brilliant article in it about a school who'd chosen a random group of year 7 pupils and given them a week to make a model railway layout, starting with the woodwork of making the base boards, then the "tech" of planning and laying the trackwork, then the electrics of wiring it up, then the art of scenery, i.e. making hills out of paper/plaster, painting them and scattering with powder, then making buildings out of kits and scratch building out of bits of card board, etc.

Really inspirational to bring all kinds of skills together, encouraging kids to work together in teams, and being able to see a finished product, with all ranges of ability and skills catered for. It was so popular, the school have now started a model railway club open to all pupils!

Yet at so many schools, the "tech" still consists of making a wooden fish and a metal trowel! That's what my state school did 50 years ago, and what my son's state school did a decade ago - things really havn't moved on!

I couldn't agree more - I remember my English language GCSE was a comprehension, a precis and a longer piece of writing with several options including a story, a picture and an argumentative piece. Part way through year 11 I stopped writing stories and started writing argued pieces instead and my marks shot up - I'm clearly not cut out to be a creative writer but i can argue the hind leg off a donkey. DD2 is the same so English Language was much harder for her than it should have been.

Best maths teacher I ever had was in year 6 - we had one whole term on geometry and she also taught us "art" so the whole term we did patchwork - it became clear very quickly that you needed to be very accurate in drawing your shapes as they then became your patchwork templates and you ended up in a mess if you didn't measure accurately...........

Eng Lang GCSE covers fiction and non fiction reading and writing.
The writing may be a letter, or an article, or <other stuff>
Comprehension is covered but so also are identifying and using techniques such as imagery, rule of 3 etc.

Functional Skills English seems at initial look to be more straightforward and useful.