Certificate of Personal Effectiveness

[tatt]

Does anyone really consider this equal to a grade B at GCSE or is it now worth the fancy paper its printed on?

sorry if this has been posted before - but searching on CoPE gets 500 + irrelevant messages.

Never heard of it!

It does seem to offer 46 league table points which puts it on par with a grade B.

This doesn't mean that it has any kudos with employers or universities though - just a way of enhancing league table positions.

somehow I can't see good universities accepting this as a B grade. I guess students may as well have the bit of paper if they are doing the sort of thing covered by the certificate anyway. It includes things like oral discussion, presentation, working with others and research skills. So it's all useful stuff.

DH often does the recruiting for his firm and has very robust ideas on 'soft subjects.'
This is not a subject for someone who wants to show they are academic/analytical/creative.

they don't do this as a substitute for the other things but as an addition. The school gets good academic results, the sports teams do well and its considered to be "good" at music (although IMHO that's only because the other local schools are very bad).

Confirming my belief that it's not really worth anything though.

The course looks quite good and does expect students to show independence and be able to plan and organise things themselves ... in practice it doesn't work like that, at least not in our school. The students on it are on it because teachers of other options preferred not to teach them (!) and often they are 'spoon-fed' in COPE because it's the only way to get them through it. Oh, and it's virtually impossible to fail too. We have plenty of children who pass COPE and don't get an A-C in anything else.

Go figure.