gcse choices time. What is your g+t teenager choosing be how much say do you have?

[Piffle]

not specifically g+t I guess but as ds1 is and his subjects are pretty academic I reckon. He is doing 3 gcses in yr10? IT Chinese and stats. I'm trying to convince him to do history not geography. He is choosing French. Engineering, art and geography. I wish he would choose history though! Did you get any pressure from the schools about what they should choose.

Same as ours except for food then, piff.

res mats DT = Res Mats
resmats DT engineering bias = DT
DT electronic products = Systems
DT graphics products = Graphics, obv!

I think it's shocking that a boys' school doesn't offer Food Tech, frankly

DS's ICT should be renamed Microsoft Tools - they study Excel, Access, PowerPoint and Word. It seems to attract teachers who have failed in other subjects - DS said on the first day his ICT teacher announced that he wanted to teach Maths but couldn't get a job (this is a top twenty boys grammar). I said before it was a half course - in fact it is a full course with Extensions (whatever that means).

Xenia, I work in HR. No company I know cares about GCSE subjects if you have a degree, but they might be more impressed by straight A*'s rather than a higher number of GCSE's with mixed grades (quality not quantity).

DS1's doesn't, and I'm not shocked. Domestic Science at school did absolutely nothing for my cookery skills - just made me feel utterly useless. DS1 can cook meals at the age of 13, which is more than I could do.

my ds(14) is doing options atm. he wants to take ICT but i was worried it looked very basic, he knows most of that stuff already. It's so hard to help him choose. (he's not G&T btw but this is the only thread discussing them!)

Hallgerda, did you overlook my ?

There is a lot of science and technology in the Food Tech syllabus, btw - it's not just cooking - in fact often there is no cooking.

Last week they had to try to make shortbread in as healthy and low-fat a way as possible. They were paired up; DS2 had taken a buttery spread but was paired with a girl who'd brought olive oil - they had a nightmare session with her olive oil, desperately adding more flour and more sugar to try to rescue the situation, but couldn't.

It sounded really funny, but they have both learned something useful from it

southeastastra, a friend who is an ICT teacher told me she doesn't rate the course at all and wouldn't recommend it. Another friend told me at her dd's school they steer the lower ability students towards it.

Against that, some of the local sixth forms here insist that you do extra computer skills lessons in the sixth form if you haven't done at least the short course in ICT.

perhaps i'll try and persuade him away from that then. the teacher was showing me the lesson plans, it seemed very basic. 'this week we'll be learning how to send attachments' . son has been doing that for years anyway. i thought they'd at least be doing basic programming, teacher looked at me as if i was mad.

For programming you need computing, not ICT, which IMO should be taught throught he rest of the curriculum, where we are perfectly capable of teaching children how to use excel, rather than in stand-alone lessons.

ICT at ds1s school is so basic the entire yr group are doing it a year early. Ds and others have been told they could sit it now and fly through it. Tis compulsory at ds school though DP is major league knowledgeable about computing and has given ds lots of help.ds also cooks really well. Meals,cakes etc top notch. His grammar is sports specialised so lots of emphasis on sport. Suffice to say his talents on PE are limited!!!!

Whoops - sorry, WendyWeber .

One of my other sons (still at primary) is doing a multicultural biscuit unit this term - they're looking at biscuits from different cultural heritages and combining the ideas to produce a new sort of biscuit. Could be interesting, but as I have a nasty feeling the results may be brought home I've advised him to work on multicultural excuses for chocolate chips

I accetp HC's point that certainly people like my children, (all 3 are students) applying for jobs normally the GCSE subjects are not the key thing but a lot of the applications to the kinds of jobs/professions they may go into do want GCSE subjects and grades. I accept A level grades and subjects are much more important but apply for the better universities it would be better to have a reasonably number of GCSEs in proper old fashioned subjects. In my mother's day - School Certificate - you had to do certain core subjects about 8 of them including maths and English. She failed RE first time round - she was 15 so she had to retake every single one of those GCSEs including RE in another year of school before she had school cert. That was certainly a good system.

Slight digression here but dh is unhappy that our local school offer only double science, they don't have the option to study the sciences individually. What would you do in this situation if you were planning on studying for a degree in the sciences or engineering? Would you study them outside of school via distance learning or does it really matter?

martianbishop who seems to know her stuff reckons it doesn't matter - that you can go on to do science A levels having done dual award GCSE with very little disadvantage and many of her students have gone on to science & medicine degrees with no problem.

But seperate sciences do seem to be coming back into vogue - the government is pressing for them to be more widely available and one parent I know thinks universities are increasingly looking for them. Personally, I think once you have science A levels, whether or not you have the seperate GCSEs is irrelevent.

If the school don't do triple award then presumably they are used to getting pupils up to speed from dual award to A level. As long as the A level results are good and they have enough pupils going off to good universities to study science and engineering, then it will be fine IMO.

yes double award is ok as it only takes up two gcse places and gives you more freedom to choose wider range of other subjects. Ds's school have always had dbl award science until this year..

DD did Triple Science but it did not affect her other choices of French, German, History & Geography. They just had to fit in the extra work

I've taught in one school that did triple science. Top set only, and they didn't have any extra lessons, so it didn't affect their other GCSE choices.

It did have a knock on effect on A level choices though, because you could have dual award and triple award people in the same group, and it was a bit tricky to start with. In Biology we were OK, but in Chemistry and Physics it was harder to get into the A level classes if you hadn't done triple award.

In all the other schools, it has been dual award only.

it says on the gcse choices form that all students undertake triple award science with the expectation that most will sit triple award gcse. Sounds a bit iffy. No prob for ds S he adores science but I know for a fact there are students struggling already with physics

Piffle, DS1's school has a similar system. I gather both double award and separate sciences are built up out of the same set of modules - you just need to do more of them for separate sciences. Those who aren't doing very well can use the time at the end to re-sit modules in order to get a good result in double science, rather than take new ones to make up separate sciences GCSEs.

Hallgerda it was my post you refer to re Westminster; I have changed my name recently. The school designates Art, music etc "practical" subjects and all the boys have to do one, for "balance". The only exceptions are possibly the best linguists/classicists who have opted for a second mfl and still want to do Latin and ancient greek too. There then wouldn't be space for a proper practical subject.

Better this way than ending up doing 11 or 12 or more GCSE's. But I agree with Xenia that a collection of GCSE's including 4 or 5 less rigorous subjects wouldn't impress the top universities. I find it galling that so many of the vocational GCSE's and other awards are so heavily weighted in terms of a massive over-equivalence to a straightforward academic subject like history or geography. But that's another story !

apparently the school are being barraged with complaints about the triple science being compulsory.

Gosh - are there lots of MNer parents at your DS1's school who have been swayed by martianbishop, Piffle?

Mrspanic, I agree with you and Xenia over the weightings given to vocational options - I'd be very interested to know whether anyone really considers them worth four "proper" subjects.

DS's school lets you do the BTEC First Diploma in Public Services - "This internationally respected qualification is equivalent to 4 GCSEs at A*- C level" (as well as the other 12.5 GCSEs,of which only Media Studies is non-traditional).