Despite having the right grades, my child is not applying to Oxbridge because ....

[TalkinPeace]

• she wants to live in self catered accommodation
• she does not like the small sizes of the colleges / social units
• having to go back to college for lunch while doing a lab based degree does not make sense
• the whole gown and formal dinner stuff smacks of coat tails rather than standing on own feet
• she does not fancy fighting through hordes of tourists while moving between buildings
• having a tutor picked by which college they are based in rather than their research specialism seems very odd to her

Also, for what she wants to do, the course at Oxford is not that well balanced
and Cambridge, despite having a fab course was not a place that felt like home when she visited for 2 days.

So she will be putting other Universities on her form and taking a great deal of stress out of this house.

For what its worth, those of her friends I've chatted to are also ruling out Oxbridge in favour of other Unis because of the first four points.

What are other people's reasons for ruling out Oxbridge, despite having the grades?

In 1955/6 11.7 % of students achieved 5 O level / GCSE passes. In 1985/6 this figure was 26.7% and in 2011/12 it was 81.1%.

That's a hell of an increase over a generation, but you have to remember that prior to the mid 1980s exam passes were norm-referenced, which meant that fixed percentages of students were awarded each grade which hardly varied from year to year and any improvements were due to a larger number of students staying on and taking exams.

squirreled
Your comparison is invalid because prior to the introduction of the GCSE in 1988, lower ability students took CSEs : you would need to know how many students were getting grade 1 and 2 in CSE in the 80's to get anything like a valid comparison.

In the 1950's GCEs were only taken by Grammar school kids : one third of pupils under the tripartite system
and a bit shocking that 2/3 of them did not get the grades after the 11+ selection method

TiP - No, it's valid because it includes CSE Grade 1 passes up to 1986/7, which was the O level pass equivalent.

link please.

Bear in mind that in 1956, the school leaving age was 14
and that pre 1975 only 36% of students took O levels
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Ordinary_Level_(United_Kingdom)

Comparisons are very difficult because until about 1970ish the school leaving age was 15 so some of the grammar school pupils and the vast majority of secondary modern pupils would have left before taking exams. After that, it was still perfectly possible right into the 1980s to get a job without any qualifications so there wasn't much incentive to bother about exams unless you were very bright and/or being pushed from home.

Table 6 link

from your link, page 18, Table 5 : in 1971-72 only 43% of the cohort were in full time education at age 16

it is not possible to directly compare pass rates in exams when such huge swathes of the population were not taking the exams because they were going to work instead often for economic rather than academic reasons

I did my O levels in the early 1980s, lots of kids in my very ordinary comprehensive school didn't bother about exams as they were following in their parents footsteps by going into apprenticeships and the like.

So many differences.

1. School leaving age.
2. Employment opportunities.
3. Nature of exams - no coursework, no open book exams, no modular approach, re-takes rare, and above all norm-referenced grading as explained above acting as a considerable disincentive to taking the exams at all for all except the most academic children.
4. No National Curriculum, no Ofsted, no SATS, no league tables. Parents were not looking at exam results before choosing schools and in any case in many cases they were not choosing, they were accepting the LEA's allocation for their child.
5. Teachers were not focussing on exam preparation to anything like the same extent. Exam technique was not taught in the same way. Teachers weren't judged on exam/test results as they are now.
6. Teachers/parents/everyone were far more likely to take the view that individual pupils had the choice whether to work or not and if a pupil didn't do well it would be viewed as their own fault, rather than down to bad teaching (or something like dyslexia, which was unknown until very recently).

Agree with Gasp. My father is/was (retired) a chartered mechanical engineer. He went to a grammer school but left age 15/16 with 1 English O level to do an apprenticeship. He later did an OU degree in his 30s. My son planning the same career now is going down the 5 year M Eng in Mech eng needing highers/ advanced highers etc.

It is hard to compared. My mother (at state grammar) in about 1944 did her general certificate of education a year young but did not get enough credits so had to do the whole year again in every subject. I am not sure if that was a requirement for her teacher training college or some other requirement that you had to pass all subjects at a certain level but it is consistent with today's preference that you show your broad education by having some basic core subjects not too different from those in 1944 which were english, maths, a science, a language, geog, histry and perhaps RE all sat and passed in one summer.

It is hard to compare. Were my 1979 A levels (the best in the school) "better" than the almost identical subjects and identical grades my daughter got so m any decades on? Are the GCSE results my twins just got comparable with their siblings' GCSE results of 13 - 10 years ago?

Anyway it does not really matter as teenagers can only deal with the situation they are now in.

The relevant point is that until the mid 1980s there were fixed proportions of O level and A level grades awarded, so that there was always going to be a limited number of passes - 10% of A level candidates were awarded an A grade, 15% a B grade etc. The only way you could increase the number of passes was to increase the number of pupils taking the exam.

So, you can't directly compare the exam pass rates from a generation ago to today's generation because the grading system is entirely different.

With the pre GCE Matric and Higher Matric you had to pass the whole lot to be awarded the qualification.

Yes, there were fixed proportions of O and A level grades passed by when you bear in mind that some children from the better Secondary Moderns were getting O levels then it does mean that a good number of grammar school pupils must have been falling short.

BTW the school leaving age was raised to 15 by the 1944 Education Act which came into force in 1947 but I suppose some summer born children would still be 14 when they left.

There wasn't the focus on attendance then either, LaVolcan, so there were quite a few kids who simply stopped going to school at some point in the early teens and nobody seems to have noticed/bothered too much about it.

I suspect that some teachers were quite pleased that some children quietly stopped attending!

There were 4th year leaving certificates, but children could leave at Easter and had been able to leave at Christmas, so they wouldn't have completed the 4th year. I don't know whether these leaving certificates were national or local initiatives.

I should think many teachers nowadays look back longingly at those times! My mum was a primary school teacher and never ceased to rejoice at having retired in the mid 80s before the huge upheavals in education introduced by the Thatcher government and enthusiastically continued by Blair and his chums.

When my mother taught in the 1940s and 50s there were truancy officers out on the streets to catch chidlren and indeed all her life if she saw a child not at school when she was out shopipng she'd stop and ask it why it wasn't in school.

there were truancy officers out on the streets to catch children
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So many people I knew at school simply stopped going during the final couple of years.

Usually because earning a few quid was a better short term prospect than sitting in a classroom with no teacher bored to tears.

First few years of Thatcherism. Leaving school with no CSEs and doing a YOP was pretty standard.

I always hope with League tables, Ofsted etc (and I know they cause loads of problems) schools can't be that bad now.

I agree, christinarosetti. I know there are lots of problems with Ofsted etc but it was all so uneven in ye olden days. In the 70s and early 80s, my mum had a colleague who was paid an extra increment for looking after the school plants. The teacher concerned spent her entire summer holiday watching cricket, not preparing for the next academic year (not so unusual back then, of course). She arrived in the morning at the same time as the children and was the first one out at the end of the school day, often beating the children to get out of the playground.

She always taught what is now known in England as year 3 - seven and eight-year-olds in their first year in the Juniors. Her colleagues knew that when her class moved up to year 4 they would be way behind the parallel class in the year group and their teacher would have to work particularly hard to help them catch up. Knowing what I do now about parents, I find it hard to believe that the parents didn't know this too. Nobody did anything about it and she was eventually able to retire early on a good pension. Unimaginable now.

Parents weren't on the whole expected to be involved in their children's education then, there was no national curriculum, no school websites with useful information etc.

We spent a whole year in secondary school 'doing' French without a teacher. Someone would come in at the beginning of the lesson, tell us to copy out page 21 or whatever, then we'd sit there until the bell went for the next class.

We did have a teacher for history, but they unfortunately taught us the incorrect syllabus during the equivalent of Y10, which presumably no-one else realised either.

My mother must have known about this, but had pretty low expectations from the system and wouldn't have known what to say anyway.

Unimaginable (thankfully!) now.

In my gels fee paying selective school, 17 out of 42 had to re take our A levels

that did not include the girl who turned up three times in two years of 6th form, each time wearing a fur coat and not much else and accompanied by very dodgy looking men : never quite got my head round it all.

It always amazed me that our frankly shite head was picked up by a mega high profile school a few years later

If league tables have done anything, they have stopped parents wasting their money on underperforming private schools.

"We did have a teacher for history, but they unfortunately taught us the incorrect syllabus during the equivalent of Y10, which presumably no-one else realised either."

This happened to my dBro in the mid 1980s. Small rural comprehensive, c. 60 per year group, so A class and B class. The nature of the intake was such that most pupils did CSEs rather than O-levels. History was an option only taken by less than half the year group, so 1 class was timetabled, in which CSE (taken by the majority) and O-level (taken by less than 5 pupils each year) was taught at the same time. Which was fine until the periods covered by the 2 curricula totally diverged....

This carried on for a few years - all O-level historians failed, because they had not been taught the right stuff, but that was par for the course.

My dad wanted to help DBro [who got 1/3 of the total O-level passes from his year group, and did go on to Oxbridge, the first pupil ever to do so from that school] with history, and uncovered the issue. School said 'he's the union rep, we can't solve it'.....

Just an anecdote here but my exSILs went to a private girls' school in the US. They all did well, went to university, graduated, etc. Many years later they were all at a family dinner and some topic related to physics came up. exFIL asked one of them a question wrt basic high school physics and she said she couldn't answer as she had never taken physics since it was not offered when she was in school. exFIL was appalled, but then he had not exactly noticed the lack of physics at the time himself, just wrote the cheques.

Isn't that theoretically possible in private schools now though, as they don't have to follow the national curriculum?

Having said that, physics was another 'we don't have a teacher for this, and we never enter anyone in any exams anyway' subject at my school, so I can't claim to have been taught physics either.