New GCSEs - do DDs grades rule anywhere out?

[PancakeMum6]

DD did very well in her GCSEs (best in her school) but she’s at an underperforming comp so it’s hard to compare. As they don’t sit AS levels these will be the only grades the universities will see, so we’re trying to work out if her grades are ‘good enough’ for us to bother looking at Oxbridge/Durham/UCL/Bristol etc. as there’s lots of conflicting information. We want to work out where realistic universities are before starting on the open day process!

She’s doing A levels in English Lit, Arabic and French, and she wants to study either French and Arabic, French and English, or French and another language at beginner level.

At GCSE she got
A*s - Arabic, media.
9s - English Lit, maths, French.
9-8 in combined science.
8s - art, English lang.

She’s been reading all sorts about “percentages of As” and can’t tell how the new “8s” are considered. At her school they were described as high As/low As.

[PancakeMum6]

BubblesBuddy DD has only just started year 12 now - we haven’t even started looking at courses/unis properly yet! I wanted to establish whether her GCSE grades ruled any options out. She has AS mocks just before Christmas so gets the results after Christmas, at which point we’ll know exactly where she’s on course to apply and can start looking more specifically at unis/courses.

The Arabic she speaks with her friends is obviously miles away from that she uses in her exams/classes - as a PP pointed out. Her friend group actually has their own odd dialect because they not only shift very quickly from Arabic to English and back, but also because the four native Arabic speakers are from three different countries, so they all have their own ammiyas/dialects, and subsequently have sort of merged to create their own weird language. I understand every fifth word maybe but DD informs me it’s fascinating to be part of however she does also read a lot of Arabic literature in translation and is trying to read as many in original language as she can find (we often struggle to obtain many of he texts - she desperately wants to read I Saw Ramallah in Arabic but we just can’t find an available copy), and is deeply interested in the cultures she’s surrounded by. She always has been!

Also to clarify the GCSE selection - she had the choice of 3 or 4 from: geography, history, RE, French, Arabic, music, art, media, business studies, sociology, DT (I think graphics and textiles were the options within that), food tech, BTEC sport, BTEC ICT/computing, BTEC performing arts. At A level her school also offers psychology, economics, PE and politics, but not English Language. There are also no BTECs offered as the year group more than halves in size at sixth form as people go to one of the colleges for the vocational courses (three colleges renowned for their vocational courses as they don’t really offer A levels). I think the selection offered is quite standard for our area - no-one really does Latin/Greek/classics/ancient history/drama as far as I’m aware and most schools do the more modern subjects like media etc.

[AtiaoftheJulii]

OP I find it hard to honestly believe that you and your daughter have been worrying or finding conflicting information, when this is clearly a really good set of results!

Language degrees can vary greatly in their composition, so once she starts looking, do look closely at course structure, and also things like are you taught and/or assessed in the target language or your home language.

"so much of a standard MFL degree is language" - not always true! Especially at Oxbridge.

I agree with Bubbles that a joint MFL degree (particularly Arabic and something!) will make her stand out a bit more than English and something.

[goodbyestranger]

Atia DS3's gf is reading joint honours MFL at Oxford and seems to have a shed load of language stuff for her final degree - I think she said 60% when I saw her recently - but I've never looked at any courses so can't claim to know. But if it is 60% and a bilingual nails that 60% then they're basically sorted for a first. But maybe I misheard and it wasn't 60%!

I hear you sendsummer the thing is it is putting DC off round our way at least and this stuff gets repeated by MFL teachers who use the fact of bilingual DC in the system to defend their less own than brilliant (GCSE and A level) results (ie their students' results). It's very demotivating but it does seem to be a thing.

[goodbyestranger]

Or rather, their own less than brilliant! (thus proving the point that native speakers often can't write their own language :)).

[NewModelArmyMayhem18]

Grammars have the same financial constraints (arguably more) as all schools in the state sector. They tend to offer fewer subjects, not more.

I agree. All GCSE subjects on offer for for DS were very 'usual' (nothing like sociology, pyschology, Latin or similar). Most 'out there' subject was business studies. Most did the EBacc (with a to be expected very, very high achievement rate). DS's school does struggle financially too, I would say, but has very active PTA which helps boost the coffers considerably.

[BubblesBuddy]

Pancake: she might be year 12, but it’s not too early to consider going to an MFL subject day at Oxford. That will answer a lot of questions. Look on their web site for dates and booking information. It will tell you how one of the best universities teaches and what is involved in the subject there. She should go to other open days next summer. Many high achieving DCs will have planned this already. Look for when booking opens.

Sendsummer: children who have a parent who is French, German, Chinese, Spanish etc are now fairly significant in number, especially in London. These parents are bilingual and work in professional jobs. Their children may not be totally bilingual, or native speakers, although some are, but they are streets ahead of the average talented DC linguist that doesn’t have such parental or cultural input.

When looking at universities, SOAS very much appeals to Arabic speakers. DDs Saudi friends targeted that university.

Goodbye: Could your DD consider ab initio at university so she makes use of her talent? It’s a shame to not pursue a language when she is talented. Although I can see she has many talents!

[IrmaFayLear]

I was thinking about this and particularly with respect to a school I was working in recently. This school is near the bottom of the heap in the whole country. There were not an insignificant number of pupils taking foreign languages GCSEs - Portuguese, Urdu, Polish etc etc. Of course these were bilingual pupils as the school was only entering about ten pupils for French which was on the curriculum. I think the school was thinking, "Hmmm, these pupils will be getting 9s. Our results will look a whole lot better now!" (Or at least less bad.)

As I said, in the 1980s the bilingual pupil was not a "threat" , but as Goodbyestranger observed, a family with a MFL parent is simply more common now. Also when I was doing MFL the most "immersion" you could hope to get was a school trip. Now I hear of kids being sent to fancy camps, nay goat farms in France. I wish my dcs had had the opportunity to do Latin, as there is no chance of anyone stealing a march by forking out for a time machine and going to stay with a family in Ancient Rome.

[sendsummer]

Bubbles I am aware of the growing number of families in the UK with at least one parent with another native language (London and university towns predominate). At risk of outing myself I was brought up as bilingual speaking a European language at home (and English only at school) so I have insights into the limitations including affecting higher level writing skills in either language..

‘The streets ahead’ for the more frequent case of a DC with some proficiency in another language through family has a natural ceiling for developing vocabulary and writing in that language unless they are are part educated in that language. Also most such DCs do not choose to study their home advantage MFL after GCSE. So there is still plenty of room for those without family background in the language.
I continue to state that IME a keen, talented linguist with humanity writing skills will overtake those who just talk a little bit at home to a parent. To continue the analogy with other subjects, a keen musical DC from a non musical background can succeed despite home advantage of many DCs with musician parents

[sendsummer]

Goodbyestranger I don’t have the facts but my anecdotal experience disproves the magnitude of effect affecting chances of highest grades that is being propagated as a reason not to do sixth form or university MFLs. Even for GCSEs enough abinitio pupils get top grades to disprove that as a barrier.

Private schools are increasingly using preUs for MFLs as supposedly this reduces any home advantage of a native speaker (with poorer English writing skills) or students who have home advantage in speaking but are not so good at essays.

What is an advantage for a natural linguist to pick up new languages is when they have been properly introduced to logical grammatical structures.

[PancakeMum6]

AtiaoffheJulii you’d be surprised - it’s very hard to find information on how 8s are valued and the school really has no idea as only 5 pupils got an 8 in any subject. Only one other girl got 9s - she got 2 of them (plus 2 8s, 2 7s, and 2 6s a funny set of results).

I’m not too bothered about steering her degree choice so she “stands out” - I think it’s more important that she enjoys her degree and makes the decision herself. I’m sure an English and French degree from a top university wouldn’t limit her in any severe way...

IrmaFayLear not sure if the goat farm was a targeted comment but it seemed a bit passive aggressive - I’m not sending her there... she organised it entirely independently after deciding spending time with people she couldn’t speak to in English would be the best way to immerse, and is paying for it herself from earnings. She’s been to France once before on a French exchange. As a family we’ve never left the UK! There is still space for normal kids to do MFL - but like everything, you’re at an advantage if you’re wealthy and/or middle class. The same can be said for English/drama, music, art. If your family can afford to fund trips to the theatre, music lessons, art materials and visits to art galleries then you’re of course more likely to succeed. Doesn’t mean those who can’t afford those things can’t - they just have to work that extra bit harder and more independently. It isn’t fair but I don’t see it being solved any time soon...

BubblesBuddy we’re in the north and DD often has busy weekends so we’re going to wait until we know for sure where is realistic and where she’s interested in before investing a lot of time and money into random places. Her school runs a free two day trip down to Oxford in June for two or three students every year, and as DD was the top performing at GCSE I imagine she’ll be invited. She can have a good look at Oxford then if she wants and DD1 also pointed out that when she went she got to speak to a tutor in her subject and students studying her subject. As I said, in January we’ll start booking onto other open days! I don’t think it’s a good idea to be too heavy with planning when we don’t fully know her level yet. We want to be realistic.

[goodbyestranger]

sendsummer yes I may be generalising. Down in our neck of the woods language teaching has been poor for almost all of DD4's secondary schooling. She pretty much self taught for GCSE to hit a reasonable grade. It's picking up now in sixth form though, so perhaps that will re-direct her again. Meanwhile she's teaching herself GCSE Latin through an online course which can't do any harm - though Classics really came into play as a possible ab initio substitute for French, which she really does seem to love. No plethora of multi lingual families down here, so no advantage there either.

(My father was trilingual (an accident of fortune) but when we asked him later on why he'd never spoken to us in his native language (Polish) or in French (where he went to school until 1939), he said he thought none of us three siblings were bright enough and that English was quite enough :)).

[goodbyestranger]

OP apologies for the stuff about my own DD - hijacked a bit.

[Needmoresleep]

Central London here, so bilingualism was the norm. Over 10% of DDs year group was bilingual French, with plenty of other languages around. One contemporary of DS' spoke five. The school would accelerate them through GCSE, in part I assume as their teaching needs were difference. Very few seemed to study languages at A level.

I agree with Sendsummer. DD picked up French from friends. This helped get her a good grade at GCSE even though her dyslexia meant she could be expected to struggle, but there was no way she would have taken it further. When working ski season the French chalet owners would happily chat to her and ask her to interpret, in a way they did not with kids with A level French. Her accent is awful (a mix of Chi'ti and Parisian Lebanese, with quite a lot of teenage slang thrown in) and I doubt she could write a grammatical sentence. But it serves her needs. There is a difference between language as a skill and language as an academic subject.

In terms of finding a goat farm, I don't know if it is that hard. French are desperate for their kids to learn English, so ask everyone. DD met a French girl on holiday who did the same sports as her, and so I asked the parents if they could do an exchange. The dad was keen, the girl less so. (She loved London but refused to speak anything but French.) DD then went on to have exchanges with others in the sports club, encouraged by the coach who got her registered with the club so she could compete for them. Ditto she ended up staying with a family with a chateau and a posh house in Paris, because London based aunt kept being tasked to organise exchanges. You could also look at French holiday camps/courses. We often spotted two or three French kids at British residential sports camps, getting the child care, the sports training and the English immersion.

The thing that is often missing from MFL threads is the fact that people learn languages in different ways. My assumption is that language teachers are good linguists and expect students to learn like them. But that this may only work for those with a similar academic bent. Actually speaking is more a matter of needing to and practice. (I ended up learning four as an adult for work reasons, starting with no obvious aptitude.)

And OPs DD grades sound great and the DD sounds interesting. Arabic and an interest in the Arab world is the sort of thing that the FCO and other employers should be interested in.

[Needmoresleep]

London state sixth forms are sometimes arranged in consortiums so they can offer a good range of A levels including MFLs. Indeed state pupils can sometimes access real minority subjects (Ancient Greek etc) at their local private school.

It seems like a good solution.

[sendsummer]

Goodbyestranger the intelligence criteria
luckily was not applied to myself and siblings nor our DCs .

Your DD sounds like OP’s, talented, interested and with a thirst for learning. If she does go for Classics basically an initio at university, including another MFL as a joint degreee might be just too much time spent learnt vocabulary etc.

IMO learning latin grammar and structure is the best way to compensate for poor MFL grammar teaching but that is just my bias.

[Xenia]

(I learned most of mmy grammar either at home or in my French and german lessons as we didn't do much in those days in English lessons; i think they do more now)

I think we are all agreed this girl seems very good, has good subjects and might as well try the lottery which is Oxbridge as well as other good universities and should do fine.

[BubblesBuddy]

I think, sendsumner, you are underestimating how bright some bilingual children are, how much their parents invest in their education and, in fact, are very capable themselves. There are plenty of these children at the very best universities. I know a child who only did languages at A level but still went to Oxford to study her mother’s language: she was a MFL teacher. Her father had taught French and German before becoming a school adviser and latterly a Head. It is fairly common that bright (and I stress that point) bilingual DC are able to get to the best universities and others, who haven’t had that input, then do feel a bit inadequate if they have just had the odd school trip to France! Others are immersed from birth!

I do not think Oxbridge is a lottery for MFL. It has far fewer applicants for a start and takes a bigger percentage of applicants.

Pancake; I suggested the subject visit because it’s important your DD knows what is involved. You apply from a position of knowledge and you are already at a less good school. You would be investing your time and money in finding out if MFL at university is for her. Leaving it until the school visit is very late in your position. I knew absolutely nothing about Oxford and, although our school was private, it was worse than useless. Sitting back and not getting information is not a good policy. If they don’t send pupils to Oxford or even to MFL degrees, your school probably doesn’t know the time of day either. So, I’m afraid you have to do the slog. It’s just a day at the weekend (March?) and it’s never a waste of time. You can ask questions and satisfy yourself and your DD that this is a good idea, or indeed a poor idea! Don’t think this info doesn’t matter, because it does and can be applied to the better MFL degrees as well.

[Everincreasingfrequency]

"Private schools are increasingly using preUs for MFLs as supposedly this reduces any home advantage of a native speaker (with poorer English writing skills) or students who have home advantage in speaking but are not so good at essays. "

Yes I heard that as well but don't really understand it - I would have thought private schools also have quite a few native speakers, so won't the same thing happen in PreU? PreU does include language, oral etc, not just essays.

Ofqual did some research published last year about the effect of native speakers on grades - in French, German, Spanish and possibly some other languages. The conclusion was - it's complicated! And very difficult to get reliable figures on the number of native speakers (however that is defined). They did adjust the A level grade boundaries to take into account the research. As a lay person I'm not sure whether that works - maybe MFL exams should be 'criteria referenced' rather than norm referenced - that would be a way of taking the native speakers effect out of grade boundary definition.

[BubblesBuddy]

I agree that it must depend on who is classed as a native speaker. You cannot get accurate data unless the native speakers are identified and an exact criteria is used for that. How would that work at university when they unashamedly want the best?

[Everincreasingfrequency]

Exactly, very difficult to define a native speaker - you don't have to be fully bilingual to have an advantage iin the oral, for example.

I think that the thing is that whether non native speakers are disadvantaged or not (and Ofqual did find some effect, though it varied and was subject to lots of qualifications etc), over the past few years students and parents have become much more aware of this question and think that they may be disadvantaged . (From what I can gather I am not in the same area as goodbye, so it's not just one enclave where that belief has taken hold!). So that itself is an issue.

I can understand a student who's in two minds, deciding to steer clear if there are other A level subjects they could equally well do. Once you get to university it may be different again - but again I can understand not wanting to be competing against bilingual students (I know it shouldn't be a competition, but in reality there are only a limited proportion of the top degrees awarded.) It would be interesting to know how much this factor is driving A level and university choices.

[goodbyestranger]

We're rural SW Everincreasingfrequency and as I said above, at least one of DD4's teachers justified the department's poor results on the basis of native speakers lurking in the GCSE and A level system. There could well be other reasons. But then when that gets triangulated with the info coming from my DC/the Oxford direction, that there are large numbers of native speakers lurking in the colleges there bagging all the firsts, it does give pause for thought. That said, my DC are well capable of wild exaggeration/ talking rubbish, so who knows.

[sendsummer]

Bubbles I am fully cognisant of how bright some bilingual DCs (perhaps from more experience of this than you ).
I also know and have agreed with you that a few do pursue a native language (rather than a foreign language) as their degree at Oxbridge and the motivations for that which include the goal of an Oxbridge degree.
BTW it is very very easy to distinguish a bilingual speaker from an A level speaker (even a talented one) at least in my MFL. Of course a native speaker has huge advantages if they also want to study their language in the UK system.
For fear of labouring my point IME that relative minority does not hinder the success of other able, keen students to reach the standards of top grades. Also top class of degrees are not a competition but a standard reached.

[sendsummer]

meant at least in my other language ( as it is not strictly speaking a foreign language).

[AtiaoftheJulii]

Atia DS3's gf is reading joint honours MFL at Oxford and seems to have a shed load of language stuff for her final degree - I think she said 60% when I saw her recently

Oh that's interesting - dd went to UNIQ (French) and is still in touch with her coursemates - 10 out of the 12 of them ended up at Oxbridge I think, and she says there is a lot of complaining from them about how little they get to speak their language(s). They're all on their year abroad now, and some were feeling quite unprepared to be immersed in their target language!

Pancake - your dd could have a look at UNIQ if she hasn't already, it's an amazing scheme. Also the Sutton Trust summer schools. I just had a look to see if the Cambridge masterclasses were being advertised yet as they're usually in the spring, but they're happening now! www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/events/masterclasses Couldn't see anywhere saying whether there will be a second series next year. There may be similar things at universities closer to home, such as Newcastle's Bite Size Uni.

[moredoll]

We were told that if you were in the top 3 for all your subjects Cambridge would like to hear from you. Didn't matter if you were predicted a B, because if you were in the top 3 it meant that you were making the most of what you had even if the school wasn't as good as it should be