The return of the O Level.

[hermionestranger]

Leaked reports suggest that the government is to scrap the GCSE from 2015, 2013 option takers will be the last year to take them.

I'm sorry it's the mail bug they were first on my twitter feed. I 'm on my phone so can't link properly.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162369/Return-O-Level-Gove-shake-biggest-revolution-education-30-years.html

Nothing wrong with Cuba's education system - it has issues of political repression and economic problems caused by the US boycott but it has very solid basic state infrastructure, a highly motivated population and a reasonably phonically simple language.

I did O levels many years ago at a private school with a fairly mixed intake and the race to the bottom among exam boards was visible. Our Latin teacher had put much effort into identifying the easiest board to maintain his perfect record, and in English different sets took different boards. I looked at the bottom set's mock O level paper and honestly I could have passed that paper without even having heard of the set texts, let alone read or study them - no essays, just comprehension questions.

Cuba dedicates a far higher percentage of its GDP to education (although to be fair their GDP is lower than ours so that's not a great argument).

Maybe Cuba is better as a demonstration of the benefits of universal (as in no private, rather than just available to all) state education (with Marxist roots), in a country with far less inequality in all areas of life than ours

LeQueen You make a good point about the UK now having lower literacy levels than some 2nd and even 3rd world countries.

Jenai I read the Telegraph and the Guardian. I found the article I read in the guardian with the world rankings for reading, maths and science. The UK was average in reading and below average in maths and science. Take a look to see who is above us.

and a reasonably phonically simple language

And there's that too of course.

'Plus one exam board sounds very nice in subjects where there is an agreed universal body of knowledge, like maths, say. But what about subjects like English or History? Will all pupils across the UK have to read th same 3 books or study the same 2 periods of history or whatever? Doesn't sound very desirable.'

That is how it is done in Ireland and it works very well -- one central curriculum, set by the Dept of Education, a few levels so that everyone gets a crack at succeeding. The teaching of history and geography in the UK is baffling as things stand. I don't think the way history in particular is taught contributes one iota to students' understanding of the past, with little snippets from vastly different periods taught willy nilly and essential religious and constitutional issues frequently bypassed altogether.

Sorry I misread the table. We are average in Reading, just above average in science and below average in maths. Take a look at the top 5 though. Four are in the far east and 20 years ago were not even making the top 50 countries in the world.

At long last, Nick Clegg has found his teeth!

I have to say I don't really understand the graphic on that piece, Want2b

It has the US in 14th position with a total score of 1489, and the UK in 20th with a total of 1500

I can only guess that they've made an error or that the different subjects are weighted differently.

I think what is more important is that we move back to a system where GCSEs, or O levels, or whatever you want to call them, especially in the science subjects, are actually marked by someone who is a specialist in that particular subject so that kids who actually understand a subject can pick up marks even if they don't use, "key words" in the appointed places. In this way these kids stand a chance of actually getting a halfway decent grade instead of failing whilst kids who don't have a real understanding but just have super memories can come away with As by regurgitating said, "key words" like parrots having their papers marked by non-specialists with a, "key word" check list! Maybe then our universities will have less to complain about first years not being equipped for undergraduate work.

Yes, I have a bright scientist who, being dislexic, has trouble recalling, "key words" and poor memory skills generally but, according to her teachers, has a better understanding of Biology and Chemistry than most of her class and can talk on any subject in the curriculum in real depth until the cows come home!

Rant over.

And you can take different subjects at different levels...

Looking at the table as opposed to the graphic, the US is actually 26th.

The placings of the countries above the UK don't come as any surprise tbh - China, Sinapore, Finland, the Netherlands...

I think the remarks on vocational/apprenticeship routes after early school leaving are misty eyed to the point where reality is being obscured. A far better idea is to provide the sort of third level education where people can get certification, diplomas, or degrees and a training mixed with practical experience that is quantifiable and therefore portable abroad. The old Irish regional techs did this, and continue to do it though they are Institutes of Technology now.

I have marked exam papers, and everyone in my team was a trained Science teacher. You have to mark to a mark scheme even if you know what you are talking about, for consistency and to prevent appeals. In fact, there has been a real move towards questions that test understanding rather than rote learning of facts. Of course, Michael Gove, who is no scientist, actually wants to move back to the rote learning, and has said that Science is a set of facts to be learned.

Frantic is absolutely right and she put it v. well. Don't think I can add anything to that, except to say that teachers should be experts too, so they can deal with the awkward questions and accommodate forays into the wider intellectual sphere away from what's on the blessed syllabus. Whenever I asked a question the textbook didn't give me the answer to, I was fobbed off, most often with "you don't need to know that until a few years later" or "you don't need to know that" full stop. And they were definitely relevant to the subject! Instead of history lessons, we have History lessons- a little subsect, where even if you knew everything about Gorby's fall from power in 1991, you couldn't answer a Q on it unless you'd had a long hard look at the mark scheme beforehand. And had a teacher well versed in examiner-speak explain it all to you. It's a joke. Not one I much enjoyed being played out....

Science is a set of facts to be learned

Did he actually say that? He gets worse every single day. WTAF is he doing there? Surely not even his own party could possibly like him much?

Is it because he's a grammar school boy and Cameron et al think that means he'll keep it real or something?

"I suggest some posters take a look online at available past papers and see how they do themselves before making comments about the difficultly of GCSEs." *BringBack1996

Agreed

I think it was last year (or year before) when The Times had a feature on GCSEs and looked at whether the standard had changed by examining the most recent paper, a paper from 10 years ago and then a paper from 20 years ago (last year of O levels or when GCSEs were introduced?) in three subjects.

One of these subjects was Maths. I thought the paper from 20 years ago was about as hard as my O-level (taken in 1978); the paper from 10 years ago was much easier; but the most recent paper definitely looked as hard as the one 20 years ago and actually I struggled on some questions! [I got As at O and A level in Maths and still consider myself pretty competent at it]

Also as the parent of a Y11 who has just finished GCSEs I feel it is a shame that they are going to be seeing lots of discussions like these where people dismiss their achievments.

Being someone who currently studies the curriculum, I don't see how it could be much different and link subjects together anymore than it does? In history we've studied Britain from 1900-1928, Russia from 1905-1938 and International Relations from 1932-1969, with each topic leading to the next. Geography fits in with the sciences and we do have a very wide maths curriculum in that we do things that will be useful in later life (e.g. statistics, averages and things like that) as well as harder stuff like geometry and trigonometry. The only subject I haven't enjoyed is English as we are taught Of Mice and Men which has been on the curriculum since my mum studied it in the 70s. To be honest I think some of the comments on here are quite ignorant - no school is going to gardening or make us learn poems by heart, teachers have more important things to do such as teaching things that are relevant to our futures.

It was ever thus though. I practised past papers endlessly before my O levels. And in fact you could get a decent run of past papers back then, and even question spot, as the cycling of questions was very predictable.

Now specifications change every year, and we go into the exams much less confident than ever before about what is actually being asked for.

When we teach students to write a structured answer, what we are doing is teaching them to present a coherent, evidenced, referenced argument. I think that's actually a reasonable thing to do. Rather than "just" teaching to the test.

I heard him on the radio in the car on the way to work. I shouted.

Earlier I picked up a prospectus to the local college by accident. I thought it was for adult-ed courses but it was in fact aimed at 16-18 year olds.

The courses are pretty dire and if this college is representative nationally then we need a root & branch reform if we ever want to stand a cat in hells chance of competing in the world economy.

Virtually every course offered was for subjects like hairdressing, dance, childcare, construction, beauty therapy etc. etc. If they were a small part of the courses offered then fair enough. But it seems that courses like computing, engineering and business courses were just a small minority. Almost like "Look we do all these wonderful course....and computing and a couple of business courses if you're a geek"

For me I'm glad it seems the lib dems are going to oppose it. We don't need to scrap GCSE's just mark them harder and scrap the soft courses. Make our education system meet the needs of business. Not the needs of politics.

My problem isn't so much that GCSEs are too easy, although obviously that's part of it, but that they are extremely narrow and prescriptive, and that students gearing up to the peak of their intellectual ability are being made to waste two years cramming for these exams which could be so much more. There are some very bright people who just cannot enter into the mindset that GCSEs require. I wouldn't say I'm so bright as those sorts of people but I was the same in that I just didn't get it, a lot of the time, with Arts subjects.

There are some people who got an A in English who hate reading, don't want to discuss books but were spoon fed all the way and got the hang of the essay writing style, so they did well. Somehow I got an A in English Lit and blagged my way through everything, did the minimum of work, got hauled into the deputy head's office to redo my crap coursework, which IIRC in its original state was two sides of scrappy A4 on Romeo and Juliet, not dramatically improved upon by the deadline. I was completely expecting a C or so- even at the time I thought how ridiculous it was. This was an Ofsted "Outstanding" school which has the best state GCSE results in the city. You can dismiss my "achievements" all you want, for me, I feel pretty ashamed of them....

I wouldn't say I'd be the ignorant one if you can't see the value in learning poetry by heart :) not everything has to serve an immediate purpose! where's learning for learning's sake....growing through the acquiring of knowledge...really enjoying the book, instead of shooting through it and being handed a printout of points to bring up in the exam, no other discussion entered into (true story)...

I took O level chemistry in 1984 under the JMB board and that year we had an new experimental paper called the 16+. Hated it with a passionate very different from the Old Olevels papers we practised on. The exam asked very brief one line questions about every single area covered in the 2 years. We hated it because you couldn't show your breadth of knowledge and understanding of a particular area and you couldn't spot questions either as in the old style Olevels. I suspect they were the precursor of GCSEs. Also out of a class of 30 only 1 person got an A grade.

The thing is though we get taught other things that aren't in the curriculum that are useful, such as other aspects of human biology that help with us understanding what's on the curriculum. However for my latin GCSE I've have to learn the Aeneid and that aspect of the course has been useless, I haven't gained from it at all and even though I had the exam yesterday I'm already forgetting parts of it.

When you state a goal of expecting O-level students to do calculus, this means you are going to have to reboot the maths curriculum all the way back to where students start at age 4. I wonder how this is going to be achieved.

I also wonder, since the government is so keen on following the Finnish example, if children will be able to start school at a later age, if students will enjoy a basic, nine year education that is free from selecting, tracking and streaming, if private education will be abolished...