Gove does it again!

[longfingernails]

An end to dumbed down GCSEs, and a return to the O-Level!

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

He truly is a simply unbelievable reformer. It is so refreshing to have someone who really cares about education, putting pupils first, and not caring about whether idiot teaching unions bleat.

No doubt we will have Christine Blower ineffectually defending the ludicrous notion that standards in British secondary education have "improved" year on year on year despite international evidence. Watching the militant unions get their comeuppance - yet again! - is a delightful little bonus...

Googling around I found this... there are some tables you can click on to open with detailed results but I haven't studied it too closely atm.

oh that link I posted, scroll down to table 11 and 12. I think they're what you were looking for Claig

Of course, that is just for one year, 1982

and it's only just for maths....

I agree that there should not be two different exams. I think teh solution is just to make the exam harder and more rigorous, which may increase the percentage that gets less than grade C. I don't agree with Lord Adonis's seeming emphasis on avoiding failure, I think we have to reward success and increase standards, but this could be done using the current system.

There was someone else debating with Lord Adonis who said that pupils should have a choice about which route or option to go down in order to be able to differentiate higher achievers. I think that is wrong too.

There should be one exam taken by all children and it should be rigorous. To avoid the stigma of failure, children who don't achieve grade C could be awarded some other type of school leaving certificate, which would be a pass, but at a lower level than a GCSE.

EdgarAllenPimms

CDT??

HE??

Ok, so I am Old :)

EdgarAllenPimms

I am sorry but being a tech teacher etc.

Great link, thanks. It looks like something like twice as many entrants got less than C compared to those who got above C in those days. That is a huge difference in standards by the look of it.

There was also a Tory Education Select Committee MP on Channel 4 News and he said he wasn't told about this and thought it was unhelpful and divisive. so I think that headfairy is right and this is a total non-starter just done to deflect attention from other issues.

be wary of bald statistics Claig though, they don't tell you the whole story at all.

You're right. I learned that through reading catastrophic climate change statistics and New Labour economic forecasts.

MPs who get pensions accrued at 1/40th - far better than other public sector workers, incl doctors, can therefore accrue a pension worth half their £65K salary in only 20 years. £32.5K pension for only 20 years work - and £12K for getting chucked out of office - and lump sum.

And MPs have the gall to complain doctors' pensions are too large...

No wonder they don't want too much discussion on this.

oh yeah, cos George has got his economic predictions so right

www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2143896/MPs-stall-bid-pension-gold-plated-perk.html

'What?s more, while raising the retirement age for 2.6 million of the country?s working women by up to two years, MPs have still not accepted proposals made last summer for their pension age to rise from 65 to 68.'

Newsnight says that the Daily Mail called Gove the Cabinet's one true Tory. Gove is going to be the most popular Tory out there. With Gove, the Tories are back! He could single-handedly run every department. He is a modern marvel, a champion of Conservative values.

sorry, champion of Conservative core values

Len McCluskey is very good on Question Time. He is the best union boss I have ever heard, as good as Bob Crowe, and much better than Sowotka and Tony Woodley, the ones they usually invite on.

I'd love to see the reintroduction of Grammar schools. At least during that period there were a number of working class kids getting jobs that usually went to the kids of privately educated tories.

We need to realise that some kids are more academically brilliant than others.

@headfairy 'I know there are programmes that can detect work lifted directly from websites, but how many schools use them?'

That'd be google, then. Works fine. Only time I've ever had a plagiarised controlled assessment handed in (kid had cut & pasted an essay together, smuggled it in, & sat in CA conditions quietly copying it out from a print out on his lap), his mum tried to ask me if I'd checked it via 'PROPER plagiarism detecting software'.

She went rather quiet after I posted her a copy of her ds's work along with the links where she could find each paragraph.

Old style coursework, absolutely rampant plagiarism. The 'A* essay my girlfriend's sister's clever mate submitted four years ago' was a favourite technique. New controlled assessment, nope. It can only happen if a teacher fails to notice a crib sheet being used - exactly as in any other exam.

All well and good, and I wish him well. But why does that mean that other kids can't study more challenging O levels and achieve and meet their potential?

But that's ludicrous! What are you going to say - that blind pupils can't use scribes? I used to work with a person who was blind, he was very talented and had all sorts of gizmos to help him work - clearly if those were removed for a "level playing field" and he was just given a computer keyboard like the rest of us, he'd have been on the dole! But the point was what he could do - and it's the same with support for exams, surely?

oh thanks for that Raven... very interesting. I didn't realise you could search for whole chunks of text on Google and check to see if it's been c&p from an online article.

Thinking about it more, plagiarism isn't a new thing, I used to do it all the time at Uni, only copying it from books instead. I'll hold my hands up, I was lazy :o That said, when you plagiarise someone else's work it does become pretty obvious soon enough when the person ie me is unable to support their argument because it's actually someone else's argument.

loving claig. priceless.

find it difficult to understand how a return to good old days can be seen as revolutionary....