The English Baccalaureate has really affected the League tables...

[MrsTweedy]

Is anyone else finding this fascinating? I am really surprised at how few pupils at well-regarded schools in my area have done what I would consider core subjects eg
Richmond Upon Thames

The Ebacc is basically English, Maths, a science, a language & history or geography with A*-C passes. These were compulsory in my day (okay I am ancient and did O Levels). It just shows how the curriculum has changed and how schools have been slanting it recently to improve their league standings on the previous benchmark.

I suppose it depends on which criteria you use to rate them ie either the EBacc or just 5 A-C GCSEs at the end of the day but it is certainly a surprising result in some cases.

Probably the history and geography edam my DCs school have 60% with a MFL above a C but only scored 37% in the ebacc so the kids must be choosing stuff other than history or geography.

well, by the time ds is a teenager, he will be VERY disappointed if he thinks he ain't doing at least history or geography, if not both. I am quite prepared to be a very stern mother indeed over that one. If he has any spare choices after doing eight traditional academic GSCEs, fine, he can do something more creative or practical as well. But not instead of.

Xenia - what a ridiculous requirement an employer might want - that their employee "can get by in France"!
It's laughable. Of all the countries in all the world, why is that language looked on more favourably by you? It might be close geographically to many of us, Ireland is closer. Wouldn't it be better if all our surly teenagers learnt Gaelic instead? Or Icelandic? Or perhaps Urdu or Chinese or Pujabi might be a better language for the businesses of tomorrow.

We don't all want to spend our holidays in the Loire Valley.

Yes, the languages bit is what really interests me. I have seen no definitive list of which languages 'count' and which don't. I'm not sure if Chinese and Japanese would go the way of Urdu, or whether they'd count as they are modern languages and there are fewer native speakers to skew the figures which I fear is the real reason why Urdu, Hindi etc are not going to count. It's a shame as a lot of second generation pupils would have to work really hard to get a full GCSE in their 'native' language as they have generally (and this is a huge generalisation I know!) been brought up speaking and listening to the language but not necessarily writing it down or reading much in it.

I think Chinese would be popular - I used to work in a languages college and it was very popular there (although the results were dire). In my current school we've just introduced it and have a first cohort of about 18 13 year olds.

Another real worry is that schools wanting to market themseleves on EBAC results will reintroduce a compulsory modern language at KS4 and the teachers available will not necessarily be the best. I know several ex-MFL teachers who have gone into other careers since KS4 languages were made non-compulsory and I doubt that many would be eager to get back into it with policy changing so rapidly. We'd end up with a lot of teachers from overseas (which can bring problems) and teachers of other subjects being offered incentives to retrain in MFL.

And how can this be running alongside the policy of setting up large numbers of new academies, which are free to choose their own curriculum? It's Model T Ford all over again!!

Some schools offer geology as a humanity option as well as RE; that probably accounts from some of the odd scores.

xenia you do talk crap

my state school kids do MFL and latin

It makes you wonder if perhaps teachers are motivated by the fact that we all seem to move to the Loire or Dordogne for August.

I know we have not made up the rules but I wonder if we overestimate the usefulness of French.

I wouldn't want my state school educated ds to do Latin

Yes - Michael Gove, The Daily Mail, certain MNers and a few others have over estimated the importance of French.

@duchess it's not run by evangelists. It's a straight forward CofE school with very little religious impact. In Exeter, prioritising church attendance over proximity (or anything else) actually skews the roll away from the posher end. As you would know, if you lived in Exeter (you live outside, right?) and actually had anything to do with St. Peters.

Of the children I know well who attend St Peters (who were at primary school with my DD1) there are representatives from pretty much all points on the academic scale including kids with severe special needs. What you don't get at St Peters is anyone who can afford to go to one of the big 3 private schools and anyone who could get into Colyton or Torquay.

I just noticed that Dh's cousin's children's school I mentioned yesterday scores 6% in the new league tables, which is pretty piss-poor for the only school in the area (ie should have the full range of ability) but probably just demonstrates their commitment to eradicating languages from their curriculum.

Some schools offer geology as a humanity? That's even more bizarre than regarding Latin as a modern language. Last time I checked, geology was definitely a science. They do it at Imperial and everything... (Was offered as a fourth science at my own school when I was young.)

i wonder how these measures will impact on specialist schools

If its a really specialist school then you should only be sending your kid there if they have an obvious early talent and desire to follow that line. So you wouldn't care much about the EBacc metric if they could show you their GCSE and A level results with stunning results in a set of languages (in the case cited).

For the vast majority of kids, specialist schools are a bad idea and encouraging a decent spread at GCSE is a good thing.

These statistics are all blunt tools, you really have to get the full raw GCSE results and then consider them in the light of the intake. Maybe my DH is the only person in the world who enjoys rebasing data enough to have done that

Partial - I was taught by native speaker overseas trained teachers of French and German. They were outstanding teachers and we should encourage it more. I don't necessarily see the problem with OTTs as long as they meet the requirements for QTS (so are qualified in their country) and have a decent command of English, as one would expect anyone working in the UK to have really. The GCSE and A-level syllabi aren't that hard to get your head around and the textbooks are very straightforward for GCSE so not having trained to teach under the current system (which will change every few years anyway) isn't a huge disadvantage.

A couple of my current students want to teach French as a foreign language in schools abroad - I've told them to take as many FLE classes as they can in addition to their English degree.

Thanks Usual suspect. Btec music doesn't sound like an easiy option to me, just more practical.
I suspect DD would much prefer it but her school does separate music & drama GCSEs or Btec performing arts.
She will be very bored with the music GCSE theory side as is already doing near AS level equivalent in musicianship at her w/e music school.

The problem with MFL is not that it is not useful (maybe not always for work but can be great in everyday life and is quite "brain stretching"), but that three years in secondary school is not a good foundation. If children were taught more intensively when much younger, that would be better. I would rather my dc did a language for lots of time in primary school, than did science or ICT, or technology, all of which can come later IMO.

lovelyopaque - you are so right about MFL. Children can make massive headway with languages when they are very small (pre-literate) whereas progress with science is painfully limited at a young age. I am very keen on DCs being required to learn skills at age-appropriate times for the best return on investment.

edam - if you compare curricula from around the world, you will find that a topic that is classed as biology in one country will be classed as chemistry in another; something classed as geography in one country as history in another; etc. These things are open to interpretation. There is no international body that lays down the content or classification of subjects.

yes, I'm sure different countries and syllabuses classify things differently. But calling Latin a modern language or geology an arts subject is going too far. Both are simply untrue. It is a fact that Latin is an ancient language and geology is a science. Unless, I guess, you teach people to write poems about rocks and draw pretty pictures. But that wouldn't be geology.

I must tell my friend, who is a fairly eminent professor of geochemistry at Imperial and used to be head of the British Antarctic Survey, that she's not a scientist and is just imagining all that time she and her students in the lab.

The rest of the world does NOT speak English, people, no matter what you may believe! Most of the world speaks pidgin English. That is not the same thing as having a lingua franca.

Languages aer hard. YOu can't fudge them and waffle. You have to sit there and learn your voc off by heart unless you've a parent who spoke to you in that language from birth. So weaker and lazier candidates avoid them. It also used to be compulsory to have a laugage for university. Employers know they are hard GCSEs so they prefer candidates with them. Everyoen knows this but there has been far too much of a let us all do our basket weaving GCSrs because it's dead easy, let's not over strain children with hard work (in the softer schools).

Childewn are capable of very much and it's a good thing if this new very obvious requirement which every decent parent who knows anything about university and employers already ensures their chidlren does and most of the better private school insist on (the 8 core traditional GCSE subjects) is publicsed a bit better. Were there so many parents living in cloud cuckoo land over this?

I think this is a bit like the league tables. 25 years ago when I was choosing private schools for teh chidlren I knew which were good schools and which weren't.There were no state school league tables and some parents thought their local comp was great when it wasn't. They had no parent power as they had no information.

Now we have this. For 25 years I and many others have known you need 8 traditional GCSEs to get a broad accepted education in some context (not if you want to work in the local rubbish tip etc of course). I don't need this new set of tables to tell me this but it seems loads of parents just had no idea that some GCSes are regarded as better than others and that an employer might think a child at 15 or 16 with 8 broad GCSEs spanning English, maths, a science, a language etc is more clever than one who has even 14 GCSEs in marginal subjects and few of the main ones. It's parent power and very clever that it was sprung on them too even if it does unfairly exclude even the harder iGCSEs

Not sure I'd find basket-weaving all that easy myself.

I so wish I could do joinery- would love to be able to build furniture. Suspect I would not have many fingers left if I did take up though.

My daughter is studying Latin at 10, the idea being that it's a good language to introduce children to, it's relatively easy I'm told and it's good for them to gain confidence with. Which why I am astonished that the grammar school offers it as a language choice, i'm torn between encouraging her to take it as she has a 2 year head start v's wanting her to study something more challenging that might be useful.

mamatomany - my son hated latin with a passion and dropped it as soon as he could. he found french and spanish much easier and got 'a's at gcse.