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.

JoanofArgos - indeed, what sort of narrow minded Education Secretary would try to encourage schools/pupils to get a balanced education under their belt!

I think my son will end up fairly well rounded with the subjects above. He's the youngest of 6 and the older DC managed very well with similar choices. I think one did art instead of music, but only 2 did history/geography.

I think it's great - it exposes how badly Labour's education policy failed. I've lost count of the number of employers I've spoken to saying that current school leavers are almost unemployable.

I think the retrospective thing is obviously politically motivated, but it might at least make the more militant and complacent members of the NUT have to face up to the fact that there is a problem, that there is such a thing as bad teaching, and get them to stop failing those children who are falling foul of the current system.

My eldest 3 DC are 25-30 now so they are the Thatcher/Major educated generation. I can assure you education standards were not too great then either!

My dd, who is now in her 1st year at uni, was one of the few pupils in her year taking French GCSE in Yr 11 as most of her year had taken the exam in Yr 9 -she joined the school in Yr10. This enabled them to have a wider set of options. The school has now become a language college so they all have to take a language at GCSE.

She was advised to do drama rather than Geography but I am sure that her school will now insist on a humanitiy.

Her school got 69% A - C and 36% Ebac. Another local school which has concentrated on vocational subjects got 62% A - C but went down to 15% in Ebac. It will be interesting to see how the other school will change their curriculem.

I'm absolutely delighted with the information.
DDs school is a comp and got 33% in the Ebacc.
For them to have got over a third of their pupils through the full set of academic GCSE's is a fantastic achievement IMHO.

My ds' school is a high achieving school but because they have Humanities as a compulsory GCSE with History & English as options they will be in a certain amount of trouble when the results come out.

Thanks Mrs Tweedy - extremely interesting - first I've heard of this - what a great idea. So at last ther is a sensible baseline marker for parents to make meaningful comparisons

Completely agree with PanicMode!

The dumbing down of state education has been going on for rather longer than 13 years, unfortunately, although the decline did seem to gather greater momentum under Labour.

The emphasis has been all on passing tests and exams which are then held up as a measure of sucess, and young people are emerging into their adult lives with plenty of qualifications, but lacking a true education.

MrsTweedy, like you, I did OLevels - although was the last year to do them , and like you I am also a resident of RUT. In 'my day' we were pretty much 'forced' to do mostly Bac subjects and then picked the others from our Options. This stood me in good stead in later life and whilst it is brilliant that there are so many other areas to excel in now - especially for less academic pupils - I still believe a good backbone of EBac subjects will serve you well.

I am not surprised to see the 'truth' unravelled at all - especially at Christ's School. A friend of mine recently visited the school (Grange Hill it was in my day ) and was reasonably impressed until she drilled down into the subject passes and it was all Media Studies and Graphic Design IFKWIM.

There is a place for all of these and if you have a talent and a view for what you want to do in life, great. But I don't think many 14 year olds have a clue about what they really want to do, so being pushed towards these subjects in order to get them to 'pass something' is doing them a great dis-service. These are supporting subjects and should be secondary to BACS.

So, if it means, curriculums get changed to ensure higher scores in core subjects, then good.

I think it's fab this is putting foreign languages back in the centre of things

I worked in a school that introduced a coursework based vocational qualification that was worth 4 GCSE A-C passes. The kids got a huge amount of help with the coursework which meant that the bulk of them passed it obscuring the fact that the bulk of the kids were barely scraping a single 'real' a-c gcse.
After working at this school for a while I went to work for a company developing e-learning products for this course (called DIDA) and was amazed by the number of schools doing this, it was a major money spinner for the exam boards and software developers because it meant the schools could buy their stats.
There were other tricks like this going on that made the old stats meaningless, the new English Baccalaureate system will finally bring these deceptive and wide-spread practices to an end.

This would explain why my son's (indep) school has just announced that RS is no longer a compulsory GCSE option, and that either geography or history is (he was delighted with the news!).At least one MFL and 3 sciences (or dual award)already compulsory.

Hmm, this is really interesting. The school the DDs will go to, which has a good reputation locally, has 66% A-C incl Eng & Maths, but only 19% on Eng Bacc.

When I was at school, the options were structured in such a way that you would have to work pretty hard to avoid selecting an Eng Bacc range of subjects. I didn't realise it had changed so much in 25 years.

This is really interesting to me. The (very comprehensive) school I teach at has been seriously under the cosh from the LEA for years because our exam grades were not in line with the County average. We do not offer NVQs or other qualifications worth 4 GCSEs; just a fairly traditional well-rounded curriculum with a Route to Worki option for the least academic. UNder this marker, we have suddenly shot up to in the top 5 or 6 in the LEA. A huge relief really.

The school I teach have 58% 5A*-Cs, but only 11% on the EBAC, that's despite the pupils doing more GCSEs than they know what to do with (17 or 18 in some cases).

It's shocking really. But hardly any take a language, and barely half of them take either history or geography.

I think it's a bit unfair to judge schools on this straight away without giving them time to adjust. I did my GCSEs last year and got As or A*s in 13 subjects. I wouldn't have the English Baccalaureate though, simply because I chose Religious Studies instead of Geography or History. Some people I know chose two languages in lieu of Geography/history too. WHile I agree it's important that people do well-balanced subject combos, it isn't necessarily vocational 'soft' subjects that are skewing these results.

I'm really glad this will hopefully mean better MFL teaching and more concentration on them. The way MFLs are taught here, particularly at GCSE, it atrocious IMO. Although I suppose it could go the other way, and the situation could get worse. Assuming it's even possible to make GCSE languages any more pointlessly taught.

Cannot believe this, have long suspected DS's school to be playing the system in order to miraculously improve their GCSE results (from 38% A-C's last year to 56% this year) and judging by their 1% Ebac result I think I was right to do so. Only ray of hope is that DS only yr8 so hopefully will give them much needed kick before DS starts GCSE's.

Yes, I suppose it's impossible to know how many students might have had 4 out of 5 - i.e Eng, Maths, Science + EITHER a MFL or a humanity.

When I was at school, English, Maths and Science were compulsory and you could choose any other subjects. It didn't have to be History or geography-some people did both. As long as you had enough GCSE's. I think that this worked well for and my friends. But we HAD to choose 9 subjects. That way we'd spent 2 years learning a broad range, and could pick and choose what we liked and understood to go further, either in education, or to work.

I'm not a fan of RE in school! Sorry! It was always a 'doss' lesson where I came from!

The reason some of the better private schools appear to have done badly is that some of their IGCSEs are not yet included in some subjects. My children's schools now do IGCSE for English, French, Maths and science.

So use these tables with caution where private schools are concerned. iGCSE is considered more rigorous than GCSE, no course work and modules, for instance.

Sorry, previous message was in response to a comment I misread!

Firstly I am delighted that MFL is effectively back into the national curriculum, but overall I think the eBacc will reduce choice for students over the next 5 years - schools are facing two major pressures at the moment, one to raise their ebacc and league table scores and the other is to reduce costs. Whatever was said in the budget about no reduction in education budgets, in real terms many schools are facing a 5-10% budget cut in the next two years. One of the areas where they can reduce costs is in examination fees - I think the focus on ebacc will lead to a narrowing of options available to candidates so they concentrate on those that will count towards ebacc. I really think the days of candidates taking 16/17 GCSEs/equivalents are going to be over, once the budget trimming starts.

Abr1de please could you show some data where it proves that IGCSEs are more rigorous than GCSE - this is a marketing message touted by the examination boards running them, which independent schools have latched onto - but is not borne out by any independent research I have seen so far.

EdgarAleNpie bell curves are not used when awarding examination grades - it is based on carrying forward standards from one year to the next, and is not that the top 10% get A, next 10% get B etc so your suopposition that because more candidates from independent/private schools take a subject it is harder to get an A in it is not correct.

Yawl should come over to Ireland and do the Leaving Cert.

I've got to admit that when I was looking at secondary schools I didn't look at the league tables data but at schools' individual GCSE data to see what sort of subjects were taken and grades. It's about the only thing where Michael Gove and I probably see eye to eye

But having said that, I just think that's only one measure to judge a school by

What's interesting is that the figures for our LA workk out roughly like this:

• v academic private day schools wholly doing GCSEs (not IGCSEs)- approx 80-85% eng bacc

• handful of partially selective grammar-type schools - approx 60-65%

• v good local comps - 40-50%

So that goes to show that even in these more academic environments, not all pupils necessarily take the eng bacc subjects