What are peoples thoughts on the English Baccalaureate ??

[TheOriginalNutcracker]

I know what I think, but i'm wondering if i'm alone in my thoughts.

So, any opinions ?

Chloe are you Sarah Vine? Can't imagine anyone else would have such charming faith in the man when he's clearly a buffoon.

OK, joking aside, yes, the system needs shaking up. My main issue with Gove's "improvements" is the lack if solid information about them. How in earth is ANYONE to make an informed decision when so few details have been released. No exam board has been created, no spec has bed released. You have no idea, Chloe, whether Austen and Dickens are there, because no syllabus has been written. Your assertions that it WILL be better are no more based on evidence than my feeling that it's a crock of shite. Until I see actual details, I will continue to assume that Gove is a teacher-hating tosser, with no idea what actually goes on in a state school.

When did Mr Dickens & Ms Austin(sic) leave the building?

I've been using Oliver Twist with bottom set year 9 today - we're comparing it to a more modern novel on young homelessness, from which it's to be hoped they'll glean a few practical pointers if the Tories get back in in 2015.

I used Bleak House in my after school GCSE lesson on descriptive writing, & I'm treating myself & year 7 to A Christmas Carol next month.

Year 9 (top set this time) also study Northanger Abbey as a gothic pastiche. Comes in handy when we do Henry James alongside Susan Hill in year 10.

& if you have a look at the level descriptors for KS3 English, you'll see for yourself the emphasis on 'Insisting children write coherently and grammatically with correct spelling'.

Honestly, the NC & exam specifications are freely available online. No excuse for this level of ignorance, chloe74 - although your own education may not have been all that if you were born in '74, to be fair. I attended grammar school in the '80s & the comprehensive I teach in now is quite a bit more exacting in its standards.

My evidence that the exam will be more rigorous comes for the mouth of the Secretary of State for Education. I am pretty sure he didn't say he was going to create an easier exam that more people will be able to pass. And did say "The new EBCs will be robust, rigorous and relevant - and will match exams in the world's best education systems." Where is your evidence he is lying?

I am also pretty sure that classical physical has relevance to every person and profession in the country. Certainly its an important stepping stone to be learnt before moving to the more detailed area of subatomic particles. I think you trying unsuccessfully to be facetious.

Chloe, you seem to be mistaking a change in the curriculum (which teachers deal with what seems like every year and really isn't an issue) with valid concerns about a complete scrapping of the current exam system (which is being replaced by something as yet unknown but with vague messages about it being simultaneously more rigourous and yet also so broad that 80% of children will be expected to sit exactly the same exam) and about which many professionals (not just teachers, by the way) have expressed deep concerns.

Typo: I am also pretty sure that classical physics has relevance to every person and profession in the country.

chloe74
you do not seem to understand how politics works.
Cameroon could have a reshuffle next week and all of a sudden Gove could be the worlds expert on Foreign affairs
and Ian Duncan Smith could be in charge of education.

Polticians generally know bugger all about anything except looking after themselves.
Civil servants and advisers do all the real work.

I teach Newton's Laws of Motion at maths A-level. I can't say that my students are suddenly transformed into model citizens once they have mastered them.

Here's an interesting fact, and I say fact, not opinion! Every 10 years, the criteria for IQ tests have to be shifted upwards because children are getting smarter. To be average now, a child has to have 15 more points than a child in 1950 did. A child who passed the 11+ in 1960 would now be deemed to be below average and would not get a place. This has been part of a longitudinal study and is accepted by OECD and the IoE. This myth that education is getting worse, is just that, a myth. What has shifted is the nature of the work that the majority do - when 85% of people left school at 14 or 16 with no O levels, they were likely to walk into manual labour jobs. Being able to read, write or add up was good but wasn't really necessary so employers didn't need to intervene. This fiction that suddenly no-one can communicate is just that - fiction. More children are literate now that at any other time in our history.

80% of people nationally think that our schools are bad but only 15% of parents think their child's school is not good. There is a huge difference between our perception and our experience. But one thing is sure, the more we attack our teachers and undermine the achievements of our young, the more resentment we will breed. Fewer high quality graduates will be attracted to the profession and those who can will leave. We need to think very carefully about what kind of education system we create when we turn on each other and on the people we charge to care for and educate our children.

This is where teachers ?expertise? falls down and they prove their ignorance. Your experience is only based on the children in your classes. What is needed is an understanding of the needs of millions of children. The two are very different. Just like there is a difference in comparing a page in a book and studying the whole book. Some schools obviously still use these authors but over the whole county many schools don't ?study? the pre-20th century classics, hence the need to reintroduce them.

I cant find any examples of Michael Gove being buffoon like. Plenty for real idiots like Prescott, Brown and Balls but certainly not for Gove. So I can only assume you are just expressing an ignorant political prejudice that has been indoctrinated into you from birth.

ET ? Which came first the chicken or the egg? If all the specs had been created before consultation then teachers would be up in arms for not being consulted first. The fact that he is consulting first so he can use the information in creating the system is to his credit. You cant have it both ways!

Until Gove messes up I will continue to believe that he is an honest man making the system better.

I was watching an episode of Yes Prime Minister last night. They were talking about how young people couldn't 'read, write or add up'. Yes Prime Minister was shot in 1986, the first sitting of GCSEs wasn't till 1988. Apparently the old system that everyone harks back to wasn't considered that great either.

Chloe, your faith in politicians is sweet. Misguided, but really quite charming. Here's something Gove has done to mess up- overspent on the academies programme to the tune of £££££££ meaning that education budgets will have to be slashed AGAIN. And that's just this week.

Oh, and the "expertise" you deride is, I imagine, a whole lot more experience than YOU have. Unless you've examined the set texts in all English schools, in which case, I apologise

What about his disastrous Free Schools policy that has seen thousands spent on schools that have never opened, or have opened only to be mostly empty seeing as they've opened in areas that didn't need them?

chloe, I'm not just a teacher. I'm a senior examiner and moderator for the biggest exam board in the country. Therefore my "expertise" isn't confined to schools I have worked in. I see thousands of exam papers and controlled assessments every year from students all over the country. All of them, without exception, have studied academic texts, like those in my post above. I suggest you familiarise yourself with the content of the GCSE specifications in particular. You can find them online, together with exemplar exam material. I tell you unequivocally that what my students have to do now to get an A* (and therefore what all students have to do as these are national exams) is harder than the exams of 20 years ago. I have compared them, and believe me it is so.

Gove's suggestion that taxpayers should buy a new yacht for the Queen?

The stupid King James Bible project, foreward written by M Gove?

His behaviour re Leveson?

Or idiotic assertion that all schools can be above average merely by trying a bit harder?

I remember my mum (who was a well-respected English teacher) once saying to me that the problem with teaching is that everyone is an expert as everyone has been to school.

(A former pupil, who had just found me via fb after googling her and finding out she'd died recently said, "A teacher affects eternity, for they can never tell where their influence ends! And this was true of her." )

prettybird that is SO true.
Its one of the reasons DH decided not to stay in teaching - he does not have to deal with parents in his current work, just kids and their teachers :-)

Most really good physicists know that classical Newtonian physics has real limitations.

It's like anything really - if you start trying to sound like an expert about things you know nothing about then you make yourself look like an iodiot.

Chloe 74.

I spent the day with Dylan Wiliam, the man Michael Gove hired to advise on the overhaul of the curriculum. I'm not sure if you know who he is, but he considered to be the leading expert in the world on pupil assessment. This is what he had to say.

1 That all the evidence from over 3000 international studies suggests that Michael Gove's tinkering with the curriculum will make no difference to standards whatsoever.

1. That having spent a fortune on a consultation process with an expert panel, charged with looking at the international evidence over a two year period, when they finally published their advice, he ignored every single bit of it.

These two points suggest that Michael Gove is a buffoon.

In agreement with lurcherlover. I'm also an examiner.

chloe74's statements like: 'Some schools obviously still use these authors but over the whole county many schools don't ?study? the pre-20th century classics, hence the need to reintroduce them' are simply untrue, as a very cursory look at the specifications would show.

I fell over our Gove bible the other day - HT has deployed it as a wedge for his office door.

squeezedatbothends, I don't believe that average intelligence has increased dramatically. What has got better is children's exam technique and short term recall.

However most children would struggle with an O-level or a CSE paper from the 1970s. In the 1950s the expectations for O-level were far tougher. Children had to do calculus in maths and Newton's laws of motion were in a 1950s physics O-level. In the past an exam paper was literally a piece of paper rather than a 23 page book. Children were forced to write in sentences and make their mathematical workings clear enough to be followed an examiner.

I wouldn't mind betting that a 2012 a-level biology student would fail an o-level paper. They would struggle to explain the structure of a kidney with a diagram because they cannot recall facts.

IQ tests are an appalling measure anyway, because every single one of them has significant racial bias - Europeans score low in Indian tests and vice versa.

It is not really relevant to compare past and present exams.

Lamarckism has been discredited
but epigenetics has appeared from nowhere

climate change / the ozone hole - CFCs are history now

the speed of technological change is increasing exponentially - our children will most likely have jobs that did not exist when we were children

and the problem with the Idiot Gove is that he fervently believes (and its a religious rather than a reasoned viewpoint) that every child should sit exams like the ones he sat that let him get where he is today.
He has no concept that their time has passed and they were never suitable for all people.

The Ebacc was a political move
the EBC needs to be scrapped ASAP - as the changes already in train on GCSEs (the results of which will appear in August 2015 and not before)
will have much of the desired effect without the insanity of binning so much good practice.

Reallytired. You must be.

This isn't an argument but a fact published by the organisation that sets IQ tests - the IQ point average has risen by 15 points. That is a simple fact - not a question of belief. Why this has happened, we don't know.

Now where is your published evidence that pupils would struggle with a paper from the 1970s? Your points about content are irrelevant - of course anyone would struggle to pass a test containing information they had never been taught. And don't forget that only 15% of the population in 1950 actually sat an O level and many of them didn't pass.

If I was presented with a 2012 GCSE Core Science paper when I was 16 I would have failed it.

I knew nothing about Wegener's theory, why it was not taken seriously nor the evidence that now supports it. I also knew nothing about the formation of the earth's atmosphere (nor the age of the earth).

At A level I did not study the greenhouse effect of gases caused by absorption of IR radiation. Nor did I study NMR, IR, GC or the effect of CFCs on ozone.

The current curriculum is relevant.

Following changes to the GCSE science curriculum in 2011, it is also a lot more rigorously tested (a fact that is overlooked by all politicians).

radical
You and I must be the same age. Wegener was heresy during my O level. Becoming proven during my A level and the paradigm by my degree (John Small, Study of Landforms was one of my lecturers!)

And yes, what DD in year 10 and DS in Year 8 are doing is radically different than what went on three years ago.
Friends who teach at PSC sixth form college are already being geared up for the new approach of their incoming students