I'm just getting my head round Gove's changes to the exam system- and I am even mor horrified than I thought I would be!

[curlew]

The three things that leap out at me are 1)all year 11s have to do 8 GCSEs of which 5 have to be EBacc subjects, which will be a real struggle for many, 2) no more tiered papers, so one exam for all, so kids for whom a C is a real achievement have to sit a paper which has also to cater for the effortless A*, and 3)only the first attempt at an exam counts for the league tables. This means for a school like ours, where the vast majority of students are middle/low ability, and where we have always let many have a "practice go" early, won't be able to- because the risk to the school is too great.

I think the French are pretty good at ensuring that everyone has water, electricity, trains, roads etc! The integrated basic infrastructure is amazing. It's just not true that their products aren't compatible or user-friendly.

As I say, you need both the long slow theoretical perfectionists and the practical go-for-it approach to make the world work.

To those who say BTEC's are an 'easy option' - you're wrong. I believed that when the school pushed DD into doing Health & Social Care BTEC.

The content is FAR harder than ANY of her GCSE's, and in fact is the only subject she won't achieve a grade in at all.

As an example - her current topic is 'Barriers' - geographic barriers, physical barriers, emotional and mental barriers, financial barriers...and she has to discuss, compare and contrast these barriers, identify what they would be in a variety of different issues that people may face, and work out solutions to those barriers, how to overcome them.

This is a child with Auditory and Sensory processing disorders, moderate learning difficulties, dyslexia, Dyspraxia and blah de blah de blah.

How the FUCK is she meant to have the analytical thought processes to complete this topic?!

It really ISN'T an easy option, whatever people say. They are taught in mixed ability groups, so DD is currently working 4 grades below the next lowest pupil in the class, as DD is currently getting 'U' in every topic, and the next lowest in class is working at a 'D' grade. The A* students in other subjects are getting 'B 's or 'C' s in this BTEC. Hardly an 'easy option'

Bonsoir, I think you might have a different view of the wonders of French infrastructure if you lived in the countryside. Power outages, brown water, no public transport, terrible road surfaces, no snow ploughs and worst of all half a megabyte of broadband are all part of daily life.
I will shut up now and let the thread go back on topic.

I'm a parent of reasonably academic kids, and my problem with the new system of "First Attempt Only" is that it leads exactly to what ReallyTired dreads - endless revision and take the exam at the last possible moment so you spend a full year simply polishing and revising. That way, they make no mistakes, but all the challenge has gone. Early maths has wrongly gone as a concept.

For the kids Curlew speaks of, I think I agree: they are just going to get blown away by this tougher system and you can't help think that a CSE or BTEC might be better. For teachers it makes the whole thing more complex.

I do really fear that the new reforms aimed at increased rigour are going to demonstrate perfectly the law of unintended consequences. It just shows that you tinker with these things at your peril.

In France the DC don't get a year to revise and polish - the programme is full of new material right up to the end of the year.

"rigour"

To my knowledge gove still hasn't defined this term.

What don't you understand about the term "rigour"?

Bonsoir

I would like it defined by the minister of education.
Because there are various definitions of it and If you are going to make something more "rigorous" then what is the quantitative measure of it.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigour

rigour cannot be quantified, it is therefore perfect for those who wish to constantly change variables without true reference points

TalkinPeace

Exactly, and with out quantitative measures, you could change the pass rates after exams and tell moderators to mark harsher to bring down A/A* pass rates and claim success, but who would want to do that?

It is really interesting and worrying to see how the clock is being turned back to the old 'O' level era. What Mr Gove et al seem to forget is that huge swathes of children failed and left school with nothing is those days. That is why CSE, 16+ and then GCSE were invented if my memory serves me correctly. I agree that life is tough and children have to learn to 'suck it up' and get on with it. However, the big difference today is that there are just not the job opportunities around for youngsters with limited qualifications. I just think we have got it all wrong. We should be teaching our children how to create their own jobs - what has happened to the entrepreneurial spirit in our Brave New Education World? Is the UK destined to become a huge Heritage Theme Park with anyone who wants to create wealth restricted to a public school-educated elite or forced to go abroad and start afresh elsewhere?

I'm an English teacher. Last year was our first year doing the IGCSEs.

The literature course is all exam based and has no tiers.

Our lower ability children did amazingly well in these exams. Students barely scraping Ds and Cs on the Core (Foundation) paper in English language, achieved Bs and As on the literature papers.

After we received the results, we all said that we hoped language would follow suit too.

I don't know how other schools teach their students, but in our school all students follow the same topics, units of study and exam texts. No student misses out parts that other students get.

I can't stand Gove, but I think getting rid of the tiers may prove to be a good move.

Good discussion re: rigour. Agreed. It is vague. So, if you look at what the government is doing:

• "first attempt only" to stop the practise run idea.
• "average of the best 8" (just saw this today) to retain incentive to improve grades across the academic spectrum.
• EBacc etc initiatives to encourage the "core subjects"
• Ofsted "back to basics" approach with the bar set higher (and in a different place).
• No coursework to put the pressure on the student and the student alone.
• Curriculum reviews in Maths, and I believe, English aimed at a limited beefing up (defo needs doing in Maths IMO).

Well it LOOKS half-sensible although a bit tough on what we can now maybe call the fringe subjects, and it will be an intensely hard transition for kids and teachers, which is why you suspect it will be chipped away and watered down. As I say, at my school it is causing a "safety first, take no chances" approach which feels rather dour. People talk of the massive gap between GCSE and A-Level, but the back-ending of the assessment would seem to me to make that problem worse. I think the main thing I agree with is a focus on how challenging the curriculum is, but that's an ongoing process anyway.

Dunno.

- "first attempt only" to stop the practise run idea.

But its first attempt only to be taken in to account in the league tables. Schools are supposed to put the best interests of the children first, I suspect that schools will be accused of holding the brightest and most able back.

- "average of the best 8" (just saw this today) to retain incentive to improve grades across the academic spectrum.

No real impact other than to reduce the average score of the pupil with no effort by the government.

- EBacc etc initiatives to encourage the "core subjects"

English, Maths and Science are the core subjects, and pushing for the academic will just split the school cohort, vocational subjects will once again be for the "thick" (One of the terms that was favoured when I was growing up)

- Ofsted "back to basics" approach with the bar set higher (and in a different place).

gove wants teacher led whilst ofsted wants child led, they need to be on the same page.

- No coursework to put the pressure on the student and the student alone.

Very few areas of the curriculum use coursework/controlled assessment it was being phased out in many areas before gove came in to his position. But I remember colleges, universities and businesses complaining that those leaving education had to be taught how to work on projects as they were not being taught it at school.

although a bit tough on what we can now maybe call the fringe subjects

What are you classing as the fringe subjects?

- Curriculum reviews in Maths, and I believe, English aimed at a limited beefing up (defo needs doing in Maths IMO).

Absolutely. I don't think there's a maths teacher in the country who would disagree. However, for a decade now we have been promised a double maths GCSE, with one GCSE focusing on the numeracy stuff that employers want, and the other focusing on the hard maths that sixth forms want for A-level students. Lots of reviews of maths education recommended this, including the one commissioned by Gove and led by Carol Vorderman. There was even a pilot scheme of these new qualifications running. Completely inexplicably IMO, Gove has completely ignored this and stuck to one GCSE, now beefed up, trying to be a qualification to please everyone, to suit the needs of all students, and this will undoubtedly cause problems, my guess is at the lower end.

The only concession to the double GCSE is that maths now counts for two GCSEs in the league tables. Gove recommends more curriculum time for maths, an extra lesson a week. It will be interesting to see whether this will actually materialise.

I really like the idea of a double maths gcse. I think some schools are doing this by having Additional Maths as well as Maths. However, some seem to be doing it with more success than others.

I'm currently teaching maths and further maths GCSE to my top set, which is working quite well, but the bottom set are having to learn to solve equations when they can barely do arithmetic.

I don't know how bottom sets are going to cope sitting a foundation paper which is even harder than the current offering. The new foundation paper will be pretty much the old intermediate content.

"but the bottom set are having to learn to solve equations when they can barely do arithmetic"

Why can't they do arithmetic, though?

Pretty much all of the bottom set have SEN of one sort or another. Most won't have instant recall of their times tables.

No real impact other than to reduce the average score of the pupil with no effort by the government

No idea how you figure that out (or what you think the motivation would be). At KS4 (i.e. GCSE) the metric currently used is the total average (capped) point score per pupil. It is capped because it only looks at the best 8 results for each pupil. So "average of the best 8" is no change at all.

Bonsoir its because the national curriculuum works in such a way that they have to cover so many aspects of maths and (especially in primary) dont get the chance to master the basics of one field of maths and really practise it before they move onto the next field a week or two later. I think its a fundamental flaw in the system.

OhYouBadBadKitten - thank you for confirming what I thought: children aren't so irredeemably dim that they cannot master basic skills (as some would have us think), rather they have been poorly taught (which is not to say that teachers are at fault - curriculum design is a huge issue).

I think they are taught well but not enough, too quickly and without continual reinforcement until they really really get it.

By not enough, I mean, the aren't allowed to concentrate on the basics enough.