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.

Boney - there might not always be tractor drivers, if (if) we can develop sufficiently cheap artificial intelligence to steer a plough over an uneven field. Probably not soon though.

Anyway, that's a slight diversion. To those worried about eliminating tiered papers I agree where there is a problem solving element like maths or chemistry then it might be an issue. But most humanities and essay writing subjects can be made to cater for all abilities very easily without worrying about putting harder questions first. The same probably quite deceptively simple questions will be answered by candidates with varying degrees of sophistication.

It is fair to say, though, that the tractor drivers do go on to study for several years at agricultural schools if they can jump over the right hurdles. I remember supporting a boy who was struggling to understand an English comprehension about teenage suicide in Finland, but perked up no end when I based our English lessons around the history of beef production. I also supported a boy doing a five year course to become a waiter who had to translate endless recipes. What is the English translation for boeuf bourguignon? Very useful.

Bonsoir
as you live in France and have no intention of sending your kids to the UK system, frankly I do not care what you think about Gove.

And you are UTTERLY wrong about Tractor drivers.
France's agricultural industry may be fossilised with jack of all trades labourers.

The UKs farms switched to skilled trades a while back, so yes, there are lads who tractor drive for several farms in an area, five days a week, 48 weeks a year.
Same as there are combine drivers
sheep shearers
lambing hands etc etc

TalkinPeace - what exactly do you know about my family that I don't? We have one child in the UK already, one soon to follow and another who may well go to secondary school in the UK. And who will follow a UK curriculum (in addition to a French one) even if she stays in France and take some GCSEs.

Bonsoir.

'all DC should be eligible to take exams with rigorous recognisable standards (how cruel that teachers may decide they may not).'

Currently, all students take GCSEs. They are all eligible to take them. Just as you wish to happen.

In English, if a student is expected to get at best a C grade (ie. somewhere between U-C) they enter the Foundation tier. If they are likely to achieve a B or above, they enter for Higher. Both papers award grades B-D, so there is some overlap.

If I couldn't tell you, about every student I teach, their likely final GCSE grade to within three grades, I wouldn't be very good at my job.

No-one is being deprived of a fighting chance at any achievable grade.

If we lose the tiering, the bottom third, at a conservative estimate, are going to be deprived of the opportunity to attain any qualification at all.

Isn't that rather cruel?

And you nothing about technology, economics or farming, TalkinPeace. One of the biggest problems in Europe is people like you who think that there are going to be plentiful jobs in future for the low qualified. There aren't and those that exist won't pay subsistence wages. Hence the need to educate our children far more than they have been.

raven - why are the bottom third going to be deprived of the opportunity to attain a qualification? That will be my dd and as per my earlier post I assume she will still be-able to get what she deserves?.

Bonsoir, I do agree to some extent about exam entries. I would have one exam board and eliminate competition between them. I would allow tiered entries though. I am old enough to remember how we fought for exams that the least able pupils could access.

So... tractor drivers don't need to know about literature then?

Oh silly teachers. If only we expect students to get an A, then magically they will be able to.

Bell curves are bollocks, all kids are above average really.

But I accept she may not get quite what she would have got had we helped her with her coursework etc which went towards the grade. But surely all students will be the same so there will be a lot of them in the same boat and attitudes will adapt.

noble
magically all thick kids can be pushed towards the middle of the curve

maybe we should hold all the bright kids back towards the middle of the curve as well

Please somebody answer me as this is directly relevant to my dd. I still cant understand what is so bad in there ending up a broader range of results but true to the childs abilities. Surely my dd (as low achiever academically) will be in good company as there will be lots of kids like her that get Ds or Es for example. There will end up being a greater range of results? But is that a bad thing?

Bell curves demonstrate the distribution of intelligence in the population.

Achievement is not correlated with normal distribution of intelligence alone but with quality of education (all its composites).

Because, frogwatcher42, if you have a single tier exam capable of stretching the most able, it won't be accessible to lower ability candidates. Not in core subjects, anyway.

It's simply not do-able, which is why we had two entirely different qualifications prior to GCSEs.

See PP for how well that worked for the less able kids who took CSEs.

Oh & coursework went in 2010, when the curriculum was overhauled rather effectively, just before the idiot Gove climbed aboard his wrecking ball.

raven - I am being thick and not deliberately.

Why wont it be accessible for lower ability candidates? Won't they just do what they can and leave the rest? And then that will be fed into the results - i.e. all students who do 25% of the paper correctly get an E, 30% a D etc etc. The A students would do the most and at the highest level.

I can't get it. Sorry.

I have one high achiever dd and one very low.

I would expect my high achiever to quickly do a lot of the paper to a fairly high level. If she runs out of time then so too would most of her high achiever peers and so paper would be marked accordingly.

My other dd would struggle more and do maybe a quarter of the paper in the same time. She would get a lesser mark but so too would her peers at a similar level.

Bonsoir, are you suggesting that if only someone of very low ability had a quality education they would be able to access the highest grades?

I'm not a teacher, but I really wonder how on earth anyone could set a single exam paper that would be a fair test of such a huge range of abilities - you need to have questions that will differentiate between A and A*, as well as questions that will distinguish between E and F or however low the grades go.

I genuinely don't understand this. Surely in the old days we all sat the same paper and the grade was based on how well we did with certain % marks for certain grades so for instance 75% and above A, 60-75% B, 50-60% C, 40-50% D. Why is that so difficult to achieve once more?

Also how is that demotivating? Surely it would be more demotivating to be told that you were not being allowed to sit the paper at all because you were too stupid?

I am not picking a fight or an argument - genuinely confused!

We didn't all sit the same paper. Some of us took O levels, and some of us took CSEs.

Frogwatcher, Maths GCSE higher paper is currently a joke for the brightest students. It has to cover grades from A to D, and so there is only room on the paper for a couple of the hardest questions. It's a waste of their time sitting there answering what they consider to be insultingly easy questions, and then there isn't enough difficult material to distinguish between the brightest. A student might get lucky and get their favourite A topic and get an A*, or they might get their less favoured one and drop to an A.

At the other end, a C grade student only needs to get 25% to get their C grade. They sit there for 2 hours faced with a paper that they mostly haven't a hope on (funnily enough they aren't spurred on to getting As even though they are available). It's incredibly demoralising and also a waste of their time, they haven't demonstrated what they can really do either.

Now imagine that they'll have to extend that paper down to a G grade. Waste of time for everyone. And that's why maths will retain two tiers.

Yeah, but it doesn't work quite like that frogwatcher42.

For Eng Lit you'd be about right - given a question like 'How does Susan Hill create an atmosphere of foreboding in 'A London Particular' your high achieving dd would pinpoint & analyse techniques used at a high level, whereas your lower ability dd would probably make fewer points, support them with less precise evidence from the text & develop her analysis much less - which is exactly what I see when I mark the exams.

For Eng Lang it's entirely different. Higher paper has harder, more nuanced texts to read & comment on (think broadsheet not tabloid).

Also the questions require higher order skills. One example of difference in questions: Foundation - how is language used in this (straightforward) text? Higher - compare how language is used similarly/differently in these two (relatively complex) texts.

If you sat an E grade candidate down in front of an Eng Lang Higher paper, she would honestly struggle to understand a) the texts she was being asked to read & b) how to go about the questions she was being asked to answer.

I teach both higher & lower ability year 11 groups this year - it's about totally different levels of ability.

We didn't all sit the same paper. Some of us took O levels, and some of us took CSEs.

And that was blinkin' demotivating and embarrassing. I can still remember being put in the maths group that could only get a C - I think it meant I took a CSE rather than O level. I was embarrassed and depressed by it. And the teacher got it wrong as I got the C and then a couple of years later at university excelled in maths having thought I was thick in it due to exam placing.

Bonsoir - the current UK system only allows a retake of a whole GCSE. But it does insist that Maths and English are retaken if a student is in the sixth form without a C in either of those subjects.

Are you suggesting that students have one chance and one chance only at achieving a qualification, and that at the appropriate point in schooling? What about adults?