Rant about the new maths GCSEs. Michael Gove you tosser.

[noblegiraffe]

I've got to write this because I've been fuming all day and I need to get it out or I'll never sleep.

So today was the final maths paper, the first round of teaching of the new GCSEs complete. What a total and utter nightmare the whole thing has turned out to be. The poor kids today looked like wrecks. Over 20 different exams spread over weeks has really taken its toll, thanks to all subjects being made linear. We had a revision class yesterday and they had nothing left to give, it was a really horrible ending to the course, trying to cajole them into squeezing in some last minute revision. Three papers for maths has meant it has been a real trial to keep the momentum going (not to mention the added expense of all the extra photocopying of 3 papers instead of 2). Next year it will be even worse as at least this year they still have the cushion of coursework in some subjects.

Due to the last minute scrapping of SAMs which meant the textbooks were out of date and useless even before they left the warehouse and school funding cuts which meant we couldn't afford to buy them even when updated, teachers have been scrabbling over the internet for resources to teach the new topics on the syllabus. The syllabus is unclear and teachers have been trying to find out what they actually have to teach from looking at the sample papers put out by the exam boards. Workload has been horrendous. One question on Edexcel Foundation caught lots by surprise because that style of question wasn't on any papers, and being an old A* topic, many schools hadn't taught it.

Some of the syllabus is just stupid. Memorising exact trig values on foundation? Really?

Before the most recent higher and foundation papers we had foundation (up to a D) intermediate (up to a B) and higher (up to an A) which were then replaced with foundation (up to a C) and higher (up to an A). Essentially what has happened is that we've gone back to the old system with an intermediate and higher paper, but got rid of foundation and are making all the weaker kids sit intermediate. There is nothing for them on the papers. Kids who would have got a G or F grade are having to sit 4.5 hours of papers where they can answer maybe 2-3 questions on each. What does that say to them? The first question on the first maths paper that they sat was (non calc) 2^4. The third was solve x/5 = 2 1/2. Those poor kids.

And the papers themselves? Awful. It used to be 'the examiners are looking to reward what you know, not trying to catch you out'. Well that seems to have passed Edexcel by. Questions which could have been fine had twists put into them for no reason other than to increase the chance of failure. Foundation kids for the first time have to solve simultaneous equations. But why put a question on which is going to trip them up and confuse them? Lots of fuss about trig being on Foundation so we dutifully taught it and spent lots of time on it because it's hard. It was on every sample paper they produced. It wasn't on the sodding real thing. What a waste of time.

My foundation class would have comfortably got Cs and be able to answer the majority of a paper without breaking a sweat. Now it's all very, very difficult and they hate it. We've had higher tier students lose all confidence, bomb out of the higher paper and be moved to foundation, capping their potential grade. Other higher students have decided that maths isn't for them and wont be taking A-level.

All this has served to do is to put kids off maths and make them think they can't do it.

And it's all very well saying 'the grade boundaries will be low, it will be fine, the same proportion will get a C as last year' etc etc. As a maths teacher who is interested in the maths education of the population, this is simply not good enough. You can't make kids better at maths by battering them over the head with stuff they can't do.

It was just a whole different world back when I did O levels in the 80s. No predicted or target grades, as pp says no revision sessions etc etc. You went to class, did your homework, and got what you got at the end of the process

Did mine in the 70s - it was like this.

BUT we as kids seemed more personally invested - the marks didn't matter for the teachers, but for us they were a way out of home - only 12% went on to uni, another 15% to tech college.

For the month before exams we all turned into pasty-white hermits.

For the last few years results days news has been full of people getting 10 A*s , these students have been brainwashed to see that's what to aim for rather than what they can achieve. A decent school works against this and makes them realistic but the next few years will be difficult to make the psychological leap to 'actually a 6/7 is good' or 'excellent I never thought I'd get that 4' . In the meantime we are risking a group of students thinking they are worthless.

I agree that the curriculum needed revising at the top end, to bridge the gap between GCSE and A-level. But this did not need to be at the expense of the entire lower 50%+ - and also many of the more able, whose confidence has been badly affected.

There was once a suggestion that Maths could introduce a double award paper - for the more able and as preparation for those going onto A level maths. Plus the single award still. This seemed an eminently sensible idea. I asked what had happened to it and Noble told me that Gove had scrapped that plan. Now he's introduced this mess, and having made such a mess, had to be moved elsewhere. Leaving our young people to suffer from his mess!

I read and scribed for a Higher Maths paper last week. In previous years I've worked out answers in my head as we go and mentally cope with most of them without the luxury of pen and paper

That really shows that something needed to change, not that I agree with the changes that have been made.

but why is it that children in most other countries in the world can do this level of maths and ours can't. is it teaching, is it a societal attitude to maths .Before we can remedy this we need to try to establish the reason.

Children in Korea spend 9-3pm in school, then go to a crammer school until 10pm then often to the library until 12pm.

In effect they do three times the hours of British children. So compare a British person with 15 years post 11 education with a Korean with 5 years post 11 education.

Way back in the days of O Levels, CSEs and 50% of students leaving school with no qualifications there was an arithmetic CSE, it might have been called 'commercial arithmetic' or 'business arithmetic', it basically taught you how to give the correct change in a shop and how to multiply the number of boxes i a store room.

It was similar to the level 2 numeracy papers, and IMHO that's what we need. Employers look at grade C GCSE maths and think arithmetic, they don't think simultaneous equations and trig.

Now that the government has decided at the last minute to lower the pass grade to a 4, the change of grading system is mostly pointless. The only real difference is the addition of the 9.

Only about 4000 kids got straight A*s, I'm not sure it's worth all this upheaval to reduce the straight run of top grades to 2 kids or a few hundred or whatever it turns out to be in August.

Double would make sense. Functional maths plus additional? Than add further for a triple , like Science does?

buy the government might solve the problem. I see us making Gove do continuously harder Maths papers whilst telling him he's below average...

carol: I do not know the detail.

Read this thread then. State schools have to do the exams preferred by their funders - the state, so GCSEs.

Private schools also do the exams preferred by their funders - parents, and iGSCEs.

The world of I levels was very different. Lots of people left school with no qualifications at all-and were able to get jobs. O level marking was pretty arbitrary, and it didn't cross anyone's mind to query it. I really is no use comparing.

It's worth mentioning that Functional Maths got harder from Sept 15. Prior to that I could pretty much guarantee getting someone with a good attitude, reasonable English and a respectable D to Level 2 (equivalent to C or above) with one or two days' intensive preparation.
Now I run separate 3 day courses for weaker and stronger learners, provide a range of other options from half day bespoke sessions to four day courses with paper based rather than online exams and look very carefully at initial and diagnostic assessments in both Maths and English when deciding on which option to take. (Anyone below L2 in English may have difficulty interpreting the questions.). I also take age into account - a 27 yo will do much better than a 17 yo in understanding the contexts in which questions are set.
(I'm retired secondary now teaching in FE.)

Like a few other PP I am curious to know whether other countries have a similar number of students who struggle to access maths. Not looking at the extreme methods of Korea or China, but what about Finland, which is often cited as having one of the best education systems in the world? I seem to remember reading, that although they have much shorter school days than England they spend more hours teaching maths than us. They also don't set or stream, so it would be interesting to see how many children "fail" maths there.

My school only set in Maths but everyone was expected to sit O-levels not CSEs. But the lower set sat Commercial Maths paper whilst the remaining sets sat a General Maths paper.

I also have it in my head that when I was at school the average grade (not just in Maths) was level 4 CSE and the lowest grade you could get was level 5, so many students were obviously leaving school with nothing or very little So standards had to be raised and schools/teachers had to be held accountable (e.g. to prevent children being taught the incorrect syllabus 2 years on the trot as PP mentioned above) But as with everything it has got out of hand and appears to have gone to the other extreme.

Wales have gone the route recommended by the maths reduction reports. They are doing the double GCSE and have reintroduced intermediate tier so the higher paper can be properly challenging for the brightest students only. It will be interesting to see how they get on.

Posters wondering why other countries do maths education so much better than us - partly it's hours of study (S. Korea being an extreme), partly attitude to maths (the idea that some people are talented and some people are bad at maths is alien to many cultures who understand you get better by working hard at it), and partly (probably quite a lot) due to the crisis in staffing maths teaching. Many primary teachers are not confident with maths and don't like teaching it, it's rare that they have a post-16 maths qualification. Then in secondary school, huge swathes of kids are being taught maths by anyone with a pulse. Gove can raise expectations all he likes, but while there is dire shortage of maths teachers, maths won't be taught properly.

Actually, the complete refusal of the government and Ofsted to see this problem is exceptionally frustrating. Ofsted released a report 'KS3 the wasted years' bemoaning that exam classes got the best qualified and most experienced teachers. The Tories put in their manifesto 'more school accountability at KS3' (return to Y9 SATs?). Of course schools put the qualified teachers in KS4 and 5. If they had lots of qualified and experienced teachers they wouldn't need to prioritise. It's not like saying KS3 needs more attention is going to suddenly magic up awesome teachers to do it. If they want more accountability at KS3, then that would mean taking the best teachers from KS4/5. Do you want your sixth form lesson taught by the PE teacher who up till now was doing Y7/8 maths?

It's also important to remember that a significant number of children in places like Korea leave school early or don't go to school at all. It's not comparing like with like.

Gove can raise expectations all he likes, but while there is dire shortage of maths teachers, maths won't be taught properly.

Yy and meanwhile good maths teachers are leaving the profession because Gove (and other education secretaries to be fair) have made it such an awful place to work. It really is like deliberate sabotage.

DD is in yr 10 and studying for the two Welsh maths GCSEs, plus I have friends with dc in yr 11. Obviously only time will tell as to how exams will go, but dd is enjoying maths and I haven't heard about anyone being particularly more stressed about maths GCSE than any of the others.

The first pupils to take the new exams were last November, results here were lower overall than for the old single GCSE, but I think the belief is that this was largely down to schools putting pupils in early to try to get a handle on how the exam worked.

It is also important to remember that the education system in countries like China and South Korea produces people who are unable to think for themselves. OH has worked in both countries and still works with companies based there, and is so frustrated at the lack of initiative even by management. They have to be told what to do all the time.

The evidence that China and S Korea produces far more academically kids is hugely flawed - huge swathes of the population are conveniently ignored when they compile the data, which is universally restricted to the big cities with majority middle class high earning parents.

Do folk REALLY believe your average farming kid in rural China is supremely better at maths that the UK, despite them probably only have ever had 3 years of formal schooling?

They also top the OECD suicide tables. Not sure this is the way to go.

'China' is represented in Pisa by Shanghai. Quote from the Washington Post:

"Shanghai, which is wealthier than the rest of China and is not itself representative of the rest of China, participated in PISA as a separate education system. After Shanghai became No. 1 out of 65 countries and education systems (the United States came out no better than average, as usual), a great deal of attention was put on its school system, including criticism that one of the reasons it does so well on PISA is that the group of students who are tested as the representative group of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds excludes many migrant students."

Residency requirements for accessing Shanghai's education measn that the children in Shanghai's schools are universally the children of wealthy, middle class families. Anyone else is excluded (including anyone with SEN). It's like using the UK's private schools to represent the UK.

(It is also worth looking at what percentage of students each country excludes from PISA due to SEN. Up to 10% is common, even in countries who, unlike China, have slightly more representative sampling of the nation.)

I think the obsession with identifying exception pupils at gcse level is daft - it's meant to be a general qualification - use the a levels to highlight exceptional achievement.

Reading this thread makes me feel sick, from what i have read the English syllabus and exams are just as bad what on Earth benefit is there to ensuring more children fail and write themselves off as 'thick' ??

My dd has just gone through the joke that is year 6 SATs and if GCSEs haven't improved by the time she comes to sit them I may well pull her out of school, her confidence when it comes to learning is fragile at the best of times

Would it be possible to rescue the situation for next year, by adopting the Welsh system? Assuming that looks to be working.

Gove may be back in Government, but it's now a Government on the ropes, so now would be the time to strike whilst the iron is hot (sorry, mixed metaphor!), and say that this isn't working and we owe our children something better.

Peregrina,

For the mid level and above students, i believe that next year will be better anyway - and increasingly better going forward - because the main stressor this year was the lack of clarity about materials, questions, specifications or grade boundaries. One at last some of these are 'known', the feeling that 'we have to get full marks on infinitely hard questions on a new syllabus ... oh, and someone has completely changed the goalposts, and maybe we should enter them for foundation' will receded and teachers will be able to more confidently prepare their pupils.

For lower ability children - those who would expect to do the foundation paper and get less than a 4 - I don't think the situation will improve much with familiarity. The paper is simply testing the wrong things for them to demonstrate competence in arithmetic and functional everyday maths, and teachers' increasing expertise at driving them through what are essentially 'the wrong hoops' will only make the situation marginally better. I would like to see an alternative functional maths GCSE introduced (both for these children, and for those retaking post 16), making the current papers effectively intermediate and higher tiers, covering c. 3-9.