Massive decline in English A-level take-up thanks to Gove reforms

[noblegiraffe]

One for @piggywaspushed who warned of this.

Take-up of English A-levels has declined massively since 2016. There has also been a decrease in the take-up of Maths and Further Maths A-levels after years of steady increases (and the country cannot afford this).

Good job everyone. Well done.

Full figures here: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/803906/Provisional_entries_for_GCSE__AS_and_A_level_summer_2019_exam_series.pdf

Yes Loose, that’s what I was getting at. It’s the discussions tne students really seem to switch on to. I teach mixed ability and some will struggle with the detail of the language- but they all are able to understand the message.
I find students enjoy Shakespeare if you play up the outrageous and the over dramatic in it. Teens can be a bit over dramatic themselves - so it’s giving them something they can relate to!

Shakespeare never fails for me and I love poetry so think I do a good job with most of it. Animal Farm has my kids in tears. But I don't much like the 19C novel bit or all the teaching to the exam and the Eng Lang exam is dull dull dull.

My school has just announced that from September, it will be co-teaching French, German, Music, Textiles and Theatre Studies A level in mixed year 12 and 13 classes, due to a lack of funds.

How awful. I have heard this suggested before. Must be chaotic, though and really hard in languages, I'd have thought.

DS's school just scraps subjects altogether , including Spanish, which he took at GCSE with a view to A Level and uni and that door has been closed on him. I genuinely don't think many people (including some of the universities) realise the level of disadvantage many state school students are up against in terms of options, richness of curriculum (including availability of the entire range of the 'facilitating' subjects) and enrichment of educational experience.

Piggy Rosenshine suggests scaffolding but certainly in maths I would teach top set GCSE differently to set 2. What about the expert versus novice stuff?

Monger For a moment I read that as they would all have the same teacher. How many does it tend to have in each class?

This is where the Hants model of large 6th form colleges really helps I think. With 1000-2000 per year group round here for A levels they can teach pretty much anything.

I genuinely don't think mixed ability or otherwise is the issue in English. If anything we got a (much) higher uptake before we setted so rigidly. Rosenshine suggest withdrawing the scaffold over time but most people never read the whole of any educational thing!

piggy The research shows that with ‘experts’ you shouldn’t be scaffolding in the same way as you would with a novice and that it can actually be detrimental to do so.

Your friend David Didau writes about it here: learningspy.co.uk/psychology/novices-become-experts/

This makes perfect sense to me in maths, I’m not sure how it would apply in English. Is English still mostly setted? My school binned that per EEF research and I don’t think they’re alone in that

It seems English is setted in most places. It really isn't a subject that benefits hugely from this especially not in terms if gender or at the bottom end. But that's another debate,! Certainly English Lit as an A Level choice is strongly related to enjoyment of lessons and it does seem the jou has been sucked out. Couple that with a decline in reading and the emphasis on sciences (They have soooo many science lessons!)And you have the perfect storm.

“My school has just announced that from September, it will be co-teaching French, German, Music, Textiles and Theatre Studies A level in mixed year 12 and 13 classes, due to a lack of funds.”

“Must be chaotic, though and really hard in languages, I'd have thought.”

Actually it works really well in languages. The syllabus is over two years and it can easily be overlapped so that the current year 12s are learning the same as the year 13s, then next year’s year 13s will be learning the same as next year’s year 12s.

My school did mixed lower and upper 6th for A level French and for A level Home Economics, and it worked really well. The subjects aren’t like maths and sciences where you need “building” blocks before going on to the next stage. The work doesn’t get harder. It is just more work.

I think it would work well with history and geography as well.

The accessibility of poetry is an interesting one. In the 1960s and 70s, my mother in law was an unqualified teacher working in a boys secondary modern in a deprived coastal town. She was originally taken on to teach drama, but also taught English.

She spent one lesson doing poetry (no idea what) with a bottom set 3rd year class, and at the beginning of the next lesson, one of the boys asked 'Can we do poetry again today, Miss?' She said it was one of her proudest moments!

@JoinTheMicrodots the PEE method is nothing to do with the writing paper - it's a way of helping them formulate their points on the reading paper. It's boring but generally it's helpful, at least at GCSE level.

Creative writing is as creative writing ever was. PEE is utterly not applicable to writing.

They refer to a section as a PEE paragraph section ??? Or your DD does?

There were two parts to the paper, each marked out of 30 (ie total mark was out of 60). The first part was headed "Reading Section" and gave them a piece of text, in the mid year exam apparently about London, and there were four simple comprehension questions worth one mark as a warm up and then the second question, worth 26 marks, stated "How does the writer use language to present the city of London - Write 3 P.E.E paragraphs You could include the writer's choice of:

• words or phrases

• language techniques

- sentence structure."

The second part was headed "Writing Section" and was the creative writing. it was marked Content out of 18 and SPAG out of 12.

So of the Reading Section (worth 50%) the vast majority of the marks went on whether one could write these three P.E.E. paragraphs, and DD got 8/26 for the P.E.E. paragraphs, which is what put her into Set 3.

So, they have added the write PEE paragraphs bit to a standard GCSE question.

There are so many things I could say about this but energy has deserted me.

Well they've done it so that kids who would otherwise be a bit rabbit in the headlights at that question will be able to take a stab at it because they'll remember doing that in their lessons. It's just guidance at that point, surely?

Sorry but I'd have probably put her into set 3 too based on the probability that she'd need more structured help on the reading paper. At the end of the day they are trying to help her!

I wouldn't get too hung up about sets anyway - since the tiers have gone, they're all doing the same paper. The examiner won't know what set she was in.

Why are the English GCSE exams so long ?
My DD gets extra time so a 1hr45 turns into 2hr10.
And then they go and put the question with the technical accuracy marks in the second half.

They are long!

Lots of students who worry about their writing do Section B first as it carries so many marks. Maybe your DD could do that?

IHeart I was wondering about that having seen how things deteriorated over the 2 hours. I think it could be worth a try. She's only finishing y9 at the moment so we have time for her to improve.

She's got time and a lovely mum who's looking out for her. Lots on her side

Laura McInerney blames the obsession with STEM for the decline in English and asks where future English teachers will come from in this article:

www.theguardian.com/education/2019/jul/16/misguided-obsession-stem-subjects-blame-decline-english-a-levels

It’s like she reads Mumsnet!

I like Laura. Hi Laura if you are reading! I do hope politicians heed her words.

My sons love of learning was beaten out of him in Year 11 - the pressure to perform at exam time, the continual testing during the year and learning for tests destroyed education for him. He's a year into an Engineering BTEC and he's loving the practical way of learning this has given him. He'd have rather stuck needles in his eyes than do English at A Level!!

Politicians are pretty unlikely to have studied a STEM degree.

We still seem to be stuck with C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures.

What strikes me, working in a school where you by necessity have a staff with different subject backgrounds is that they all bring something different to the table, something that the others wouldn’t have even necessarily considered.

Most engineers would feel the same though.

Politicians are pretty unlikely to have studied a STEM degree.

True, most of them seem to be PPE and the Bullingdon club these days, but Margaret Thatcher was a chemist. I think politicians used to have more diverse backgrounds in general, at least in the second half of the 20th century, and I think that was a good thing in general, even if you don't agree with a particular politician.