3 year GCSE courses

[mintyneb]

We've just been told today that DD (yr8) will have to chose her GCSEs next summer to start them in yr9.

Up until now the school has done GCSEs over 2 years so traditionally DD would have had over a year before having to make a choice. This has therefore come as something of a surprise.

Apparently research shows that 3 year courses are better all round but as there won't be an info evening until Feb it will be a while before I can officially find out more from school.

Any thoughts from folks whose DC have gone through this and come out the other side?!

That is a BIG difference. There are no longer any modular GCSE's in England. Just doing 9 GCSe's my daughter had 18 papers at the end of Year 11.

I think really we are trying to compare apples and pears. Can you see how the 3 year GCSE system which appears to work well in your Welsh school with modular exams and more flexibility doesn't work so well with completely linear courses that have to be examined at the end of Year 11 within a 4 week time frame (plus the odd music/drama/food assessments in addition to the linear exam for those subjects.)

I guess the totals make sense proportionally, 18 exams for 9 subjects vs 27 exams for 14. But DS doing his courses over 3 yrs means their Y11 summers will be similar, 18 for your DD and most likely 17 for my DS as he is thinking of maths A level so will probably decide to do the add maths exam.

Yes of course @Comefromaway
I haven't said that this would work for every child in every school and of course things are very different in the different parts of the UK. (The OP doesn't say where they are though.) I was just answering the OP's question as have others with opinions both for and against the 3 yr course. And then answered people's follow up points.
Some schools in England evidently do adopt the 3 yr course with some success so I hope it's not necessarily disastrous for the OP's DC.

DD took 3 GCSEs early. If she had taken all 10 at the same time she would have had 23 exams (this was in 2016)

All our local schools do 3 years - grammars, comprehensive and private schools. One grammar school lets the girls do 11 GCSEs in year 9 and they drop one for year 10 - I think this is a good idea as some subjects children chose like business they don't have any experience in to know if they want to do 3 years of it.

DD, who took 10 9-1 GCSEs plus the legacy Further Maths exam this summer, had 29 exams.

Without the FM, that would have been 27, and tbh she had a significantly lighter exam load than many because she did 1 coursework-only subject, and one with only 1 exam and a big coursework element. Had she e.g. done further humanities in those option blocks, or new subjects like business or even computing, she would easily have been into over 30 exams.

This is significantly more than DS's partially 9-1 exams two years' previously - essentially, it felt as if every subject had gained at least one extra exam.

DD1 had 13 exams 4 years ago (8 GCSEs).
DD2 will have 20 (9 GCSEs) unless she drops something.

Seems like some schools are managing to alleviate the stress of Y11 summer exams but some can't. 29 exams in just a few weeks is surely a ridiculous idea - how can that possibly be the best way of evaluating a child's academic development and potential? You'd like to think that the education system is set up to help children succeed but it doesn't look that way when you consider situations like these. Very thankful to live in Wales.

How did your DD and her friends find the Y11 exam experience, @cantkeepawayforever?

Dc also took some early (1 in year 9, 2 in year 10.. followed by a further 8 in yr 11).
I’m not convinced it helped to alleviate stress ( results day for 3 years in a row?) but it did lighten the work/ revision load at the end when 3 were already done

I work in a school where students choose options at the end of year 9 and start their options subjects in year 10. Some departments choose to teach GCSE stuff in year 9. My subject doesn’t teach any GCSE content in year 9. One or two subjects start GCSE from the start of year 9. A few more start in the Summer term. Our Head is happy to allow flexibility to HODs which seems to work.
I would personally be against 3 year GCSE with options chosen in year 8. I can’t see us changing as I think the rest of SLT feel similarly.

In addition to dd's 11 GCSE courses, she does PE learns an instrument andtakes part in various concerts, and is hoping to have a part in the KS3 play.

There are lots of extra curricular activities to choose from too.

She dropped some subjects that she found difficult, as she has difficulties with fine motor skills.

I honestly didn't realise some schools were still doing 2 yr GCSE courses. I thought all schools did 3 year courses.
It seems a no-brainer to me. A whole extra year to study for the exam. Plus it gets all those who mess around in say art or drama because they don't want to do it, out if the way into subjects they do want to do, and behaviour improves.

I would be really interested to see the take up of the 'new in secondary' subjects for GCSE in 2 year vs 3 year schools.

I'm thinking about things like specialised DT, MFL, Music, Drama - the subjects that are often not taught discretely, and certainly not by specialist teachers at a detailed level at primary. I wonder whether a 2 year KS3, with little opportunity to really get into those subjects, which are often taught in relatively few periods per week, results in fewer children choosing them for GCSE?

Also, I would imagine that more 'specialised interest' subjects are harder (and more expensive) to staff with a 3 year GCSE, especially if very few children select the subject. I am thinking perhaps of a less popular MFL, or something like music - where this is studied for a 3 year KS3, a teacher's timetable is easily filled by all that whole class teaching, which compensates (at a cost per student taught) to some extent for the GCSE year periods having fewer students. In schools with a 3 year GCSE, that teacher becomes proportionately more expensive, with the temptation being to drop them to part time or lose the subject altogether.

That is a good point about uptake of subjects

Just looking at numbers at DC school where they start GCSEs in Y9

Looks like there were 305 in the year

The option with the highest uptake was history with 195, second was business studies with 188.
Geography 121
French 78
German 67
Media studies 93
Drama 94
Art 61

A mixed bag, some subjects are pretty popular even though they are new or unfamiliar.

Music only 39 but they also offer performing arts and there were 82 of those.

cantkeepawaydorever - absolutely zero evidence of any of your imaginings at my children's school. Tbh, I do not get your logic about new subjects, anyway, given the appeal of novelty to the teenage brain. "New" subjects are extremely popular at both GCSE and A-level.

I would hazard a guess that it's the schools which have no expectation that their students continue with a MFL at KS4 that have numbers drop off a cliff, regardless of length of GCSE course, as it was ceasing to make continuing with a language compulsory nationally that resulted in the astronomical decline years before 3-year GCSEs existed. Making GCSEs harder then accelerated this, as languages are seen as harder to do well in than other subjects (and given that German, followed by French, are actually statistically the hardest of all GCSEs to get 7s, 8s and 9s in, it's not an unfounded belief - and also why as of 2020 they are going to make it easier to get top grades in those two MFL, to bring them more into line with other subjects).

As for DT - no doubt not making it an Ebacc subject didn't help, but again, its decline in schools is more lack of funding, lack of enough specialist teachers, lack of effort by schools to promote it. My children's school has a thriving DT department with excellent facilities - it's a selling point for the school.

Is DT a facilitating subject? When I've told people that my Ds takes it, they often mention that their child only takes facilitating subjects

Facilitating subjects only existed at A level

Where I think you have a point is not in numbers of children wanting to take up new subjects, but in cash strapped schools looking for excuses to stop offering subjects. They may have no decline whatsoever in the popularity of, eg, a MFL at GCSE, but it may nevertheless be less popular than other subjects, so the first to be axed if there has to be a cull. That's a problem with underfunding, not the length of a GCSE course. And if a school has introduced 3-year GCSEs so that it can get rid of subjects and staff, it has massive problems already.

oreomum - it's not an Ebacc subject, so not counted in Progress 8 measures. The only reason for this is that Michael Gove is a bit of a twat.

DT is counted in Progess 8. Ebacc and Progress 8 are two separate things

Ebacc = Maths, English x 2, Science x 2 History or Geography & an MFL

Progress 8 = Maths, English, 2x Science, History or Geography or Computer Science or an MFL plus 2/3 other free choice subjects

Yes, sorry - it's not an Ebacc (and schools are judged if they get low percentages of students achieving Ebacc) and doesn't have to be counted in Progress 8, so not much incentive to spend lots of money on it, I would have thought.

absolutely zero evidence of any of your imaginings at my children's school

I was hoping for a slightly larger statistical sample - because i would be genuinely interested to see whether there is any statistical difference, not because I am already convinced about whether it would show lower or higher uptake.

At an individual school level, uptake between subjects may be more about specific teachers or the way option blocks are constructed or local employer / parent preferences (for example, my DCs' school is sited in an area where languages are highly valued by employers, the language teachers are particularly good, and option blocks make it very easy to take 2 languages, so MFL uptake is unusually high). That's why I would love to see proper comparative data from a large number of schools.