Private school to ditch GCSEs, write own exams

[noblegiraffe]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/education/gcses-private-schools-london-qualification-latymer-school-b1106686.html

Not entirely sure what to make of this. Latymer Upper (I'm not really up on private schools so don't know how fancy it is) is planning to ditch GCSEs and create its own assessments to 'free up teaching time'.

I guess if it's a super-selective type school they'd be expecting all the kids to go onto A-levels anyway so aren't worried about losing GCSEs, but what of kids who want to go elsewhere? How recognised would their portfolio be?

Also, we know from covid just how good some private schools are at marking their own homework so how would anyone know if standards were being maintained?

I'm surprised that a school has enough staffing capacity to set up its own exam system tbh.

It's not the school being in the paper that makes me think that they think they're very, very important, it's the fact that they think they can create their own exam and people will automatically know anything about it and it won't cause any problems for their kids down the line.

I'm not sure it will cause many problems in reality. Universities are full of international students who haven't sat GCSEs and most employers don't care about them once you've got A levels, degrees etc.
Universities look a predicted grades, medicine you have to do extra tests anyway, same with some Universities.
Good to mix things up a bit!

@noblegiraffe Well you've got to the right conclusion pretty quickly about that school!

Have you got a child there?

@Foxesandsquirrels - you don't need to answer that! Just being nosey as thinking about it for DS!

@hammersmithgal Haha no I don't but in the Op she said she's not sure how fancy LU is. I think them not worrying about lack of GCSEs sums it up pretty well! It's not really a school that will worry about lack of bums on seats.

i agree with @hammersmithgal on the uni entry being irrelevant for most due to international schools and the way the uni are accustomed to cross referencing courses and qualifications.

So the assumption is that the kid will stay at the school and then head off to uni? No other options?

I just looked at the "Teddies" website from upthread (my eyes!) and they seem to do their fake GCSEs alongside 9 normal GCSEs rather than completely abandoning the system.

@noblegiraffe you're right about teddies, bedales is the only one that really does it's own thing aside from maths and English.

kids come from all over at any and all times of the year thanks to international work and family. so how would this any different than a teen joining from the usa/canada/brazil? surely all schools have a method other than gcse's to evaluate new admissions.

No they are planning to do this in 2028.plenty of time to chicken out

It is a very high risk idea, and I don't it will happen

I get that, but other countries have their own public exam system which will generally be more robust than ' marking their own homework'
I wonder if Bedales is planning to diversify itself into selling their 'gcse equivalents' and becoming a kid f exam noard too

Some schools used to do a mixture of IGCSEs and GCSEs and people could still move (in or out) for sixth form.

The exam boards can be so different in what they ask for anyway that some cross-referencing is needed — for example I know that Edexcel modern languages used to be a controlled assessment for the longer writing while for AQA it was an exam paper.

The cynic in me wonders if their GCSE results have slipped a bit, or they have a lot of people leaving for sixth form elsewhere.

I think you have nailed it

Looks like a money making wheeze to lock children in for A levels.

It may be a sign that they are in trouble financially. It will save them a fortune if they don't enter their students for exams.

Some schools ( direct grants) tried this for some pupils many moons ago eg. Manchester Grammar School. I think their logic or how they sold it to parents was that their best students took the bare minimum of O levels say 3, in year 10 which would enable them later to matriculate for University and then they had 3 years for A levels to give them more chance of Oxbridge places.

Manchester High School for Girls tried to run a system where their A class would do say 4 O levels - so eg English Language, Maths or a Science, History Geography ie just enough to matriculate together with A levels but not eg English Literature or subjects they were intending to study at A level. It didn't last long as parents were very unhappy at the lack of flexibility. My sister said she had lot of explaining to do when being interviewed for a University place in a subject she didn't have a track record for. (This school may have had serious financial problems though as their new school had been bombed during the war and maybe they thought this was a way of saving money for repairs?)

At most private schools the parents pay exam fees so doubt that's a factor.

What, so they charge £8000 per term which is more than a state school gets in funding per kid per year and exam fees don't come out of that? Bloody hell, no wonder they've got cash spare to fanny around with projects like this.

I've just realised that if any of their pupils want to become primary school teachers then they'd also need science GCSE.

I can't believe that during covid when exams were cancelled and schools had to write their own and it was awful that any school went 'yeah, that was great, let's do that again'. Although I suppose the record results that year must be rather tempting.

'Home' students apply through UCAS, is there any other way? Uni course requirements tend to list what's required for them. Afaik quite a lot of unis are at least to some extent 'computer says yes/no', I'm not sure there's a box for 'I went somewhere weird with its own system'?

@noblegiraffe haha yes. £8k a term is on the cheap end in London, however LU doesn't include lunches so once that's factored in, it's pretty much in line with everywhere else.

I can't find the info about needing a science gcse to teach? Have been looking that's something DD is interested in.
All the PGCE courses I've seen specify English and Maths only.

Primary teacher training needs science too.

Re: "It may be a sign that they are in trouble financially." and "The cynic in me wonders if their GCSE results have slipped a bit, or they have a lot of people leaving for sixth form elsewhere"
None of this is true. They have buckets of money, are hugely oversubscribed and their GCSE results are very high, with no recent dip. They seem to be doing it out of idealistic frustration with GCSEs.
Sevenoaks did something similar, but only for English literature, where they felt the GCSE was rigid and unchallenging. And Latymer upper are proposing to retain maths and english (language?) GCSE to tick boxes.

Personally, I think it raises a lot of questions as to how it will work in practice:

1. if you want to change school at 6th form e.g. to a specialist maths school, will your "in-house" qualification be recognised?
2. when you apply to universities with only 2 GCSE's will you really suffer no disadvantage compared to students who have 8-12. Will all universities be aware of the idiosyncratic decisions made by your school? Will they even read the footnote in the reference that explains it.
3. A lot of public sector positions expect minimum 5 GCSEs from anyone educated in the UK. Will only having 2 lead to rejections because computer says no. Similarly some universities require a minimum number of GCSEs.
4. Who will design the curriculum and exam spec, who will write the textbook, who will set the exam papers, mark schemes etc. They may think they have the in-house expertise in every subject, but do they really? I've dealt with private schools of similar selectivity and was distinctly unimpressed with the calibre of some of the staff. There were definitely weak subject departments.
5. How different will the curriculum really be from GCSE? In certain subjects, e.g. maths, physics, chemistry, there is a common core of stuff that you simply must teach. For this reason, an American introductory high school textbook doesn't look much different to GCSE. If you go significantly beyond GCSE, you'll end up encroaching onto A level material, which will then need to be skipped or re-covered. So if you end up at A level standard 2 years later, how much have you really gained? And why couldn't they enrich beyond GCSE in years 9-11, while still taking the GCSE qualification?

The GCSE system needs reform - there is no need for high stakes testing at 16 when the school leaving age is 18. But for one school to go it alone smacks of hubris and naivete. What is clear is that the first two cohorts will be the guinea pigs, and the results of the experiment will likely not be known until 2030. I personally wouldn't want to shell out upwards of 150k for a school to play Russian roulette with my child's future.

I don’t think gcses are fit for purpose and would welcome a move to only examine English and maths and leave the other subjects not taught to an exam. The formal exams can then be at 18.

I actually think gcses have got to a point where they are turning kids off from learning rather than inspiring them in subjects.

I also don’t think the gcse marking is good enough - the inconsistencies are huge. in a lot of countries the formal exams are marked by teachers - Germany being one. Culturally that would be difficult to introduce here now but I think that is a gentler approach