Worthless qualifications at state schools

[Judy1234]

Wise words.
Pick solid GCSEs in proper subjects - take a language, take English lit and lang, take maths, geography, history and 2 or 3 proper sciences and get just 8 or 9 in traditional subjects with good grades.

"The headmaster of Harrow has accused many state schools of deceiving children by entering them for ?worthless? qualifications. Barnaby Lenon said that grade inflation and a shift to vocational qualifications was masking a failure to teach enough pupils to a good standard.

?Let us not deceive our children, and especially children from poorer homes, with worthless qualifications so that they become like the citizens of Weimar Germany or Robert Mugabe?s Zimbabwe, carrying their certificates around in a wheelbarrow,? he told a conference.

?[Let?s not] produce people like those girls in the first round of The X Factor who tell us they want to be the next Britney Spears but can?t sing a note.?

He cited media studies as an example of a soft subject, for which many schools were keen to enter students because it was easier for them to get a good grade. The real route to a good job in one of the professions, he said, was good grades in traditional academic subjects such as maths, sciences and languages."

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/school_league_tables/article6998943.ece

agree merrylegs
dd has got a couple of A's and nowadays sadly that means B's

it just does

A* is the new A

at LeQueen and NotAnOtter.

Yes, absolutely agree with you LeQueen.

Some children are perfectly capable of meeting the standards of the old 'O' levels etc. Many children would relish the chance of being stretched and if the exams were harder it would be so much better for everyone (sick of repeating myself emoticon).

The difference between the intellect of the students achieving 3 As at A level is unbelievable, as I can testfy my with older 'children'(who are children no more obvs). Personally, joking aside, I am glad for the A* at A level.

LeQueen, agree with you. This is the elephant in the room that nobody dare speak about. It's like the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Emperor's New Clothes".

"I have seen GCSE English papers that have been awarded an A...t'would appear that current English GCSE A pupils don't need to spell or punctuate properly"

Le Queen that has strangely cheered me.
DS has had a piece of coursework that will count to his final English GCSE grade marked as an A* (by his teacher).

It was a good essay - a confident start, and certainly the spelling and punctuation were fine- but there was no way I thought it merited an A*. To me that means perfection and it wasn't that.

Plus, as an Eng Lit graduate I thought I had a good idea of what constituted an excellent essay.

Perhaps the teacher was right after all and it does deserve that mark. I really hope so.

After all, she should know more than me, shouldn't she?

i agree with lequeen and merrylegs

so so true

as a mother of teens and young children the change in standards goes right back to tiny

i remember newsnight the night ds got his gcse results. An expert was on who said ' no one who has been in education for 20 years could deny that if we are being honest with ourselves we have moved the grade boudaries 2 grades in that time'

ie A is C

looking at the dc's work I agree and I am no academic genius.

As a mother of undergraduate, graduate and teen, I completely agree with you notanotter.

I have just looked at the course choice section of the school handbook for the school that DS1 wants to go to next year. The range of subjects has NOT changed since I was at a similar comp nearly thirty years ago;

You MUST take English, Maths, History or Geography, French or German, one of Biology, Chemistry or Physics ...then three from (Art & Design, Drama. Home Ec, PE, RE, Spanish, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Business, Accounting, Computing, Craft and Design, Graphic Communication, Music.

NB. no media studies etc.

NB. you must still do one MFL, even if you are doing three sciences (you could even do two)

NB. This is fairly typical of Scottish comprehensives.

NB. there is no such thing as an A* grade here.

so right lequeen

depressing but true

IS that really your experience LeQueen? Because my experience of children who get E and Fs are that they don;t think they're academic at all. They feel like failures. Which about matches with your attitude. So I rather like the new vocational qualifications where they can learn something useful and appropriate, rather than fail to learn more academic subjects. But no - these courses also get slammed. What would you like to see happen for these children? Who did exist when we were at school. I got all As in my O levels, but there were people in my year who got a clutch of grade 3 CSEs. Which is exactly the sort of spread of achievement we see now.

I teach a top set in both years 10 and 11, I teach far and above what is needed for an A* and think I expect much more from my students than was every expected of me. I was however the first batch of GCSE students. I said the other day, it may have been on this thread, that the new exam syllabus is dumbed down. I will continue to teach at the level I have always done though.

I agree with TFM children that get Es and Fs do not see themselves as academic.

'I simply don't understand why they had to introduce the A* for GCSEs??? Why not just keep an A for excellence, and award more grade Ds???'

I actually agree with that; my sister used to laugh at me for having A,which no doubt was due to the fact we didn't have them back then LOL! I do think we need to accurately grade and be honest about what qualifications are in themselves. This is extra true when refering to vocational quals: if you wish to be the worlds expert on something non academic but stillfairly specialist-we'll take ds1's aim of theatricalmake up here and say maybe you wanted to the prosthetics for Dr Who- an academic qual is not worth mroe than the training even if from Cambridge. The value of different qualifications values in context. If we could develop a tertiary levelvocationalqual that wasnn't dimissed as being lessworthy but just seen as it was and* crucially given access to uni style funding I'd be fine with it. We don't have that; we have HND then nothing for those who progress above (and people do,sister did her HND then went further again). It should ahve the same number of points attached soit can be used to progress at PhD levelif the same academic capability is shown,if that is in palce there is no issue.

Snobbery prevents that though- we'restill intellectually in an age where it is caperntry tradeor academic,no in between: technology ahs destroyed that.

There's still that assumption that vocational training only attracts the peoplewho couldn't get Uni training in the past.Asit happens,Dh (he oflaughed at course below) wasacceptedforUniversity in the 80's, aswas I:funding rpevented me attendng,ill health him. He's still the same person though.

As for social life being responsibility of parent- depends. Most universities have far more options in terms of societies, sports facillities than your average UK small market town. IME you can learn as much from attending a decent debate as a lecture.

Will readrest now

I sort of am in favour of the oldfashioned apprenticeships but it would need modifying; where FILand his peers went in at 15 these days a great many jobs need a certain amount of technical knowledge 9thinking say IT skills,CAD systems etc) that would mean at the least integrated vocational study.

Which I would support wholeheartedly.

I don't think there's too much problem in the very good shining. My daughter at North London Collegiate when she was there which is a pretty good school often best in the UK for A levels, even there there is a clear difference between children like mine who are just reasonably bright and the very very clever ones and universities can see that fairly easily.

Plenty of children don't get all As by any means. My local comp is extolling increasing A - C at GCSE by over 10% to 34% so about 54% are getting Ds and lower.

The clever children as long as they go to a decent school in state or private and have some encouragement can be distinguished. I think my AAB at A level 1979 is better than my daughter's AAB 20+ years later but there's no point in debating that. I suspect my O levels which were As and Bs are similar to my daughters' which were A*s and As on the whole.

I was in Switzerland yesterday which doesn't suit my nature - it's too conformist and boring and non libertarian but they have I think like Germany more trained vocational people. On the other hand you can learn a trade on the job at 16 I suspect so why waste years doing endless qualifications. I think I learned a huge lot more starting work at 21 than if I'd studied to age 30 as people do in a number of the countries I go to professionally. I don't think they gain much more with the endless MAs and PhDs. They just earn less money later on, live with their parents longer and delay having babies until later. Was talking to my son who is a student about this just yesterday. Lots of people do MAs just to fill in the time but I'm sure it's really worth it for most careers.

Of course it suits the unemployment figures to push loads of 16 year olds into 5 more years of education.
Anway my main point was that people should not be deluded into knowing what qualifications matter.

Xenia universities do seem to have trouble differentiating, they're even starting to create their own extra tests. I think it will eventually go like the United States, where all pupils have to take a standardised college entrance exam called the SAT, similar to the GMAT which is needed for MBA students
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2558388/Straight-A-students-pose-selection-headache-for-universities.html

Depends why you do an MA.

Know someone who has severaland will admit readily it was an excuse to delay adulthood; OTOH mine is to convert a generic degree into a specirfic speciality (was planning to train as RE teacher but the only place now offering it in Wales is 2 hours drive away- er no, 4 hours a day on the road not practical).

I spoke to an Academic here who runs the teacher training and he thinks in a few years all recruits will need an MA as it is getting harder todetermine who is really a good candidate or not- specialisms help them narrow it down they think.

I think with the amount of IT involved in many trades these dyas (and by IT I just mean specialsied technology) there is a case for post-A levels apprenticeships over post-GCSE in some areas.

I have a Master of Fine Art degree in Sculpture (took 2 years), that was definitely a delaying tactic!

Incidentally although I got quite good Higher results it made no difference as entrance to art school is by portfolio, at the time it was only about 1 in 5 or 6 applicants that got in to the college I chose, I had a big sense of achievement from being accepted, much more than my exam results (which should have been straight A's if I had put a little more work in).

I have no objection to universities selecting by entrance test, it might help the dropout rate.

My sister studied music and had to audition for her place too.

I would also approve of tests.

Dh is sick already of students who cannot get their act together:alot of their work isa ssessedon teamperformancce and he emailed to ask why a certain assessment was a lower garde than the others. 'Oh you did well, but the others didn't know what they were doing' (apparently one bloke stood there muttering 'havenb't got a clue what I amding here')

Maybe if they took students who had passed an aptitude test that might reduce? they can't screen individually for some things as they take sheer manpower (was rigging IIRC but don't tell dh - I have no clue what that is except you need ropes, a podger and gloves LOL)

They currently have an intake of 30 and expect it to drop to 9 - 10 by yr 3.

looks like the Sutton Trust carried out a pilot of the United States SAT test in the UK. Not sure if they have followed it up at all
www.suttontrust.com/reports/SAT-Pilot_Report.pdf

Useful bits of paper I got at school = 15 (11 o levels and 4 a levels)

Useful things I learned at school = 0

On that basis, I've decided it doesn't much matter

"apparently one bloke stood there muttering 'haven't got a clue what I am doing here'"
I hope that wasn't the lecturer. Sorry I have had a few glasses already.