Tough new O-Levels to replace GCSEs under Gove plan

[PICNIC]

BBC News - Tough new O-Levels to replace GCSEs under Gove plan

 

Sounds like a plan

 

Though it could all be bunkum "The details are in a leaked document seen by the Daily Mail which sources say are broadly correct" As Russell Howard says "its 60 pages of scary Bull...."

Edited June 21, 2012 by PICNIC

[localzuk]

Sounds good to me. Get rid of all these 'GCSE Cheese Grating' and 'GCSE Nose Picking' exams that exist now. I'd not working in a secondary that did GCSEs before this last year (middle school up to year 8 before), and I can't believe the churn of people sitting exams. Its constant, and the resits are constant too.

 

The system is currently designed to let any child get results, because they can try 12 times!

[CyberNerd]

The conservatives introduce GCSE's to hide falling O'level grades as their cuts hit the educational sector in the 80's. Now they need to hide the impact of cuts in funding again....

[LosOjos]

Slightly off topic but related; it always seems a vicious cycle to me, schools are constantly pushed to improve their grades but as they do the government is accused of making exams easier. So which is it; are schools improving or are exams getting easier? Seems like a chicken and egg question to me.

 

That being said, I do think the system needs a shake up - there are a lot of schools around here who do very well in the league table (another concept I despise) but will be in for a rude awakening when they can no longer count their myriad of BTEC courses...

[speckytecky]

Oh, why, oh, why, oh, why is it that they all HAVE to tinker with the system. How about we do it one final time and look at a leading academic country (one of the Scandinavian Countries I suspect) that has a proven record of getting it right and adopt their well established system rather than have this endless disruption?

[PICNIC]

Oh, why, oh, why, oh, why is it that they all HAVE to tinker with the system. How about we do it one final time and look at a leading academic country (one of the Scandinavian Countries I suspect) that has a proven record of getting it right and adopt their well established system rather than have this endless disruption?

 

Because they wouldn't do it right and we would end up with another mess, someone would want this bit changed and someone else that bit until its messed up.

[Guest Guest]

So which is it; are schools improving or are exams getting easier?

 

As David Mitchell put it on QI, it doesn't matter;

 

My problem with exams, though, is that more and more people get A's, so whether or not that's because they're getting more intelligent or because the exams are getting easier, or a bit of both… it's still, it's defying the point of the exam. The point of the exam is to tell people apart, not just to go "You're all great academically, everyone can be Professor of Latin, share the Professor of Latin's salary between you… and starve

 

 

Personally I think kids do have to learn a lot more than kids of previous generations, but because of this each topic is dumbed down and not covered in any detail. I do have a problem with modular exams and parrot learning. Testing a kid on a few weeks of work immediately after doing that work, where a lot of the "work" has been learning parrot fashion for the sole purpose of passing an exam only proves the kid can remember something they were told last week and bares no relation to their understanding of that subject.

Edited June 21, 2012 by Guest

[sted]

as gcse's have been around a while surely at least part of the increased sucess rate is teachers can make a good guess whats on teh papers and taylor teaching to that. Also since about the only thing anyone cares about is grades kids arnt being taught maths (for example) they are being taught how to pass a maths test (the same way a driving test dosent prove you can drive and an mot dosent mean you car is roadworthy just at the snapshot in time they werent bad enough to fail)

[sonofsanta]

Just scrap league tables. That's the problem. All this derives from two facts: schools are made to compete on grades; exam boards are competing for profit, and their only differentiator is their exam. That logically leads to the situation we have where exam boards are in a race to the bottom, incentivised to make their exams as easy as possible and offer advantages for profit (e.g. paid training courses that show how to pass the specific exam), and schools are following them down to get the best grades they can.

 

Oh, why, oh, why, oh, why is it that they all HAVE to tinker with the system. How about we do it one final time and look at a leading academic country (one of the Scandinavian Countries I suspect) that has a proven record of getting it right and adopt their well established system rather than have this endless disruption?

 

What is needed - and sadly, will never see the light of day while it's politicians with the power to implement it - is a ten year moratorium on politicians interfering with education and health. No matter what state they are in, what policies are already in place, just leave them be. Leave well alone. They will both settle, find their feet, end up being controlled by the professionals (teachers, doctors) who actually understand the system and after that decade has passed, sensible corrective measures can be put in place to deal with those problems that are inherent to the system instead of these wildly overcompensating changes we get at the moment.

 

As one of my techies is fond of pointing out, political logic goes something along the lines of "something must be done; this thing is something; let us do this thing".

 

(I also think that politicans should be barred from becoming an MP until they have done 15 years of work in an actual job, rather than being career politicos, so they might have some understanding of the real world. Ideally said experience would be in their area of power - i.e. the education minister would be an ex-teacher, the agriculture minister would be an ex-farmer. As it stands, these positions are just titles on a CV on a politician's self-perceived path to party leader/chancellor; no-one gets into politics because they want to be health minister and fix the NHS anymore. This also ties into the "sweeping changes" habit - every politician wants to be seen as the Great Emancipator for their area of power, the one that came in, guns blazing, and fixed the world. They can't be seen to do nothing, so they insist on constantly doing something.)

 

(Good lord, that grew into a wall of text. Sorry.)

Edited June 21, 2012 by sonofsanta
tpyo

[Geoff]

I disagree with the premise that having a market between competing exam boards has caused a 'race to the bottom' rather I think that it is a result of schools striving to be as high up in the league tables as they can get. Arguably by having their pupils sit the 'easiest' exams they can. Therefore the exam boards are simply fulfilling the demand created by schools gaming the system? Granted having everyone sit the same exam still fixes this problem (but wasn't the national curriculum supposed to level the playing field too?) but with the state of the league tables at the moment you can't realistically use them to compare schools performance fairly. There is a lot more to a school than its GCSE and A Level exam results.

[sted]

maybe its time to take politiains out of education. So they give education company £x a year and the company is answerable to parliment but they can use the money how they see fit (and stuff the board with people who know about education so people who have/do work in schools). it worked for the bank of England fairly well.

 

Have 1 exam board and x% is a pass always (or even grades based on number of kids so only the top 5% get a and so on that way you cant have 95% of kids getting high grades. Change grading system to a/b/c/d(possibly) fail. Limit amount of retakes to say 3 (with possible exceptions for wierd circumstances) and instead of if you take the test 3 times getting c/b/d and being able to say you got a b it should be the last grade you got that sticks. Im sure tests can be written in a way that they test your skills rather than the amount of data you can regurgitate from a text book (for instance we all know e=mc2 but anyone know all the implications other than every bit of matter contains a heck of a lot of energy)

 

There is a lot more to a school than its GCSE and A Level exam results.

true but when was the last time you saw a newspaper headline school has 100% attendance for 6 weeks running. School invests in new x to improve pupils chances in x. what you get is school goes from 800 to 900th place in league tables. School failing pupils only 1% get a* and so on

Edited June 21, 2012 by sted

[X-13]

Wait... does this mean I can legitimately say things like "Back in my day, we had GCSEs."

 

 

Because, I'm OK with that.

[sonofsanta]

I disagree with the premise that having a market between competing exam boards has caused a 'race to the bottom' rather I think that it is a result of schools striving to be as high up in the league tables as they can get.

 

If the exam boards were still public sector with more governmental oversight, or if the regional exam boards actually were regional, there wouldn't be the picking-and-choosing of exam boards that exists at the moment. It always struck me as absurd that the English Language AS level I sat on the east coast of England was from the Welsh examination board.

 

I can see there being some need for differentiation to suit teachers' personal preferences - exam board X focuses on creative writing more than exam board Y's grammar-heavy curriculum - but it has very genuinely devolved into "our exam is the easiest to pass, this is how to pass it".

 

If it were only the schools competing to raise their position, they would only be able to do it by improving teaching/exam technique. It needs the exam boards' complicity to properly lower standards.

 

Definitely agree that it is about more than exam results - a school's pastoral responsibilities are probably higher now than they ever have been - but that's an impossible metric to quantify despite it arguably being more important to produce rounded, capable students rather than walking text books. And as we can see with the stupidity of waiting-time metrics for hospitals*, the politicians are only interested in what they can measure.

 

*most hospital visits with my daughter go something like: arrive at reception, sit down for ten minutes, see a nurse to be weighed and measured and then wait nearly two hours to see the consultant. Technically that is a waiting time of ten minutes. Define an artificial metric and then judge people on it and they will, inevitably, game the system, particularly when that metric is so unrepresentative of the service & priorities as a whole.

[elsiegee40]

I'm right in thinking a Tory government scrapped O-levels, aren't I? And now they want to bring them back... help us!

[Pete10141748]

Part of the problem is this bogus "every child is equal and should be afforded the same chance to get the best grades".

 

You know what, sorry, no, children are not all equal in terms of their abliities in education because they are INDIVIDUALS with different mindsets, skills, capabilities and interests. I was never going to be as good as RE or History as others because I didn't *want* to be, I didn't care! It's not a reflection on the school, or the teacher, it's a reflection on ME.

 

Child X who studies hard and gets a B in an exam deserves that B.

Child Y who half-arses it and eventually scrapes a C after their fourth re-sit doesn't deserve it, and it's unfair to Child X that they do.

 

What are we teaching children, that it is OK to fail because you can just have do-overs until you succeed? How does that prepare for them for ANYthing in the real world? If you screw up as an adult, you pay the consequences.

 

We are growing a generation of children who do not know who to fail. A generation where everyone is told they can be anything they want, as long as they give it their personal best. It's just not realisitic. Children need to be prepared for failure, they need to be taught how to cope with it.

 

To quote Tyler Durden; "We've been all raised to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very. Very. Pi$$ed off about it"

Edited June 21, 2012 by Pete10141748

[X-13]

A generation where everyone is told they can be anything they want, as long as they give it their personal best. It's just not realisitic.

 

 

Yeah it is.

 

 

You can be anything, if you're willing to put the work in.

 

You want to be an astronaut? Go for it. It's gonna be hard. Insanely hard. But, you CAN do it.

 

 

Unless you have a congenital heart defect or something... In that case, forget about it.

[LosOjos]

You want to be an astronaut? Go for it. It's gonna be hard. Insanely hard. But, you CAN do it.

 

I disagree. Why is it that some people (i.e. most of us here!) can be shown once how to save a document and then apply that to nearly every program in existence, yet others have to be shown daily how to save in Word? Although the fact we're interested helps a lot, it's not just that; my mom trains others how to use a particular database system, and she's very good at it. However, she can only seem to grasp that one system; show her any other, similar database, and it all goes out of the window. It's not that she's not interested, she just doesn't get it. Cooking on the other hand she is excellent at (that's not sexist, it was her previous career!).

 

Everybody is good at something, nobody is good at everything.

[sonofsanta]

You can be anything, if you're willing to put the work in.

 

You want to be an astronaut? Go for it. It's gonna be hard. Insanely hard. But, you CAN do it.

 

But when 200 people are applying for 4 slots in the space program, 98% are going to be disappointed, and by failing to teach children what competition is those 98% are going to be utterly unprepared for the failing.

 

No-one will succeed at everything in life, and at the moment, schools try and pretend that everyone does, all the time, eventually.

 

This is similar to the "make every effort to accommodate everyone" sentiment that pervades education at the moment, far beyond the point of reason. There's no employer in the world that will accept "just &£%! off I'm not in the mood today!" as a valid reason to down tools, but it seems fairly par for the course at my wife's school. "Softly, softly" is sometimes a disservice, but I guess it depends on whether you're trying to produce rounded, capable human beings or just keep a bunch of teenagers quiet for the day.

[GrumbleDook]

Unless you have a congenital heart defect or something... In that case, forget about it.

I can't because of dodgy knees ... doesn't stop me waiting to be bitten by a radioactive spider so that climb tall buildings instead though (you've gotta dream!)

 

On a more serious note ...

 

It is not just that children learn more, they also learn differently because they are expected to be different than 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. They need a broader set of skills and competencies, and although knowledge is important for many jobs it is more a case of being able to learn and develop new skills is even more important.

 

In the years of being an apprentice, then journeyman, then a master of your trade with a job for life ... or going into an area of management / leadership and going up the hierarchy ... then we had and needed a different education system. In the present situation we have a system that has changed and morphed to fit the central dictats of whichever Govt is in power, to jump through hoops to meet an arbitrary set of targets (usually league tables) and which has had to fit into a 'marketplace' mentality where we have had a circle of changing exams courses to get better grades which has resulted in some easier courses (not all of them are) or courses more designed to be workable with children today (ie cater for those who struggle to engage in education) but leading to qualifications that are not always highly regarded because they are derided by Govt, the media and some businesses (but not all).

 

Fine, we need change. Personally I think some of this is the political equivalent of trolling ... throw lots of stuff out there and wait to get responses then twist and turn until the uproar dies down, leaving a few key points going through. The idea of a single exam board per subject to stop grade inflation seems workable but will face resistance from the commercial (ie money-weilding) companies ... instead of a regulated National Curriculum you end up with regulation by exam instead ... and if the board get it wrong 9and some do ... disastrously) there is no room to move to someone else ... so there are concerns but they can be worked on (hopefully).

 

I worry about the stigma of the lower / minor tier courses though ... they will cause problems in schools. I worry that it will lower ambition with some children / families / schools ...

 

Still ... I'll wait until I read a bit from some of the noted educationalists to see what other analysis there is.

[cheredenine]

You want to be an astronaut? Go for it. It's gonna be hard. Insanely hard. But, you CAN do it.

 

I too disagree! I was having a similar conversation with my significant other last night. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, but if i got it into my head that i wanted to be a brain surgeon i don't believe i would get very far. Even if i kept up academically, i'm not particularly dexterous - i believe being a bit clumsy in the fingers is a major barrier to success in something fiddly like surgery.

Now take this situation and apply it to a weakness in maths or a problem learning other languages. These are then the barrier to success in a given area, regardless of how much hard work is put in. Telling people that anything is possible should perhaps be replaced with advice on recognising your individual strengths and weaknesses and defining your future accordingly. Part of recognising where you are strong or weak is putting the effort in, working hard, seeing what happens and not being disillusioned if you can't do everything well!

[sted]

is it time to bring back something like grammar schools?

 

If its based on some fair test then at least the best and brightest can be taught in a school without those who just dont want to be there (for whatever reason) at least then their lessons would be less disrupted and the lower ability kids can be taught more to their ability (yes i know academic ability isnt the be all and end all as some people are just good at passing tests but surely its also less disparaging to not compete with kids they have no chance of winning against?)

[X-13]

I disagree.

 

But when 200 people are applying for 4 slots in the space program, 98% are going to be disappointed, and by failing to teach children what competition is those 98% are going to be utterly unprepared for the failing.

 

I too disagree!

 

Perhaps I should rephrase it...

 

Nothing is true, Everything is permitted.

 

Meaning:

 

To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.

 

Going back to the astronaut analogy:

 

If you want to be an astronaut, go for it. But you have to accept that, just because you want it, it may not happen. [At least you tried. Well done for trying.]

[flyinghaggis]

It strikes me there's basically 2 schools of thought regarding the purpose of pupils sitting exams. That they should either :-

 

a) Show pupils have achieved a set level of ability

 

OR

 

b) Differentiate and band pupils based on their ability

 

More and more the system seems to be gearing itself towards a) but my personal feeling is that we should be focussing more on trying to differentiate pupils based on their exam grades. Ie. For any given year 20% of pupils should get A's , 20% get B's ,etc. Regardless of whether pupils are getting smarter or exams are getting easier if they aim to keep these percentages on target then it would, to my mind, give a fair and balanced assessment of a candidates ability.

[LosOjos]

It strikes me there's basically 2 schools of thought regarding the purpose of pupils sitting exams. That they should either :-

 

a) Show pupils have achieved a set level of ability

 

OR

 

b) Differentiate and band pupils based on their ability

 

More and more the system seems to be gearing itself towards a) but my personal feeling is that we should be focussing more on trying to differentiate pupils based on their exam grades. Ie. For any given year 20% of pupils should get A's , 20% get B's ,etc. Regardless of whether pupils are getting smarter or exams are getting easier if they aim to keep these percentages on target then it would, to my mind, give a fair and balanced assessment of a candidates ability.

 

The problem then though is that Joe Bloggs scores 90% this year and is amongst the top 20% nationwide so achieves an 'A', however next year little Jimmy Jones achieves 92% but falls just outside of the top 20% that year, only getting a 'B' despite actually doing better than Joe Bloggs did only 12 months earlier...

[cheredenine]

 

Going back to the astronaut analogy:

 

If you want to be an astronaut, go for it. But you have to accept that, just because you want it, it may not happen. [At least you tried. Well done for trying.]

 

This i can agree with. Basically "give it a go, but accept that failure is a possible outcome from which you must learn your lesson and move on"...