What do you think of the UK education system?

bap98189

What a load of twaddle. Everyone who thinks the education system is broken and was far better 25 years ago, take off the rose-tinted spectacles and get real.

Let's not pretend 25 years ago every single pupil left school literate and numerate. It didn't happen. Many with lower abilities were ignored by teachers until they turned 16 and left. For goodness sake, when I was at school, it was commonplace for the school to refuse to allow less able pupils to take any exams, rather than try to educate them.

Schools have far more facilities, teachers, teaching assistants, than they did 15 or 20 years ago. There is far more support available for pupils whether disadvantaged or not. I went to school 25 years ago and any kid with learning difficulties was just fired off to the "special school". There was no individual learning plans, no support, no attempt to integrate them, they were just shunted off and forgotten about. What about all the effort that goes into combating bullying and suchlike? Again this was non-existent when I was at school.

For sure the education system is not perfect. I will agree it is far too focused on specific targets, but you have to measure performance somehow, and until someone comes up with a better method we are stuck with the one we have.

I will agree that exams are meaningless if the pass rates are as high as they are nowadays. The solution seems simple - make the exams harder. But is the pass rate so high because exams have become easier, or could some of it be down to improved teaching?

saintjammyswine

Not rose tinted specatcles and at 36 I went to school at a similar time. I am involved in and speak to many people within education and employers. They have told me that the single biggest threat to UK business and employment relating to the education system is not specialist skills but the very basic skills such as literacy, numeracy, social and conversational skills. They are reporting there is a significant drop in these abilities, regardless of acamdic ability. In fact one person even stated that graduates were worse than those who had come through a vocational route.

InA

jc808 wrote: »

Agree!!!!

Many are chidrlen who bad in writing!!! Cannot spelled most words, but can open the playstations!!!
You children are not at mathematics level which sufficient, and is able not to read at accepting levles.... much much bad

OMG u are soooo bhind the tmes. txt spk is the lnguage of the ftre, it clled mdrnisation.

InA

bap98189 wrote: »

I will agree that exams are meaningless if the pass rates are as high as they are nowadays. The solution seems simple - make the exams harder. But is the pass rate so high because exams have become easier, or could some of it be down to improved teaching?

the issue is not that the exams are easier, but that the students are taught how to pass the exams instead of learning and getting a good grounding in the subject.

dawyldthing

InA wrote: »

the issue is not that the exams are easier, but that the students are taught how to pass the exams instead of learning and getting a good grounding in the subject.

It is, thats why pupils are taught to the test. This is why, if pupils cannot be adapted to the tests then the schools get branded 'bad schools' as they haven't moulded them into the 'norm'.

But what someone said about the basics - it is soo true. In schools to learn something new it should all be about Vygotskys zone of proximal development so you'll learn addition then go on to multiplication when you have mastered addition and so on. But the problem with our education system is that they all aim towards the end product - the exams. So if little Jonny can't understand addition then they will be less likely to understand multiplication, but the national curriculum is so prescriptive and set in stone that there isn't much chance of going back over a topic properly, hence if a subject is missed then they won't go back over it until the following year and if they don't grasp it then then it will be missed until the following year and so on, until they get branded in year 9 by the exam paper that they will take and know what grades they could possibly get, knowing that a lower maths paper will not get them the c they need to get on the courses that they want to do, which demorolises them and then they have problems in school.


It is one vicious cycle, but those above need to realise that a 'one size fits all' system doesn't really work. What would be better is choices similar to a college system, but at 14 instead of 16. Why? Because there is no point in trying to do 10 GCSE's if they won't be used in life and if they know they are going to fail at them all. It should be based on what people are good at and not what they are not good at. There are some people who are academic and others that are more vocational based, so lets adapt the system to reflect this rather than it is at the moment.

They have started to do this, but its very much few and far between lets be honest.

adindas

WhiteHorse wrote: »

Either every child in Britain has suddenly become a towering genius, .....

Which could it be?

Lol genius in playing video game,
genius in cheating writing an essay ...

Coopdivi

saintjammyswine wrote: »

Not rose tinted specatcles and at 36 I went to school at a similar time. I am involved in and speak to many people within education and employers. They have told me that the single biggest threat to UK business and employment relating to the education system is not specialist skills but the very basic skills such as literacy, numeracy, social and conversational skills. They are reporting there is a significant drop in these abilities, regardless of acamdic ability. In fact one person even stated that graduates were worse than those who had come through a vocational route.

Irony alert

Coopdivi

saintjammyswine wrote: »

One of the main problems is when children are not "made to do it by adults". It is not just the education system at fault (although it is broken) but the family unit and the sense of personal responsibility that used to be instilled through a strong parental figure(s).

There are currently no real consequences for children to not try hard. OK, they may not get the top jobs but they know they will be supported ceertainly through their late teens and early twenties if not longer by the state and third sector organisations.

I saw a really good cartoon recently (not just Family Guy) where there were two frames side by side. One the left showed a 1950's mother & father marching into a child's bedroom to asking "what is the meaning of this test mark?" (a low mark). One the right, the frame showed the same parents in 2012 marching to the school and remonstrating with the teacher rather than darling little Johnny about the same mark.

Sums it up really....it's not our fault, it must be the state.

More twaddle.

The 1950s version is just a figment of the animator's imagination gleaned I would suspect from some earnest but crappy public information film.

I'm 57 and went to school between 1959 and 1970. My parents never marched into my bedroom demanding better exam results. It didn't happen to any of my school mates either. Admittedly I failed the 11+ exam so maybe that makes me thick .

No SJS, there's too many people like yourself who like to look at the past as some sort of wondrous golden era when you haven't actually experienced it.

A lot of school facilities were pretty grim in those days. At my primary school the toilets were outside in the playground. The urinals had no roof on them. The desks and chairs in the class rooms were a sort of all-in-one wooden construction with inkwells. Of course we all used fountain pens which leaked all over the place. My secondary modern had no swimming pool so we had to walk to the town's open-air pool once a fortnight during the summer term when it was open. So you can imagine how often we got lessons :rotfl:

Oh and before I forget, because somebody's bound to come along and have a whine about modern youngsters' lack of discipline blah blah blah, when I was at primary school I got the cane for spelling a word wrong. It might have been academic but I'm not sure.....

adindas

believe it or not
Some universities in the UK have to teach fractional, roots, transposition for the first year students as some students simply can not cope with it. Irony ....

In other countries even in the developing countries fractional, roots, transposition are taught at GCSE level, some are even in elementary school. Irony to see this happens in the UK.

The school children and parents nowadays have too much power and control to the school so difficult for the teachers to discipline the pupils. The pupils spend too much time in playing video game, texting, chatting, spending hours of phone call .... oh dear ....

Owain_Moneysaver

**Juice** wrote: »

What annoys me is that every year when results come out it's "oh it's so easy now, a donkey could pass"...why then are people leaving school with no GCSE's or a lot of ungraded?

Because they spent 5 years playing truant and smoking pot in the toilets.