Tories turn back the clock, it's back to O Levels

Gracchus_Babeuf

ruggedtoast wrote: »

The announcements on birchings, fagging, work-houses, and transportation to the colonies for those who fail the 11+ are due next month.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9547460/Michael-Gove-to-unveil-tough-new-O-Level-style-qualifications-for-16-year-olds.html



While I'm all for toughening up GCSE exams, which are far too easy and only really serve to show what low expectations our governments have had for state school students; I am not sure how returning to a system which has already proved itself unable to measure the abilities of the lower 50% of most school leavers is going to help.

Coursework, as long as its assessed properly, is a better measure of how someone is going to knuckle down in the average work place than exams, which favour the academic oriented.

Well, the issue is that with coursework you can cheat - with exams it's much more difficult to cheat and get away with it.
So I do support a return to exams - this will add rigour and ensure that kids actually learn facts instead of copying stuff from the internet.

The important issue is not whether to have exams or coursework, but whether we need exams at all at age 16. Why put loads of non-academic kids through exams when they cannot achieve decent grades? This is setting them up to fail. Much better would be to have public exams at 14 and then weed out the non-academic types and put them into trade schools where can learn to become electricians, carpenters, plumbers, etc. The brighter kids can then move up to an upper school that would see them up to A levels. This is the standard process in most countries, so why not here?

GeorgeHowell

CLAPTON wrote: »

you forget to include secondary modern schools in your wish list

We already have a great many of those in effect, they are called underperforming comprehensives.

CLAPTON

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

1) It would seem wrong to have a system that favours one sex over the other. Are you saying girls are less intelligent than boys ?

2) Nothing wrong with being tutored - but all the evidences suggests that a highly tutored public school university student will do slightly less well than the equivalent state pupil.

3) The UK's problem is not the top 10% in education (and never has been), but the bottom 20%. Surely it would make sense for the best teachers to teach the least able.

4) Nothing wrong with streaming or setting by ability

1 i dont understand your point. At eleven it would seem right to have equal number of girls and boys in grammar schools.

2. The evidence here is unclear, partly because it is hard to what equivalent means here

3. You are making a good case for the best in britain to only be the second best in the world

CLAPTON

GeorgeHowell wrote: »

We already have a great many of those in effect, they are called underperforming comprehensives.

The point being made is how does bring back grammars etc help the least able

StevieJ

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

O' levels were abolished in the UK in 1988.

Aparently this was slap bang in the middle of 18 years of Conservative government.

Are we saying that the Blessed Margaret who took on the EU, the miners, the print unions, the Eastern Bloc and Argentina was cowed by a load of lefty geography teachers with leather patches on their elbows ?

And coincidentally more Comeprehensive schools were set up under Maggie than any other Minister for Education

ILW

CLAPTON wrote: »

The point being made is how does bring back grammars etc help the least able

Why are we obsessed with the less able?

ukcarper

ILW wrote: »

Why are we obsessed with the less able?

What percentage of people went to grammar school and how many able children were condemned because they failed an exam at 11.

nicko33

ILW wrote: »

Why are we obsessed with the less able?

They're making the internet untidy with all their spelling mistakes. It is our civic duty to correct them.

Pennywise

ukcarper wrote: »

What percentage of people went to grammar school and how many able children were condemned because they failed an exam at 11.

Don't confuse what's wrong with the 11+ exam as opposed to what's wrong with lumping everyone together in comps.

There are far better ways of evaluating which children should receive a mostly academic education (grammar) against which children should receive a mostly practical/technical education (technical college).

It's the 11+ exam that's flawed not selection in the bigger scheme of things.

As for numbers, in my home town when I was a teenager, 40% went to the town grammar and 60% went to the town secondary/technical school. That was in the days when most towns had a grammar so you didn't have the stupid situation of today where only the top 5/10% get into the few grammars that remain that have caused it to be elitist.

note_2

i completed high school education in 2010.

i noticed a big difference from when i started, we were just taught the work and then did exams, whilst at the end we were taught to do exams, not to work them out....

by that time we were all turned into exam machines...... its become big business, things like resitting and teaching people to pass exams.....

one other thing, why are there different exam boards? the way they get more people doing their exams is by making theirs easier........a bit like having 5 different boards doing driving tests, no, you need one uniform qualification....absolutely ridiculous....

we were openly told that we were using a particular exam board because it was easier than the others!!