Gove to reintroduce O-Levels

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Halfpenny

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<a class="postlink" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18529471" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18529471</a>

I thought I didn't need any more reasons to want to repeatedly dropkick him in the face, but he's just taking the piss now. There will apparently be two separate qualifications, a return to o-levels and a modern version of the CSE. Hello to a two-tier system, leaving less academic kids behind and creating a glass ceiling.

What is wrong with the GCSE? It served me perfectly well, the A level isn't anywhere near as easy as he likes to make it out to be. Gove is single handedly ruining the state education system with his ridiculous schemes and this one I hope will be his downfall.
 
Halfpenny said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18529471

I thought I didn't need any more reasons to want to repeatedly dropkick him in the face, but he's just taking the piss now. There will apparently be two separate qualifications, a return to o-levels and a modern version of the CSE. Hello to a two-tier system, leaving less academic kids behind and creating a glass ceiling.

What is wrong with the GCSE? It served me perfectly well, the A level isn't anywhere near as easy as he likes to make it out to be. Gove is single handedly ruining the state education system with his ridiculous schemes and this one I hope will be his downfall.
Click to expand...
No, it is even easier, to the point of being devalued beyond repair.
This was at least in part a deliberate policy, in order to make the New Labour Government look better by getting more and more kids into 'university'.
The harsh truth is that many of these universities are glorified FE colleges offering worthless degrees while saddling students with huge debt. Many of these students had no place going to university, it was a conceit created by a party mired in politically correctness.
Many would have been better suited to vocational training, after which they would earn a lot more money than the tens of thousands of 'graduates' with crap BAs trying to pay off their loans while serving you coffee in Costa.
The teaching unions went along with this as it made them look better if it looked like results were improving.
The evidence of my own eyes, interviewing and employing many young people over the last decade, is that standards of basic literacy and numeracy are at crisis levels.
GCSEs are a joke. An 'inclusive' mess which encourage mediocrity and fail to prepare young people for the fact that the real world is competitive.
I don't know what the answer is, but GCSEs are so shit they are probably given away in Kinder Eggs.
 
LongsightM13 said:
Halfpenny said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18529471

I thought I didn't need any more reasons to want to repeatedly dropkick him in the face, but he's just taking the piss now. There will apparently be two separate qualifications, a return to o-levels and a modern version of the CSE. Hello to a two-tier system, leaving less academic kids behind and creating a glass ceiling.

What is wrong with the GCSE? It served me perfectly well, the A level isn't anywhere near as easy as he likes to make it out to be. Gove is single handedly ruining the state education system with his ridiculous schemes and this one I hope will be his downfall.
Click to expand...
No, it is even easier, to the point of being devalued beyond repair.
This was at least in part a deliberate policy, in order to make the New Labour Government look better by getting more and more kids into 'university'.
The harsh truth is that many of these universities are glorified FE colleges offering worthless degrees while saddling students with huge debt. Many of these students had no place going to university, it was a conceit created by a party mired in politically correctness.
Many would have been better suited to vocational training, after which they would earn a lot more money than the tens of thousands of 'graduates' with crap BAs trying to pay off their loans while serving you coffee in Costa.
The teaching unions went along with this as it made them look better if it looked like results were improving.
The evidence of my own eyes, interviewing and employing many young people over the last decade, is that standards of basic literacy and numeracy are at crisis levels.
GCSEs are a joke. An 'inclusive' mess which encourage mediocrity and fail to prepare young people for the fact that the real world is competitive.
I don't know what the answer is, but GCSEs are so shit they are probably given away in Kinder Eggs.
Click to expand...
I never denied there were mickey mouse subjects. From experience, the 'academic' subjects I sat were difficult, and they prepared me well, and I'm now at a good uni doing a subject I enjoy. But hey, let's not turn this into a student bashing thread.

JoeMercer'sWay said:
GCSE's need making a lot tougher.

Whether this is the right way to do it I genuinely don't know.

There were higher and foundation papers at GCSE and schools wanted you on the higher as it looked better for their results, don't see much changing.
Click to expand...
The foundation paper was there to allow less academically able kids to leave school with a decent qualification, given the whole thing is under one umbrella there is no difference between a C obtained on a foundation paper (which is the maximum grade you can get on one) and a C on a higher paper. Under this system kids will be forced to sit totally different exams for totally different qualifications, which will undoubtedly create a glass ceiling for kids sitting the lower exam, and the fact that it will be a different qualification on their CVs will mean they are hindered in the employment market by that second-rate qualification. This is a terrible reform.
 
The only difference between how kids are taught now and how kids were taught 20 years ago is that there's no discipline.

Bring back discipline into schools and you will see a massive improvement in education.
 
I presume under this system though with the O-Levels and CSE's that the teachers will decide which kids should sit which exams depending on how capable they are in say year 10 and that they would be able to choose themselves should they believe they are better than the teacher thinks.

Children who are 'academically challenged' would fail an O-Level and probably not do great on the easier ones either but would maybe pass. I am in favour of the exams getting harder, I think for the sake of universities and degrees actually getting some real credibility back it needs to happen. At the moment you have such a huge amount of children who get A's and A*'s at GCSE who aren't really as good as the grades suggest who then struggle and drop out at university because it is such a gap from college to uni in terms of workload and diffuculty.

So with this, the children who aren't so great academically will be picked out at 16 and then given the chance earlier to do other things like apprenticeships or training in a specialist field instead of doing academics at college and just wasting another 2 years.
 
Part of the problem is that exam boards are competing against each other for expensive contracts with schools and colleges. Colleges care only about league tables so will choose the exam board for each subject that they believe has the easiest syllabus, exam boards only care about making money so try to make their syllabus easier. I have just finished sitting my A levels and noticed that biology, a subject I used to really enjoy was no longer scientific and was more like geography, based solely on conservation and the environment, this is due to the fact it us undoubtedly easier to the average student. Furthermore the exam boards often sell themselves to colleges by giving them information on what 'might' appear on exams. I went to a college rated in the top 5 in the country with two thousand students studying A levels, therefore it had very large contracts with exam boards. On several occasion my tutors would tell us what they 'believe' would come up in exams, information gained from discussion with people from the exam boards after threatening to move to a different one.

Therefore I do believe it is easier to achieve top grades, however I don’t believe people should be judged solely academically. Now that more people are getting straight A's there is more competition at University for the top courses. This means Universities judge more on character, personality and the suitability of the candidate to the course because the grades (often in subjects completely irrelevant to the course you wish to study) are now just expected, and people are selected now in a more fair and relevant way.
 
bermudian goat said:
Part of the problem is that exam boards are competing against each other for expensive contracts with schools and colleges. Colleges care only about league tables so will choose the exam board for each subject that they believe has the easiest syllabus, exam boards only care about making money so try to make their syllabus easier. I have just finished sitting my A levels and noticed that biology, a subject I used to really enjoy was no longer scientific and was more like geography, based solely on conservation and the environment, this is due to the fact it us undoubtedly easier to the average student. Furthermore the exam boards often sell themselves to colleges by giving them information on what 'might' appear on exams. I went to a college rated in the top 5 in the country with two thousand students studying A levels, therefore it had very large contracts with exam boards. On several occasion my tutors would tell us what they 'believe' would come up in exams, information gained from discussion with people from the exam boards after threatening to move to a different one.

Therefore I do believe it is easier to achieve top grades, however I don’t believe people should be judged solely academically. Now that more people are getting straight A's there is more competition at University for the top courses. This means Universities judge more on character, personality and the suitability of the candidate to the course because the grades (often in subjects completely irrelevant to the course you wish to study) are now just expected, and people are selected now in a more fair and relevant way.
Click to expand...
Good post
 
Effectively the Foundation/Higher system was/is a glass ceiling. Labour tore apart the Education system and this generation is suffering as a result because the world they are entering (regarding what education is supposed to teach them) is too advanced for them. The only thing I agree with Labour on was to place emphasis on the BTEC system, though I still believe BTEC students should do a single exam to contribute to their final grade.
 
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