Some things to say about this:
Simply put, these pupils, teachers and parents were not expecting that the standards the examiners demanded were going to be as they should have been. Added to that is something I’ve seen many times – someone with a marking guide in her [or his] hand tends to go all Hitler on correct answers and as English is a notoriously fluid language, there are often “least worst answers”, “OK answers” and “pretty close”, rather than right or wrong.
By far the biggest problem is that the children have been educated poorly to this point, are virtually illiterate and the teachers are made to be all touchy-feely about it, when they should be hard taskmasters on anyone at GCSE level. Plus the foreign children for whom it is not their first language.
The reason the children are illiterate is half and half. Half the quality of teacher, coupled with the curriculum branch, teacher training institutions and staff themselves, all contributing to a poor educational culture. Then there are the parents. Whilst many are relying on the teachers to guide them and they’ll willingly cooperate, there are so many parents from hell these days that don’t seem to care or who throw their hands up and give up. Junior rules the roost at home.
1. First step is to reintroduce academic excellence, plus physical training. Schools would not automatically induct pupils on academic testing but on attitude and behaviour at infant level and via interview by heads and support staff. Part of the assessment criteria are the attitude of the parents, their own level of English, their willingness to work with the child and so on.
Forget geographical criteria. Those pupils not accepted can try for another school the parents think they stand a chance getting him into and a similar process takes place. Those who fail in that then go to educational centres where there are no more than 12 in a group, taken on by SN teachers employed by the council, with lower expectations. It should be flexible enough, the system, to allow re-interview at a later time for the school of aspiration.
2. Meanwhile, at GCSE level, simply go to the ESOL Cambridge First Certificate exam, crank it down just a fraction and there is the standard you need, complete with programme. With my class in Russia, a bit over 80% at Year 11 level scored a standard grade or higher. I’d expect about 40-60% of English GCSE students would achieve the same at the first attempt. It’s a two year course.
Get teachers to either knuckle down with the text and forget all the soft feelgood and entitlement guff or send them packing and get in people from outside who have shone in other fields to do the job, paying them a good salary. The Teacher’s Guide is excellent for Cambridge exams and practically holds your hand. Slavishly follow it and the results will eventually come.
Schools would need to retain the teacher with the best academic record to stay on as supervisor for the new teaching group, doing in-service training etc.
This would produce results within two years, provided such new teachers could get to the children in Year 9 and work forward – it would at least produce a majority pass in the 2nd year. Gradually, as time goes on, bring these new teachers into the selection process for inductee trainee teachers and don’t tolerate the PCist rubbish from the rump that’s left over.
The obvious criticism is that the children come to secondary near-illiterate. Yes, they do but based on what can be done with foreign students within a two year period, then in an immersion setting, which England is, much of the damage could be repaired – to a point.
Students with good attitude who don’t initially achieve are persevered with, those with poor attitude are released and can try for other schools in the area – the final point being special needs groups. Ruthlessness in this would change a great many attitudes almost immediately.
3. Obviously the level to target, concurrent with the above, is the nursery school. Infant heads used to be the best teachers in the school so I don’t know what’s happened down there in the past decade. Maybe they went all PCist too. Assuming there are still some of these left across England, their task is to assess parent and child who aspire to join that school.
Key problem
Parents: The best learners have parents who are interested and facilitate learning at home, demanding homework be done and withholding internet access until that work is done. Across the community, parents would need to extract the digit and the choice is free – if they and their child come up to scratch, the child will be accepted. if not, then they’re free to try elsewhere.
Schools will become known fairly quickly by word of mouth.
Teachers: Whilst many are dedicated in a sense – love kids, love the work – most need to buck their ideas up as more academic curricula come back in. Those who can’t move on. No place for the bleating PCist teacher who won’t demand excellence – in the nicest possible way and with individual aptitude taken into account.
Schools, with the new influx of professional people and new support services to retain them, will soon see they might need to change the way they teach. Children, in turn, will always adapt to new paradigms. You can demand excellence and still love the child.
………..
I can’t see how else it can happen.
Broadly agreed, chuck in education vouchers and you’ve got yourself a deal – apart from the physical training bit, what the heck has that got to do with anything? At school, I never ran a yard or threw a ball unless forced to, I never took part in any voluntary activities, sod that, I stuck to what I do best which is learning stuff and passing exams. And winding people up generally.
One educates the whole person, Mark.
More than that, physical activity makes learning easier. However, it does not have to be team sports.
Yes, and kids are bright enough to learn certain things for themselves like “I’m not interested in playing in the school orchestra” “I have no interest in field hockey” or “I am not very good at being on stage”.
If kids enjoy such stuff and want to give it a go, then great, but let’s not force all of this on everybody.
OTOH, reading and writing and maths is something that is useful for everybody and for wider society, you’ve got to learn that whether you enjoy it or not. I love a bit of mental arithmetic, others don’t, but either way, it’s a useful social skill, unlike being quite quick over 400 metres.
I was the slowest runner in school at age 15, but then discovered weightlifting and judo,which beat the heck out of rugby, cricket and the track and field crap.
Like Mark I agree it is a start, especially if education vouchers are included, also dump the idea of the traditional team sports and bring in things like archery etc.
Another thing, bring back the GCE O and A level exams being set the the three main universities, London, Oxford and Cambridge and not some outside organization that thinks it knows the standard and what the universities want. Also return the jumped up universities back to what they were – technical colleges – that way all forms of higher education would be covered.
I’m with Mark. I used to dread mandatory PE & sport as a June baby I was up against kids twice my size and almost a year ahead of me developmentally. Late year birth kids just became living tackle dummy’s for prospective 1st XV members. or we were sent on ‘cross country’ runs as we were written off by the games teachers.
Yes learning to lose builds character, but losing all the time can break it.
I’ll never forget the joy on reaching the 6th form and ‘games’ were no longer compulsory , I dropped it faster than a politician drops a promise.
What happened?
I am in total agreement with all of this.
But then I’m (among other things) an escaped Teacher.
Example of what has gorn worng ..
My wife’s employers (a large accountancy practice, in sight of St Pauls’) has instituted Exams for all entrants below Senior Manager level, consisting of approx “O”-level ENglish + Maths comprehension tests.
REcently they had 7 applicants, all supposed “graduates in the past 18 months … 1 found another post, 5 FAILED, and ONE (N Irleand, Scottish degree) passed. Meanwhile, a 57-year old lady, not worked for 25 years was takne on at the most jubior grade of Payroll person – she walked it with no problem.
Erm, err, must indicate something?
Greg. I think you’re a couple of years older than I am, I’m 59. You’ve been asleep!
As a mere C&G recipient, I was teaching graduates how to think back in the mid eighties.
This backsliding has been going on since before we were born!
When I was contemplating moving on from a job in ’89, I was interviewing for an assistant. I was really looking for a replacement for me.
There were many “graduates” few who could do the job, one a lady, who declined and a young Vietnamese, were my 2 choices.
DaveE.
I’m 66.
I was teaching (not all of the time) 1989-94.
And, yes, the rot had alredy set in by then – why do you think I did not stay the course?
I have an M.Sc. in Engineering (first degree is Physics)
The rot started in the 60s which is why I got out of teaching and back into engineering at that time.
I did a spot of lecturing in engineering in the 70s but the garbage was infiltrating the colleges by then so I’ve given teaching as in schools a big miss since then.
The rot set in long before the ’60s.
The difference in my brothers education, (2 of them,) and mine is marked.
My father was appalled when he had me on his knee, aged about 6, finding I was unable to read.
In his defence I will say he was very hard working management and not really having a lot of time being on 24Hr callout with no overtime, being management. Mother had 4 children to cater for so she didn’t have a lot of time either. Remember, no washing machines, that was mother. Lil Bro’s nappies took a bit of time.
Anyway, dad took it on himself to teach me to read.
He’d never heard of dyslexia and nor had anyone else.
He couldn’t understand why I could read a word at the top of the page, but not the same word further down. Nor for that matter could I, they looked different to me. I’m still a slow reader.
DaveE.
The key problem with current exams is that the results have no relativity – with most kids who bother to turn up getting A grades, how does an employer sort the wheat from the chav ? And how does a student get a realistic assessment of his/her achievement level.
Surely it would be better simply to apportion ‘grades’ across the whole cohort on a standard formula. For example, in any subject:-
The top 5% of marks get A*
The next 10% of marks get A
The next 10% of marks get B
The next 20% of marks get C
The next 20% of marks get D
The next 20% of marks get E
The final 15% get F
The above approach means that, in any one year, you are comparing the same group of entrants, who were taught to the same curriculum and sat the same exam. You are simply ranking them in order of achievement in those common circumstances.
If next year’s exam turns out to be ‘harder’ or ‘easier’, or if it is marked ‘tighter’, that doesn’t affect the outcome – the top 5% will still get A*, the next 10% get A, etc. under that year’s circumstances.
As a recruiting employer, I want to know how the kid applying for a job compared to his peers – the approach above would give that to employers, universities or anyone else interested in an objective outcome from a common set of measures.
@Mudplugger
“The top 5% of marks get A*
The next 10% of marks get A…” which is exactly how they used to be marked until the onset of 20+ years of grade inflation corruption (with D, E and F being regarded as Fails).
Beeb Radio spent today with hourly bulletins decrying “first time in twenty years that grades have failed to impove” instead of “State schools start looking at reality for first time in decades”
This is how the ICAEW mange their exams, ditto the Chartered Tax people.
Surely the first step in all this is to break the teacher’s unions? Utterly…
NO
The teachers Unions play a very valuable role, especially if you have a Head who is dodgy in any way.
[ I very nearly had to resort to this, at one point ]
A control-freak, or a religious nutter for instance.
Ditto if a Local Authority has a rush of blood to the head.
Try again.
Julia, you’re right but interestingly, so is Greg here. The issue is a longterm one. The ideologues began to dominate in the 70s – open plan, that sort of thing. They began to dominate curriculum branches and affected appointment of new teachers who, like in general today, must follow the PC line or they don’t get through HR.
And so it flowed – the young teachers were the new type, the old ones – the Mr. Chips – pensioned off or marginalized, subject heads were the new type, the curriculum innovations coming out from the universities again being sent out by the same ideologues. We had t the whole time – teaching conferences or workshops and the speakers were always this type.
Teachers made to feel that if they didn’t bring these changes onboard, they were failing the children. 3 Rs were anathema – OFSTED told me off one lesson for teaching a straight lesson on spelling/grammar, whdih I did deliberately to see what they’d say. Ten years earlier, that would have been a “good” lesson.
So the noose tightened. Excellence went down, new texts came in with pretty pictures the kids would like better and feel more “involved”. Excellence for its own sake diminished. Cambridge and Oxford were dominating the issuing of texts and Addison Wesley Longman – there were far fewer exercises and back up exercises.
At the same time, the admin pressure and box ticking teachers had to do got worse. Testing was almost as important, if not more important, than teaching itself. Teachers taught from the script, not from what they knew had worked. The paradigm changed.
The National Curriculum began to rule [1990 onwards]. At first it was all about science dominating and then changed back – teachers didn’t know if they were Arthur or Martha. And still the ideologues kept their relentless wrongness up – there’s an article from my profession on my site from a researcher who analysed things like Delphi and showed why they were producing bad outcomes.
Most teachers, not really into the theoretical side, just went with what was the paradigm of the time. And thus the thing went downhill. Labour came in and administered the last rites. Cameron and Co have no idea whatever or if they do, then they’re disingenuous. It’s everyone from the curriculum branches, the universities themselves, the teacher trainers, those who appoint – they must all be cleared out but Cameron doesn’t know how.
The left knows exactly how but they’re staying shtum – the Foners of the world.
So, the English examination marking team started to take spelling and punctuation into account and lookit what happens…….