Today’s moan-iness comes at the expense of the education system… in particular the whole debacle that is becoming of the GCSE.
I know, you are probably thinking this is more a June topic but for those unaware of the timings of such things, rising 16s across the UK are currently taking their mock exams so the subject is fairly relevant right now, especially in my household.
I do not want to start on the tone of “exams are getting easier” as is so trendy to do, because even were it true (and I wouldn’t know having only a vague memory of the content of my own GCSE’s) that makes little difference to the pressure felt by those sitting them. With pressure to have all post-16’s remaining in education, the system is being tweaked constantly to create an ‘everyone wins’ situation, but in reality is this and the fact the kids are hearing outcry from the nation’s media about how easy the exams are simply placing more pressure on them? If they are hearing that there is no way they can fail, the worry about what will happen if they do is surely all the greater?
So just what are these tweaks?
For those unaware of the process, I will explain a little from my own experience. Bear in mind, child one sat her GCSE’s two years ago, child two is sitting hers this year… my own were too long ago to be relevant, but I can see the way the system has changed just over the past two years.
The biggest change is that rather than having eighteen months of learning then six months of exam prep, revision and practice papers prior to a few weeks of frantically prying the knowledge from the back of your brain, the kids are tested on each module individually. And for those around my age, I do not mean in the form of coursework which was so demonised in our day (that seems to have fallen by the wayside) but that they are sitting exams at fourteen which contribute to their final results. There is some eight months or so of formal teaching, and then a round of exams on everything learnt so far; those topics are then deemed closed, knowledge forgotten and new things taught. I suppose it is endemic of the short attention spans of today’s youth that it is done this way, but is this a trait we should be pandering to? In ten years or so, when this generation are surgeons and the like, would you want to hear “I can’t really remember how to do this; we, like, did it in the first term or summat! ” How will this generation grow up to teach the next if they are unable to remember anything themselves? “Sir, I don’t understand!” “Neither do I, let’s just google it.”
Okay, testing at the end of year ten (the fourth year to oldies such as myself!) might give those performing well a great boost, but for the most part the kids have not developed the skills needed to learn, revise, remember and recall information before they are being given final grades on huge chunks of their exams. In our case, daughter did not perform well… we were not really expecting her to given the problems we were having at the time, but seeing such poor grades after having been predicted A’s B’s and C’s at the beginning of the year had her completely floored. Do we really think it is worth putting them through such a potentially harmful process? Living in an area with a fairly high rate of teen suicide it’s a worrying thing indeed to see your child lose all hope with one swift action, which left us all walking on eggshells for weeks after.
GCSE year two seems to offer pretty little opportunity for actual learning. Especially given that they are almost starting from scratch in some subjects, taking on a new module for their second round of examinations. I was quite stunned a few weeks ago when child two proudly announced “Mum, I got a B for my mock mock today!”… I know you went back over that sentence, didn’t you? What can I say but: yes, you did read it right…. Examinations are in June… so Mock Examinations are in December… and at the beginning of November the children were sitting mocks of their upcoming mocks… WHY?? That gives teaching time in this school year thus far of something like ten weeks out of sixteen – but consider for a moment that a lot of that classroom time is being spent on past papers, revision methods and such, are the children being taught a subject or are they simply being taught how to pass an examination? Are we placing more importance on receiving certificates than on the imparting of knowledge?
The current scandal over the release of information about examination contents perfectly highlights this. We all want our children to do well, don’t get me wrong, but why should teachers have the right to choose what they teach based on what will be tested? Surely an entire subject should be taught and the exam content should reflect that.
I do not understand the concept of modules at all if I am honest. For instance, one of daughter’s subjects is History. She received a half-GCSE last year based on the module of “Ancient Medicine”; this year’s is “The American West”. Now whilst I fully appreciate the concept of studying certain elements in detail, is it not quite important that the kids are taught about more specific historic occurrences? And is this maybe one case for the return of the old system of coursework, whereby there is room to study one or two topics in detail whilst other more general history is being taught?
History in itself is something I feel quite passionately about, mostly because I managed to get through my entire secondary education without a single history lesson in spite of the fact it was always a great passion of mine. I do not know if the subject exists on any plane nowadays (I could do a websearch and find out, I know, but the internet is attention-seeking in the worst way today!) but we studied Humanities; a bizarre amalgam of history, geography and religious studies which was taught by a group of teachers of all three subjects. Throughout the entire time at the school, my lessons were taught by geography teachers and their lack of passion for something outside the subject for which they had trained was always quite apparent! Of course, this meant that when choosing my GCSE subjects I stuck with what I knew so I walked away with a mediocre geography GCSE – with the benefit of hindsight, though, I’d have done far better at history… digressing again I know… sounding bitter? Not I!!
Anyway…
All of this complaining leaves me with one question:
Is the GCSE relevant to today’s society?
Does it fully represent the aims of the education system as-is?
Ok, that’s two questions, so before I descend into a Monty Python sketch it is impossible to climb out of I will continue and hope no-one else notices…
Given that the end-goal is a system in which every child leaves school with a qualification, you would have to question if subject-specific certificates are needed at all. Maybe the way forwards is a US-style award representing the fact that a certain level was achieved across the board. There is a certain comfort from knowing before the completion of your final year of school whether you have done all you need to… and this would certainly avoid all the uncertainty that comes of results day. One has to wonder if that is not something government are trying to sneak past us in the form of the Baccalaureate; whether they might one day announce that this is the new way of doing things… but would this necessarily be a bad thing? An all-in qualification which shows a standard has been reached over a range of subjects is surely a better gauge than a collection of unconnected grades. How many employers look at a CV and refuse someone an interview on the basis of that D grade at GCSE art, after all?
And with the age of compulsory schooling raising to seventeen in 2013 and eighteen in 2015 one would have to wonder if testing at sixteen in any form will be either relevant or necessary. To my mind, a formal test is only really needed on leaving compulsory education to give an idea of standards to potential employers or higher education providers so we could cut out the pressure placed on our 14-16’s altogether.
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