How hard could it be to examine everyone both by coursework and by final examination, simply awarding the lower mark as the final grade?
However, there is no avoiding the fact that the "gender gap" began precisely with the introduction of Thatcher's wretched GCSEs. Girls do better than boys because the whole thing is designed to ensure that they do. Not the only problem with GCSE. But certainly one of them.
In Saint Helena, they study for, and are awarded, the export strength IGCSE, not permitted to be used in the state schools of its country of origin, but lapped up in areas of historic British influence around the world. No wonder that young Saint Helenians and others are aghast on encountering their equally "qualified" but woefully less educated contemporaries from over here.
And no wonder that Afro-Caribbean parents, even ones born in the United Kingdom, send their children, especially their sons, back to the West Indies in order to provide them with a traditional English education. Note the lack of inverted commas in that last sentence.
David Cameron and Michael Gove can do nothing about this, because that would entail denouncing Margaret Thatcher in the strongest possible terms.
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Gove says that state schools can now offer the IGSCE. But they don't and they won't, apart perhaps from the Lenin High Schools.
ReplyDeleteDear Michael Groves, as the BBC calls him, could say anything he liked and absolutely no one would ever notice.
ReplyDeleteThe solution is O-levels. Denounce Thatcher and bring them back.
Sadly, anonymous is wrong. State schools have already signed up to do just that. I'm not sure why David and all his anonymous 'commenters' as so opposed to this
ReplyDeleteNo, Anonymous is spot on. We all know which half-dozen state schools.
ReplyDeleteWhy is Fel so opposed to O-levels? Knows that he/she would never have passed them?
ReplyDeleteYour idea for assessment is brilliant, far too good ever to be allowed to happen.
Why is Tim so opposed to Fel? He knows he/she can beat him at tiddlywinks.
ReplyDeleteWhy the lower mark and not the higher?
ReplyDeleteHowever, there is no avoiding the fact that the "gender gap" began precisely with the introduction of Thatcher's wretched GCSEs. Girls do better than boys because the whole thing is designed to ensure that they do. Not the only problem with GCSE. But certainly one of them.
ReplyDeleteThis assumes what you're trying to prove - that boys should do better in exams than girls. How do you know the pre-GCSE gender gap is a "true" measure of ability that has been warped by the GCSE? The other possibility is that the previous system inherently favoured boys, and GCSEs have corrected the imbalance. How can you rule this out?
Girls always did slightly better, and always will in the mid-teens. What we have now is a contrived situation in which they do absurdly better, as advocated in books called things like "Girl-Friendly Schols" (schools were never girl-unfriendly) by the people who went on to devise GCSE.
ReplyDeleteAre these the children who are paid to go to school Mr Lindsay?
ReplyDelete£1000 per child per annum. A leach on the hard working working class British tax payer. This is a disgrace!
On TDC and elsewhere they do not do this.
God Save Mrs Queen!
Their parents, British Citizens, could not otherwise afford to let them stay on, and the results, both statistical and in terms of that old-fashioned thing called education, confirm that it is money well spent. Many of them end up over here, traditionally doing the jobs that people born here will not do, but increasingly, I predict, doing those that people born here are no longer equipped to do.
ReplyDeleteIt is good to know that the British taxpayer is still paying for someone, somewhere to have a proper British education. And it is at least a bonus to know that those thus benefitting are themselves British. As it is to know that they might very well devote their future lives to bringing those benefits to the poor, benighted Mother Country where they are no longer available. Money well spent, indeed.