UK Education

[Gardian]

I have no special brief for Mr Gove, but is it possible that he is in the process of puncturing the myth that standards have been steadily increasing over the years?

I mean in no way to denigrate the efforts of all students sitting their GCSE & GCE exams, but surely the absurdity of A+ grades calls the whole marking system in to question?

[Rabbie]

Many years ago when I took A levels the grades were fixed by the percentage of candidates who reached a certain mark. So to get an A you needed to be in the top 10% and to get a B to be in the top 20% and so on.

[Mac]

Its about time that the powers that be realised that not every child/young person is academic. When I went to secondary school I went to a Technical School-those who were academic did an academic syllabus -those who weren't did more practical subjects(then it was metalwork,accounts and such like) We need to go back to allowing the non-academic youngsters to learn hands-on practical subjects that will allow them to get a job not a second rate academic qualification. Whilst I did the academic syllabus I was in awe of people who could make things;do shorthand ect. Non academic does not mean second rate.

[Clarkkent]

[quote user="Rabbie"]Many years ago when I took A levels the grades were fixed by the percentage of candidates who reached a certain mark. So to get an A you needed to be in the top 10% and to get a B to be in the top 20% and so on.[/quote]

This was the case. It was known as "norm-related assessment". Marks were adjusted to fit in with the norms and so were relative to the performance of the entire population of students taking that examination.

One of the consequences of this when applied to grammar school selection was that the performance of girls was significantly superior to boys (since girls mature earlier than boys). Based on performance, more girls were likely to qualify for grammar school entry than boys, but keeping the numbers equal meant that some girls who had performed better than boys were denied entrance.

With the growth of bodies like BEC and TEC, "criterion-related assessment" became common. This involves setting standards for performance at various levels and and awarding the qualification at that level to all students who achieve the appropriate standards. It is regarded as much fairer since it is not arbitrary or discriminating.

I think that one of the main educational problems in the UK is the fact that the political elite come mainly from a very narrow segment of society and have little real knowledge or understanding of the world outside that experience. The country does need graduates - universities should be training people in the intellectual skills required of high level managers (analysis, decision making, presentation and so on) but university should not be seen as the only educational experience available at post-compulsory education level. It is bizarre that nursing should have become a graduate-only profession and the proposal to do the same with the police is ludicrous.

[Russethouse]

A young relative of mine took GCSE Maths last week which he swears started with the question:how any times does 7 divide into 21? !!!!!!!

On last nights question time Mr Gove was accused of being enamoured of 1950's style education, which was then described as a failure!

[Clarkkent]

[quote user="Russethouse"]A young relative of mine took GCSE Maths last week which he swears started with the question:how any times does 7 divide into 21? !!!!!!! [/quote]

In my O-level Geography paper (c. 1958) there was an outline map of the British Isles with four rivers marked. One was quite long and entered the sea between Kent and Essex, a short way inland a town with a name beginning with L was shown. The river and town had to be identified. Another river entered the sea in the wide estuary between Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and part way along its U-shaped progress was a town beginning with N. The other rivers and towns were equally obvious. This question earned 20% of the marks available.

Easy questions are not new.

[Hoddy]

When I took my geography O level, 20% of the mark was on map reading. All you had to do was learn the symbols by rote.

I agree that it is a problem that so many of our education ministers have not ben through the state system. Also, I think that the ministers change too often and each of them wants to make their own mark. I regard several of the ones who were in office during my time as a teacher as loonies.

The third thing I think that is sadly missing now is the firms who used to give apprenticeships, particularly to likely lads. The training they had from working beside decent working men taught them much about skills for life as well skills for a particular job.

Hoddy

[Quillan]

Before you tackle the problem you have to tackle the cause. It does not matter if you belive this new exam system might be right or wrong it seems to me that this is an attempt by the Tories to wind Labour and the unions up.

To me the cause of the problem is politicians and successive governments who keep playing with both education and the NHS. I think, as I remember it, we have only had one minister of education in the last ten years or so who actually came from and schools background (under Labour I think, ex headmistress) but they didn't last very long. I think they should stop interfering and allow Ofsted to run education, set exams etc. They should also talk to parents and the private sector more to ensure we have people leaving schools, universities etc with skill sets that employers actually want.

I still believe the basics should be kept, reading, writing and arithmetic. I think the old system we had at primary school to learn spelling still has its place (twenty word a week to learn and a spelling test on Fridays - got of school 30 minutes early if you got 20/20). Learning the multiplication tables by heart was another.

Somebody mentioned technical stuff and science. You can't do that these days, all that health and safety stuff gets in the way. We cast and made our own surface table and block at school, could you imaging them allowing kids to pour molten iron these days? I wonder if they still do TD these days or is the thought of kids having compasses with points on the end too dangerous? Girls doing cooking, they might pour scalding water over themselves. It's all getting rather ridiculous.

[Clarkkent]

[quote user="Hoddy"]The third thing I think that is sadly missing now is the firms who used to give apprenticeships, particularly to likely lads. The training they had from working beside decent working men taught them much about skills for life as well skills for a particular job. Hoddy[/quote]

Times have changed. Apprenticeships provided individuals to work with an individual craftsman and so end up with all the skills they would need to perform their trade for the rest of their working lives. Technology, in particular information technology, has changed that. The industrial landscape has changed so comprehensibly that apprenticeship is no longer an appropriate training method. Its only large scale retention (in a disguised form) is in such things as the clinical component of medical training where students are attached to a consultant's firm.

When I was young, manufacturing companies employed people as toolmakers and draughtsmen. These jobs are, in the main, long gone, replaced by CAD/CAM.

[Quillan]

A lot of apprenticeships were also offered by government establishments or owned services like GPO, British Rail, Gas Board, Electricity companies, water board and alike. Some of these took on hundreds every year. When they get privatised and have to work on a budget and make a profit apprenticeships are the first thing to go. [:(]

[Val_2]

My nephew has just left school (he will be 16 on sunday) with no qualifications whatsoever apart from a prize book for being the best in class for making up a menu for a meal, writing about it and how much it would cost??????????

What the hell are those schools teaching them over there. Poor kid has no hope of any apprenticeships or even a job where he lives as there is nothing locally, he is too young to drive and my sister cannot run him around and his dad is a tramper away all week. OK he is no academic but surely it should be down to the secondary system to try and sort the kids out with something, they did in my day with professionals coming in to talk about apprenticeships or careers in banks etc and even here in France, there are expos every year for those leaving Lycée called Azimut and to which the students are taken by their profs to see what is out there for them after the BAC etc.

I suppose now my nephew will be at home all day, watching TV, playing computer games and being told to sign on for the dole whilst both his parents work to support him and the rest of the family.

[woolybanana]

Scroll down to the bottom of this link to see some questions from older GCE and recent GCSE papers. There are even a couple of complete papers in pdf form.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18535693

[Quillan]

[quote user="Val_2"]

My nephew has just left school (he will be 16 on sunday) with no qualifications whatsoever apart from a prize book for being the best in class for making up a menu for a meal, writing about it and how much it would cost??????????

What the hell are those schools teaching them over there. Poor kid has no hope of any apprenticeships or even a job where he lives as there is nothing locally, he is too young to drive and my sister cannot run him around and his dad is a tramper away all week. OK he is no academic but surely it should be down to the secondary system to try and sort the kids out with something, they did in my day with professionals coming in to talk about apprenticeships or careers in banks etc and even here in France, there are expos every year for those leaving Lycée called Azimut and to which the students are taken by their profs to see what is out there for them after the BAC etc.

I suppose now my nephew will be at home all day, watching TV, playing computer games and being told to sign on for the dole whilst both his parents work to support him and the rest of the family.

[/quote]

The thing is these days is that people with degrees are two a penny. Why bother employing somebody with a couple of GCSE's when you can have a graduate for the same price who has a proven ability to learn. Last year when I read about how many graduates who had left university without jobs to go to they estimated that over 50% this year would have no job. That means employers can be very picky on who they take as there will be a very big pool to choose from. So leaving with no qualifications makes life very difficult when it comes to job hunting.

Do they still do night school in the UK? Perhaps, seeing as he has shown an interest in food, he might think of training to be a cook/chef. Extremely hard work when your at the bottom of the pile but can be quite gratifying as you move upwards. Another food related job which might interest him is photographing food for menus and magazines. Apparently there are not many specialists that do this sort of photography, they are always in demand according to one of our old guests and the monetary rewards are quite high.

[Hoddy]

Val2 I find that truly shocking if rather puzzling.

Your nephew cannot know yet that he has no passes unless he hasn't sat for any of the exams.

If that is the case both he and his parents must have known this since January at least so I find it all a bit puzzling. As far as I know (my information may be out of date) only the kids who have been persistently absent or have failed to do their coursework get nothing at all.

Hoddy

[Hoddy]

"Somebody mentioned technical stuff and science. You can't do that these days, all that health and safety stuff gets in the way. We cast and made our own surface table and block at school, could you imaging them allowing kids to pour molten iron these days? I wonder if they still do TD these days or is the thought of kids having compasses with points on the end too dangerous? Girls doing cooking, they might pour scalding water over themselves. It's all getting rather ridiculous."

That simply isn't true Q. Metalwork was phased out at the same time as DS/HE. Science goes on pretty much as it always has the main constraint is money. Science lessons cost far more than other subjects because of its high demand for consumables.

On the subject of money - I wonder if people realise what big business examinations has become ? In my old school, after energy costs, it was always our biggest expenditure.

Hoddy

[idun]

[quote user="Val_2"]

My nephew has just left school (he will be 16 on sunday) with no qualifications whatsoever apart from a prize book for being the best in class for making up a menu for a meal, writing about it and how much it would cost??????????

What the hell are those schools teaching them over there. Poor kid has no hope of any apprenticeships or even a job where he lives as there is nothing locally, he is too young to drive and my sister cannot run him around and his dad is a tramper away all week. OK he is no academic but surely it should be down to the secondary system to try and sort the kids out with something, they did in my day with professionals coming in to talk about apprenticeships or careers in banks etc and even here in France, there are expos every year for those leaving Lycée called Azimut and to which the students are taken by their profs to see what is out there for them after the BAC etc.

I suppose now my nephew will be at home all day, watching TV, playing computer games and being told to sign on for the dole whilst both his parents work to support him and the rest of the family.

[/quote]

 

Sadly Val2 that is where we ended up with our highly intelligent son in France. So what did the french teachers do, well demoralised him completely, it seemed to be a scorched earth policy that they used on him. He has some qualifications obtained in the UK. Do they reflect his possibilities, nope, and he has a morbid fear of all teachers. Maybe one day he will 'grow up' and take advantage of his good brain, but I won't hold my breath.

And if you have been told that there is nothing for them in the UK, then that isn't true. There are still colleges all over the country and there are many many courses to go on. If he finds something he likes, then he can end up with good and proper qualifications. Why not restauration, that is still an industry that needs people, from the washer uppers, cooks, waiters to sommelier. The colleges will be having open days now and then it'll be the end of August time when people sign up for their courses. He should be looking at prospectuses, often on line, but there will be paper ones.

re changing the exams. I don't care if they do or don't change the system. My friend's daughter worked hard and long for her A levels and did classics, which are still an old fashioned exam..... they still exist. Just finishing her first year at uni now.

All I want is that they make sure that even the poorest of students can read, write and do sums. We cannot all be brain surgeons, there should be something for everyone to do and the appropriate teaching/training. That would be a very clever thing to do.

[Edward Trunk]

When I was at school I had to satisfy my teachers and they had to satisfy the exam board. In the 1980s all this changed; it was believed that competition and choice would improve standards. The results were that schools now had to please the students, and exam boards had to please schools. Faced with league tables and the threat of being "named and shamed", schools did what any organism does - they sought to defend themselves, by going for the softest subjects from the easiest exam boards.

If I go into a shop, all I need is money in my pocket. The shop has to please me, or I take my business elsewhere. Education doesn't work like that. Parents need a commitment to the education of their children, and children need a commitment to their own learning, and too often this commitment is not forthcoming. Gove is as Thatcherite as they come, but even he seems to have realised that competition has its limits, and he has cut down competition among exam boards.

[woolybanana]

I never thought of him as Thatcherite, but what he is trying to do in UK education seems all good so far though balances will be needed.

[Quillan]

News update on BBC1 just now. They interviewed him as he visited a school which is about to get an extensions to its buildings. Anyway he said "there are some good schools like this one and some bad schools, we need to limit expectations". This is obviously political speak of some sort. I understand about some schools being better than others what what does he mean by "limit expectations", like who's for example? There was not context to these words by the way other than he was visiting 'an excellent school' at the time.

[YCCMB]

In fairness, the expectations of a lot of academically very bright kids have been being limited for years, based on a system that was designed to ensure that the less able could leave school with a qualification which was no less valuable than the more academically inclined. It's been clear for ages that the system designed to please everyone has, in fact, been failing most people. How do you imagine a kid feels when they've worked their wotsits off at school and gained a raft of A* qualifications, only for their grandparents' generation to drone on about "dumbing down" and "lowering of standards"?

With no disrespect implied or intended to anyone, I periodically hear my OH ranting about the devaluation of the term "engineer" in the UK. A bloke who comes to fix your internet or your phone/washing machine/boiler generally isn't one, but that's what we call them. Why? There's nothing less noble or worthy about being a plumber or a technician. Notice how everyone on these forums adopts the word "artisan" with so much ease? An artisan in a skilled tradesman...not an engineer.

Universities don't just produce a bunch of useless tossers, but there could do with being a fairly rigorous overhaul of the range of subjects available, and perhaps more families should be asking themselves whether they're pushing their kids to do a 3-year Media Studies course because it's the done thing rather than a wise choice.

As for the availability of jobs for graduates or school leavers, I've got chalk-and-cheese offspring: one currently doing a Fine Art Masters and the other having just graduated with a much more vocational degree. The former is working his way through the 3 years of his postgrad degree and has enough work to comfortably manage, through any number of freelance  bits and pieces which keep him going. He's never been out of work since he finished his first degree, including an 18-month-long full time job. The younger one finished his finals 3 weeks ago and started work a week later, returning to the company where he did his industrial placement and who offered him this job last July.  He's also managed to get jobs during every holiday, from night shifts stacking supermarket shelves over Christmas, to working at Heathrow for a car hire company at Easter. They're not lucky, or special (except, of course, to me!) but they have been brought up to believe that there's no such thing as a free lunch/mobile phone/ipad/holiday, and that the Bank of Mum and Dad is open occasionally for loans but not handouts. They started with paper rounds, worked in pubs, kitchens and shops, and both have CV's which show they can work.  And both have now realised that it's that kind of thing which makes an employer look twice at them.

[idun]

Betty said:

With no disrespect implied or intended to anyone, I periodically hear my OH ranting about the devaluation of the term "engineer" in the UK. A bloke who comes to fix your internet or your phone/washing machine/boiler generally isn't one, but that's what we call them.

 

And teachers in french colleges, so secondary school, call themselves professeurs. What is that about?

 

I would have the old grammer schools back and enough possibilities for late developers. For the rest of us, who are just very very average, or less than average, we have our value in society, and where would we be without bins emptying etc. There should be a place for everyone and respect for all work.

 

[Clarkkent]

[quote user="You can call me Betty"]
Universities don't just produce a bunch of useless tossers, but there could do with being a fairly rigorous overhaul of the range of subjects available, and perhaps more families should be asking themselves whether they're pushing their kids to do a 3-year Media Studies course because it's the done thing rather than a wise choice.
[/quote]

And what is wrong with Media Studies? And why is studying for a degree in Media Studies less wise than studying for one in reading novels by dead authors? Or in extinct Mediterranean languages? (Or in pictures painted by other people, for that matter?) The main point in a university education (except in a few specialist areas) should not be that it is a fast track to a specific job but that it is a rigorous training in intellectual skills such as comprehension, analysis, application, communication, decision making and the development of ideas. The subject studied merely provides the context in which these skills can flourish. Any employer worth his salt will be looking for evidence of high level skills because the future of his business depends on them.

It is also interesting to note that many of the "high status" subjects contain no quantitative content whereas the "low status" subjects produce people with good numerical analysis and evaluation skills - essential for any area of employment. All other things being equal, I would sooner employ someone with a degree in Media Studies than someone with a degree in English or Classics?

[Quillan]

[quote user="Clarkkent"]

[quote user="You can call me Betty"]
Universities don't just produce a bunch of useless tossers, but there could do with being a fairly rigorous overhaul of the range of subjects available, and perhaps more families should be asking themselves whether they're pushing their kids to do a 3-year Media Studies course because it's the done thing rather than a wise choice.
[/quote]

And what is wrong with Media Studies?

[/quote]

I think the perception is that it is the modern version of art degrees. Like them however people with degrees in media studies do actually work. My niece did media studies, my brother-in-law thought that what she was really doing was having a fine old time partying at uni with his money. When she finish she got a job with C4 then went to the DEFRA where she did quite well and is now living in Australia doing a job she was 'head hunted' for and is currently earning (at the age of 26) well in to a six figure salary. Her father has had to swallow his past comments on the uselessness of a degree in media studies.

Rightly or wrongly there are always those that are led and those that lead, you can't turn out everyone the same.

[YCCMB]

There's nothing wrong with a degree in any subject per se, but just how many JOBS are available in Media Studies? And how many people undertake a degree in something like that with a clear objective in terms of future employment? Yes, of course, the same applies to many courses. I obviously hit a very raw nerve with you by choosing only one.[:D]. I could have said "English" or "History", but I didn't.

Just out of idle curiosity, have a look at the "Prospects" website, and you'll see that in 2004/5 there were more Media Studies graduates than those graduating in, for example, Electrical Engineering. There were more than double the number of Media Studies grads than Civil Engineers. I don't remember reading that the country was crying out for Media Studies graduates anywhere, though.

Graduate employers (generally speaking) are looking for people who have not only "skills", but skills applicable to their business requirements...many of them quite specific. In addition, they're looking for evidence of common sense and the ability to work well in a team, to understand and correctly interpret instructions, and  some track record of previous employment, even if it's only a long-standing holiday job or Saturday job.

When I was actively involved in graduate recruitment over a period of some eight years, one of the things I always looked for was the ability to write and spell. That's a fairly rare commodity regardless of the discipline studied.

I don't think you can generalise that any particular subject area produces people that are better at one thing than others, as much depends on the institution. For example, there was much ado about our local University (Thames Valley) releasing people into the world of work, clutching a Law Degree where the pass mark in finals was a whopping 23%. (That's "mark"..not a misprint).

[Russethouse]

Media studies was probably a bad choice of example, as my guess is that are quite a lot of jobs where that degree would be useful. My daughter got a BSc in Media and Communication and apart from six months has been employed in that sphere since leaving Uni 7 - 8 years ago, and now has what I would term a very reasonable job.

However I take the point, how many jobs are there in Art & Design, or even History of Art ?