Gove's climbing down over the English Bacc

I'm sure that is a relief to everyone involved, especially in the light of so many other changes in schools planned to happen at the same time. However, a little voice inside my head suggests that he hasn't given up completely.

With any luck he'll be out of government before he can do anything more about it.

No I don't think given up completely at all absent and still keen to get rid of modular exams and other so called "reforms" .

As I have said before, the man is a self promoting idiot.

Yes, he's utterly self-promoting, and the ebacc was a headline catching idea with zero understanding of the variety of ways that kids learn. He may not be giving up, and I think his plans for A-levels will probably go ahead, but the opposition to his inegalitarian model for exams at age 16 is so overwhelming - and backed up by knowledge! - that he will struggle, I think, to recreate the divisive system he craves. Hope so, anyway !

At the end of the day, something needs to change. The exam system now is not working. A return to a more rigourous examination is long overdue if you want your grandchildren to be employable. Quite funny that this has been scuppered by the Lib Dems - Nick Clegg will no doubt send his children to an academically selective school which is beloved by those who preace the value of comrehensive education. Live is divisive and giving children a handful of useless exam passes does them no favours out in the big wide world. The educational equivilent of the Sports Day when every child gets a prize.

Sel Micro-managing the curriculum and the way it is both taught and examined and introducing a number of major changes to GCSEs and A levels at the same time is not going to achieve anything apart from chaos.

This is a quick test post, as I have replied to this thread twice without it appearing.

Success! - off I go again then!

I do think it is silly for ministers to make announcements about policy changes without first ensuring that the coalition is in support - it really does make them look quite stupid.

The current system of GCSEs has put some pupils under pressure as modular assessment is a bit like continous exams and some pupils have found that stressful.

The current exam system does need reforming, as neither employers nor universities are happy with it. We need academic rigour combined with an enhancement and valuing of vocational quialifications.

Changes need to be fully researched and thought through rather than the current cobbled-together ideas that fly around and create uncertainty for pupils and hard-working teachers. Whatever new system might be adopted, the initial stages do risk creating unfairness, as it is difficult to make comparisons between pupils results under one system and the next, so we need to be sure that something of solid worth replaces what we now have.

I am just very glad I am no longer teaching, as planning schemes of work and buying course material involve forward planning and it seems that there is a volte face every time you look.
However, modular assessment and coursework have proved a nightmare both logistically and academically. One prime example was last year's farcical difference in grade boundaries between the January and June GCSE English exams.
Resitting modules takes away far too much time from actual teaching and learning and all the testing and assessment altogether is counterproductive -and should remind us that "you can't fatten a pig by weighing it all the time."
Resitting individual units until the required result is attained seems a bit like breaking up a driving test into its component parts "Well, Miss/Mr Aspiring Driver, I have to tell you that you have passed on gear changes and reversing round corners, but will have to retake steering and emergency stops!"
Competition between exam boards is incredibly insidious. Exams are big bucks and I can remember when SEG had a reputation for being "easy" while NEAB was perceived as more stringent. Our department's results (average A*-C) rocketed when we changed from the latter to the former. Pats on the back all round.

sel it is not the exam system that is the cause of young people being unemployed. Its the economy...
Apparently Gove announced this without consulting his cabinet colleagues (let alone anyone else) Cameron was in a conference in S America if I recall correctly and Gove was on a roll. So he came out with all guns blazing and has had to now negotiate from an extreme position to something other people can live with.
It was the same month that he accused school governors of only being in it for the glory!
I am against Secs of State tinkering too much in education. They are not experts in education. It is a bit like sec of state for health making sudden announcements about how patients should be treated for cancer.
Decide on how they want to measure the performance of schools. And then don't keep tinkering with that every year. And concentrating on improving primary might be more useful than continually wanting to change examinations.

You're right, gracesmum and Jess. There are a number of things that need sorting out but Gove is too much of an ideologue to deal with them; too busy mucking up the system. Like changing the inspection protocol so that if a school doesn't get a 'good' on all aspects of the inspection, it fails the whole thing. And once it's failed, it can be forced to become an academy whatever the parents, governors, staff and LEA want. I began to worry when I read that a 'satisfactory' inspection grade would now be considered er...unsatisfactory. Talk about 1984!

And the reasons why you can fail to get even a satsfactory "good" are incredible - one child looking out of the window - albeit briefly and a teacher can be rated as whetever the 2013 equivalent of unsatisfactory is!

Oh and a child tipping back his/her chair while the teacher is talking. That's another one.

Well, the programme of study is clearly not challenging/ differentiated/ appropriate/"top-down" there is it?

Re Michael Gove.
I have just looked at his Biog he has been a journalist and a member of a "right wing" think tank. He has no particular experience at all of education apart from his own.

Given the stupidity of his pronouncements up to now I am not surprised but before I posted this I decided to check. He has B****r All experience of teaching. How how on earth could he be let loose as a minister on this subject.
He is a serious risk to our education system though, a loose cannon. Full of novel ideas which have not been thought through at all.

I heard Martha Kearney on World at One Radio 4 giving him a right grilling this lunch time. Good for her!

She looks nothing like I expected her to! Which makes me worry a bit about my perception of what a fiesty top class female interviewer might look like.
I might reflect on that.

Apparently the press today are going along the "what a jolly good chap to admit when he has been wrong" line. he was a very smooth apologist I'll grant you.
I feel bored and frustrated with the tendency of successive tory politicians to pontificate and then impose their ideas along the lines of "more rote learning, more "british" history (i.e. more English history) etc etc" tack.
Kids for the past 10 years have had to put up with the imposition of compulsory Shakespeare at an early age and similar stuff, imposed by the last lot of tories when they introduced the national curriculum. And I might add never unpicked by Blair and co.
Do they never stop harking back to a mythical golden age of education (ie grammar schools) and start looking at the skills kids really need in the modern workplace. Rote learning in a world where you can look everything up on the internet in 10 secs?
And why do little kids need to be force fed the 12x tabs.What a brilliant way of putting yet more children off the wonder of maths. Have they not heard that we have gone metric?

JessM But of course we haven't gone metric. We have a shocking mishmash of imperial and metric, e.g. petrol sold in litres and cars classified as doing x miles per gallon. Furthermore, Gove has already announced that he wants teachers to teach imperial measures as well as metric ones. The fact that this generation of teachers themselves may never have learned about pints, quarts and gallons, never mind gills, is neither here nor there. I really do despair of what is happening to our education system.

Hmm. I despair absent about those we are still fighting a rearguard action when we went metric about 40 years ago. When I was a science teacher in the 1970s we taught everything in metric.
Which bits you despairing about?
And seeing as children no longer need to deal with 12 pennies in the pound and 12 inches to the foot - why are they going to be forced to learn the 12x at an early age?

I despair JessM because the idealogue and ignorant Gove is as hellbent on his damaging agenda as Andrew Lansley and Jeremy Hunt are on their destruction of the NHS.

Oh that is ok absent we are as one in our despair.
Makes me wish we were back in the good old Blair era when TB changed the Sec of State for Ed annually. Checks and balances.
Goes off, thinking to self:- "and the chances of a sex scandal damaging Gove's career are minimal. But then there was the Mellor affair... So hope has not entirely withered in the bud "
Comes back thinking
Is there not a heroic woman somewhere in England who can sacrifice herself in the interests of her children or grandchildren? Anyone to the barricades? He would be grateful. Honestly.

What? Nobody?

Oh, Jess, are you offering yourself then?

Happily married anno. He does have a personal wealth of a million according to Wiki. So a brave volunteer should expect to get some half-decent champers and room service dinners ...
If you happened to work at a senior level for a private health care provider it would be even better