Where is the EBacc?

A thought. I went back to school today and went to speak to my exams officer because I had heard nothing about any EBacc statistics.....nothing from my school, which incidently did extremely well (best ever results - swimming against the tide), but also nothing nationally in the press. The EBacc had been touted as one of the new measures, so why the silence? According to the exams officer she isn't aware of any seperate certificate or even acknowledgement for the students of the 'collection' of subjects. That is all it is afterall. Of course with GCSEs now, according to Gove, 'discredited', he can hardly have it held up as a measure of any kind....and with GCSEs expected to go by 2016 that means the end of the EBacc too? What a short lived bit of nonsense.

GCSEs to go?

So Gove announces this morning that he does intend to introduce a new, more rigorous, exam and that GCSEs are to be scrapped. No real surprise. But alongside this there will have to be a change in the way in which schools, and teachers, are judged and a move away from the culture we are in where we have to find any way possible to ensure that students reach the pass mark......regardless of whether they really deserve it. The reality in many subjects, at present,  is that it is the teacher's responsibility to "get the grade" and not the students. At my school, which I am sure is not unusual, the staff are put under enormous pressure to "deliver" results. That is the language that is used. "Can we get X a 'C'?" "What do we need to do to ensure that Y gets the 'C'?"

As long as we continue to judge schools on league tables and link the performance of students to the teachers that they had we will be in a situation where schools look to find shortcuts. If we want a return (if there ever was such a place?) to a climate in which the students are responsible for what they achieve then we must scrap such criteria.

GCSE mess

The furore over the GCSE results is still going strong and, in some ways, has been the event that helped to spur me into putting this blog together in the first place. Michael Gove seems to have a licence to do as he wishes, with little moderation or input from others. I have no doubt that, as he has so far claimed, he has had no direct input into the moving of grade boundaries. But his persistent statements about the dumbing down of exams, very publicly expressed desire to see a return to O levels and target of a single exam board has put so much pressure on the system that the exam boards are as jumpy as a World War I shellshock victim on fireworks night. Faced with the likelihood that, in such a climate, we were about to witness another big hike in results you can see why they shifted the boundaries. But where does this leave those students it has affected? 

Perhaps one of my biggest fears is that it has backfired in such a way as to give a whole group of students another reason, aside from not working hard enough, as to why they didn't get what they expected. 

Moving the grade boundary half way through a year is blatantly unfair and has created a terrible mess that no, cobbled together, apology and offer of re-sits is going to sort out overnight. The cynic in me wonders whether Gove is actually rubbing his hands together as GCSEs are further discredited. I'm not sure what the answer is but a new education secretary would be a start.