It’s all down to discipline. Children don’t have it anymore because they are allowed to get away with bloody murder and they know it
Putrid-Location6396 on
I can understand numbers failing English but when even the numbers are failing maths you know something’s up.
Worldly_Table_5092 on
I mean you could change the grade boundaries, that will certainly work!
Still_Swim8820 on
It’s OK they’ll have an A in diversity and inclusion and will be rich in no time.
Thralls_balls on
I worked with a student who took his GCSEs this year. I was his reader and scribe- shouldn’t have been; because I was never trained, but they don’t care about that. I saw him have meltdowns during maths and English and I couldn’t do anything but calm him down.
My line manager loves the year 7s- she makes all the promises to their parents, but once they hit year 10, every resource was sourced and paid for by me. Does anyone use Thrass anymore? We’re not allowed to sort through those files and at this stage I’d refuse because the silverfish have taken over.
creativename111111 on
They’re graded on a bell curve so someone has decided to make a higher % of students fail.
Even if they all worked as hard as they possibly could it wouldn’t matter, the same percentage would fail
cbob-yolo on
It does seem like this government are starting to have some serious issues to address.
Surely we should be giving as much support as possible to future generations.
its_me_the_redditor on
I guarantee what will happen is that they will make them easier. This is what has been happening in France for example.
High-Tom-Titty on
As long as we don’t take the American approach, which seems to be to drain the pool, instead of teaching to swim.
3106Throwaway181576 on
A significant share of parents are just objectively terrible at it
Advantages compound. My child was a top performer in English and maths at 4, and she will continue to be so throughout her life, because most parents just don’t put in the leg work for it.
GCSE stands for General Certificate… they’re generalist exams. Most intelligent people should be able to sit one with 0 studying and pass it. To fail a GCSE after a £40k education and 6000 days to prepare for them is shocking. These exams are not hard at all. No child without a disability should be failing them.
Rowdy_Roddy_2022 on
Speaking as a teacher, education starts at home. Parents should be constantly educating their children from the day they’re born. It is impossible for me in three hours a week, teaching an entire class, to undo 14-16 years of prior parental neglect.
Until governments get serious about the root cause of the problem, nothing will change.
RudePragmatist on
The curriculum for those subjects needs to be gutted. They have been bad for well over 40yrs.
ethanjim on
There’s too much content in most subjects curriculum, especially Maths. We need a review to cut down the content at least to pre-gove era levels and focus on quality and usefulness of the content as opposed to the quantity. This would allow us to cover content with time to really ensure it’s learnt and give time for re-cap and retrieval.
I can speak for Computer Science, there’s content in there simply for the sake of it being in the exam with little practical application in industry and I’m sure there’s many instances across all other subjects too.
And don’t get me started on the fact that pupils have to remember formulas / quotes etc in many subjects. What an absolute waste of time. No one in any industry is being judged on how well they can remember a formula or what someone said verbatim.
txakori on
Given that a child’s GCSE grades can be reliably predicted in primary school, what precisely are ministers expected to do for next year’s cohorts?
ToughCurrent2679 on
We were a guinea pig year for GCSE. In my first school in Y9, we had no maths teachers, just substitute. When I got to the second school, they swapped teachers three times. I was getting the highest grades in my class but only foundation because each teacher was teaching us the things the previous teacher thought and nothing else. It a miracle that I passed. But the fact is there needs to be serious change to the education system and how things work because a lot of talented individuals are not being given the opportunity to grow
y0urnamehere on
The national curriculum needs an overhaul. Students arrive to secondary school not even being able to read an analogue clock face. It’s also very evident that many have incredibly low reading ages after we test them which means they also can’t access any of the lesson content because they simply cannot read and understand what is given to them.
Parents also need to shoulder some of the responsibility in helping their kids read/write/count and early intervention is the most effective… There’s also been a big change in recent years in how long students can stay focused on a task, they seriously lack the resilience to problem solve or stick to something for more than 10/15 mins. Behaviour has become increasingly worse with a small minority wrecking lessons and robbing others of support because schools behaviour policies are weak thanks to the likes of certain leading educational researchers/advisors.
ScootTheMighty on
Did my GCSEs this year, and as a whole our year group preformed very badly.
I believe it’s more or less because of the lockdowns in year 7 and 8. We missed around half of those years, and many people never did any of the online work. When we came back to school, we never took it serious, as missing so much education made us forget it’s “value”
We’ve been behind since year 7 so it’s no suprise.
PianoAndFish on
Schools can’t win either way – if pass rates go up they’re “teaching to the test” (no shit, what else are they supposed to do?), if pass rates go down they’re failing their students.
The exam boards don’t decide what the pass mark is until after all the papers are marked, then they convert those raw marks into an imaginary number (UMS) and assign grades based on that. This is supposed to account for variance in the difficulty of papers each year, which I would argue is the exam boards shirking their responsibility to set consistent exam papers.
Either you grade on a curve, in which case a certain percentage of students are always going to fail, or you give a set pass mark/percentage in advance, in which case you may have very high pass rates. Which you choose depends on what you believe the purpose of the exam to be – is it a ranking system or checking whether each student has the required knowledge to pass the exam? Personally I’m in favour of the latter, if you want to distinguish the top performing students within those bands (e.g. for university applications) you can always give the percentile their raw mark achieved as a separate figure.
We can’t seem to decide what the actual purpose of GCSEs is, so we try to make them both a ranking system and a core standard assessment at the same time, which satisfies no-one.
18 Comments
It’s all down to discipline. Children don’t have it anymore because they are allowed to get away with bloody murder and they know it
I can understand numbers failing English but when even the numbers are failing maths you know something’s up.
I mean you could change the grade boundaries, that will certainly work!
It’s OK they’ll have an A in diversity and inclusion and will be rich in no time.
I worked with a student who took his GCSEs this year. I was his reader and scribe- shouldn’t have been; because I was never trained, but they don’t care about that. I saw him have meltdowns during maths and English and I couldn’t do anything but calm him down.
My line manager loves the year 7s- she makes all the promises to their parents, but once they hit year 10, every resource was sourced and paid for by me. Does anyone use Thrass anymore? We’re not allowed to sort through those files and at this stage I’d refuse because the silverfish have taken over.
They’re graded on a bell curve so someone has decided to make a higher % of students fail.
Even if they all worked as hard as they possibly could it wouldn’t matter, the same percentage would fail
It does seem like this government are starting to have some serious issues to address.
Surely we should be giving as much support as possible to future generations.
I guarantee what will happen is that they will make them easier. This is what has been happening in France for example.
As long as we don’t take the American approach, which seems to be to drain the pool, instead of teaching to swim.
A significant share of parents are just objectively terrible at it
Advantages compound. My child was a top performer in English and maths at 4, and she will continue to be so throughout her life, because most parents just don’t put in the leg work for it.
GCSE stands for General Certificate… they’re generalist exams. Most intelligent people should be able to sit one with 0 studying and pass it. To fail a GCSE after a £40k education and 6000 days to prepare for them is shocking. These exams are not hard at all. No child without a disability should be failing them.
Speaking as a teacher, education starts at home. Parents should be constantly educating their children from the day they’re born. It is impossible for me in three hours a week, teaching an entire class, to undo 14-16 years of prior parental neglect.
Until governments get serious about the root cause of the problem, nothing will change.
The curriculum for those subjects needs to be gutted. They have been bad for well over 40yrs.
There’s too much content in most subjects curriculum, especially Maths. We need a review to cut down the content at least to pre-gove era levels and focus on quality and usefulness of the content as opposed to the quantity. This would allow us to cover content with time to really ensure it’s learnt and give time for re-cap and retrieval.
I can speak for Computer Science, there’s content in there simply for the sake of it being in the exam with little practical application in industry and I’m sure there’s many instances across all other subjects too.
And don’t get me started on the fact that pupils have to remember formulas / quotes etc in many subjects. What an absolute waste of time. No one in any industry is being judged on how well they can remember a formula or what someone said verbatim.
Given that a child’s GCSE grades can be reliably predicted in primary school, what precisely are ministers expected to do for next year’s cohorts?
We were a guinea pig year for GCSE. In my first school in Y9, we had no maths teachers, just substitute. When I got to the second school, they swapped teachers three times. I was getting the highest grades in my class but only foundation because each teacher was teaching us the things the previous teacher thought and nothing else. It a miracle that I passed. But the fact is there needs to be serious change to the education system and how things work because a lot of talented individuals are not being given the opportunity to grow
The national curriculum needs an overhaul. Students arrive to secondary school not even being able to read an analogue clock face. It’s also very evident that many have incredibly low reading ages after we test them which means they also can’t access any of the lesson content because they simply cannot read and understand what is given to them.
Parents also need to shoulder some of the responsibility in helping their kids read/write/count and early intervention is the most effective… There’s also been a big change in recent years in how long students can stay focused on a task, they seriously lack the resilience to problem solve or stick to something for more than 10/15 mins. Behaviour has become increasingly worse with a small minority wrecking lessons and robbing others of support because schools behaviour policies are weak thanks to the likes of certain leading educational researchers/advisors.
Did my GCSEs this year, and as a whole our year group preformed very badly.
I believe it’s more or less because of the lockdowns in year 7 and 8. We missed around half of those years, and many people never did any of the online work. When we came back to school, we never took it serious, as missing so much education made us forget it’s “value”
We’ve been behind since year 7 so it’s no suprise.
Schools can’t win either way – if pass rates go up they’re “teaching to the test” (no shit, what else are they supposed to do?), if pass rates go down they’re failing their students.
The exam boards don’t decide what the pass mark is until after all the papers are marked, then they convert those raw marks into an imaginary number (UMS) and assign grades based on that. This is supposed to account for variance in the difficulty of papers each year, which I would argue is the exam boards shirking their responsibility to set consistent exam papers.
Either you grade on a curve, in which case a certain percentage of students are always going to fail, or you give a set pass mark/percentage in advance, in which case you may have very high pass rates. Which you choose depends on what you believe the purpose of the exam to be – is it a ranking system or checking whether each student has the required knowledge to pass the exam? Personally I’m in favour of the latter, if you want to distinguish the top performing students within those bands (e.g. for university applications) you can always give the percentile their raw mark achieved as a separate figure.
We can’t seem to decide what the actual purpose of GCSEs is, so we try to make them both a ranking system and a core standard assessment at the same time, which satisfies no-one.