Like hundreds of thousands of other parents all over the country I now face the prospect of having a child at home for many months to come. In my son's case the situation is complicated by the fact that he was about to take his A-levels. And now he will not be. As a result, and given that he was already self isolating with me, his school career has come to a crashing end without any celebration to mark this fact, or even a chance to say goodbye to some of his friends. And, in addition he now faces at least six months off with no chance to travel and no chance to secure work, both of which are also parts of the rite of passage of sixth formers heading for university.
Hopefully, in his case his efforts in the upper sixth form and the mock exams should be More than enough for his teachers to award him A-level grades that will secure his place at university. And in time I suspect that people will forget that the A-levels of 2020 were those that never took place.
But, he is one of the fortunate ones in this respect. For those who were actually relying on the exams to deliver their peak performance, or who are doing retakes without teacher assessment to act as a substitute for them, or for those who are absolutely dependent on getting five GCSEs, and who will now be in doubt as to whether this is possible with massive impact on their overall future, the cancellation of exams is little short of a nightmare. I am saddened for all of them, and hopeful too.
However, this situation gives rise to the obvious question which is that if exams can be cancelled now, why are we doing them? If this year students will progress to sixth form, further education, higher education and university, and even within university in some cases, without their progress been appraised by examination, but instead by being assessed by their tutors, why isn't this the norm? After all, we know that in most cases tutor assessment is incredibly reliable (subject, if it were to become the norm, to the type of third-party appraisal that is already required on coursework based qualifications). Why,then, are we so over invested in examination when so much of what we examine is so utterly and completely useless, starting with most of the syllabus of GCSE maths?
I have said before, and I will no doubt say again, that this crisis will change everything. Education may be one of those things that will never be the same again.
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We are in the same boat, with close family taking A levels and others taking GCSEs, some now expecting the end of their formal school education without fanfare tomorrow. We await developments.
But, of all the subjects to attack for lack of utility, I am surprised you have gone for maths, which is the foundation of all science for a start. I would want every educated person to have a basic working knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, ratio and proportion, rates of change (that is, simple calculus), geometry and trigonometry, and statistics and probability. Which essentially is (or should be) the GCSE syllabus.
95% or more of the population need almost none of that
They do need to know how to do percentages – and the vast majority after doing GCSE do not
They do need to know how to do tax calculations, and they don’t
They do need to know budgeting, but they don’t
Applied maths is what the vast majority need
And I’d venture that less than 1% of the population know what calculus is
We teach most maths for the wrong reasons and the result is massive effective mathematical illiteracy
Agree – a lot of education could be better grounded in practical purposes and it would make education more enjoyable and relevant as a result.
It’s difficult to get beyond the non-academically gifted schoolchild asking “why do i need to learn algebra, i’m never going to use it”. But as you say, budgeting, percentages etc, are more useful.
What i found difficult at school was coursework. I was well above average academically but hated coursework.
I loved cooking but hated that we did three weeks out of four on cooking ‘coursework’, and one week actually cooking. How many chefs do coursework in the real world?
Coursework was transferable across most subjects as basically an exercise in completing a task, without that task necessarily having any educational, technical or cultural merit in itself. Much like a lot of modern economic activity.
It’s something that is deeply wrong with secondary education IMO. There is far too much of it.
I struggled to get coursework done. I was diagnosed with ADHD aged 32 and all of a sudden I understood why I had struggled with it. I would flourish in tasks which were suited to my learning style, or which my nervous system found to be ‘stimulating’, but I would drown in the bureaucracy of coursework.
Teach children and adults to do stuff, not drown them in paperwork. By example – I got an A grade in IT exams. But a D in the coursework. Because I could not bring myself to write page after page about the method I used to design a logo for a business. Unbelievable that such time wasting bilge was a part of the assessment method and curriculum, but there you go. I fared better at A Level where the coursework involved actually coding a database with more practical application.
I agree: we show far too little undertdasnfing of different learning methods
This is not a boy v girl thing
It’s a human fact: one size does not fit all
‘ Why, then, are we so over-invested in examination when so much of what we examine is so utterly and completely useless, starting with most of the syllabus of GCSE maths?’
Well said Richard, and your criticism of Maths is well-founded. Most of the nonsense taught for exams is forgotten very quickly and in the case of Maths with good reason. That’s not good education. It’s a very poor substitute necessitated by an education system which sees education as the stuffing and regurgitation of facts. Good education is what stimulates minds, inspires enquiry and is remembered, not for exams, but because of its intrinsic interest, importance and relevance. Most importantly good education does not fail children, which is a central feature of the current system. We should ask the majority of ordinary people who keep the country running (and not running when they aren’t working as now) how valuable their GCSE’s are to them, if they have any recollection of what they learned for exams and what they gained from their 11 years of schooling. Probably very little. Sadly, successive governments have actually increased the importance of testing, equating it, with frightening ignorance, with improving education. If there were to be any doubt about this foolishness we have only to see politicians unable to answer the simplest questions on the maths, science and other stuff they ‘learned’’ at school. They usually laugh off their ignorance. QED
There will be innumerable social science dissertations written on how disruption can facilitate behaviour change.
Not much to disagree with here about maths.
I found most maths to be esoteric and more akin to mental gymnastics as a child.
It was only when I got to university that they taught me how to work out the bending moment of a beam at the ripe old age of 29 that it finally clicked. Maths is taught too abstractly in school in my opinion which is a pity since used constructively it can solve real world problems.
Then compare that to the formulae they use to work out some derivatives!!
Richard you are right to question the purpose of exams and the content of the curriculum. It is very easy for us to fall victim to habits of thought and convince ourselves that the way we do things is the only way things can be done. If my memory serves me, China during the cultural revolution had one high school per 100k pupils. They sent the Red Guards from the cities into the countryside to educate the illiterate peasantry. The Red Guards centered the education around the every-day life of the peasantry, which of course was agriculture. Applied and practical. The lessons were organised in a co-operative manner. For example group learning was encouraged with the more able students helping the less able. Text books were allowed in examinations. Fast forward to the present day and China is now in the forefront of Science and Technology. So much so that this lead is drawing fire from some envious sections in the West. I am sure there is much to criticize in China educational system, but we should lay our prejudices aside and whilst retain what is good in our own system be prepared to learn from others.
I am now working out with my son a practical learning programme for the period when he would have been doing his exams
What skill can he develop instead?
He’s fortunate enough that I can buy software etc if needed
Richard a resource you and your son may find very beneficial is a software game developed by Malik management zentrum st. gallen. Switzerland.
This game teaches an appreciation of systems thinking. Sadly lacking in our educational system. In this game the player is set up as ruler of a country. The choice of countries are three between developed industrial and agricultural. As ruler the player has options to increase the expenditures on infrastructure , education, agricultural development, power supply and so on. The object for the ruler is to keep the whole economy in ecological balance and well-being and prevent an uprising of the citizenry in violent revolution.
Each year the students of Germany play the MP’s in a contest. The students always win.
The address details are management zentrum st. gallen
Geltenwilenstrasse 18 CH-9001 St Gallen T+41(0) 71274 35 31 http://www.malik-mzsg.ch
I only have the XP version. Since I acquired my copy I am sure an update is now available, if not I will send you mine.
I confess I could not find the game on their web site. Can you?
I do not know how much practical applications of computers is shown in schools theses day but how about getting a technical drawing package for drawing in 2 and later in 3 dimensions. There are some good programs for about £100 such as DesignCAD and TurboCAD without the expense of AutoCAD.
I use a spread sheet for all my personal and work related calculations, This means any calculation is recorded and can back up any safety related work.
Which of those CAD programs is best? My son and I are discussing them…
Check out open source CAD software as well. I’ve tried Blender in the past, which is powerful but has a steep learning curve.
Thanks
This post is great, and links well with the next one about money creation. Qualifications only have value because institutions of authority say they should, in the same way that banks create money and the authority of the institution lends that money credibility.
This crisis may upend so much of what we have come to believe is normal, from the pay distribution of jobs (who is more ‘valued’ now, a supermarket deliver driver or a media sales executive?), to making people realise how few jobs are truly essential, and how many are the luxuries of a developed country.
Why,then, are we so over invested in examination when so much of what we examine is so utterly and completely useless, starting with most of the syllabus of GCSE maths?
Because the Conservative press which drives attitudes in the party, don’t trust teachers, seeing them as unionised, left wing and not teaching them what they were taught 50 years ago.
I was a GCSE marker for a few years and I still invigilate. I fully agree with your comment about GCSE maths.
Education has become a hunt for grades and much of what is real education , has been neglected.
🙂
If only 95% of the population understood exponential growth we would have implemented appropriate measures much sooner and avoided many unnecessary deaths. I do agree that we need to constantly look at whether we can improve on what and how we teach.
A better understanding of science helps too. Everyone could have looked at the data from China and S. Korea and realised what was coming and what needed to be done.
Education is more important than ever. Knowledge saves lives.
That’s percentages Charles, and I think more work on them is a key part of maths
So few have any real comprehension of them in the existing system because they’ve been taught sines and cosines (which I have not now thought about for 44 years)
My daughter is doing a post grad teacher training course. Her main teaching placement had just been suspended less than halfway through so she won’t have completed the required number of teaching hours. She’s waiting to find out whether she will still qualify. And she has a teaching job interview today. So many young people dealing with such uncertainty and anxiety in addition to everything else that’s going on.
It’s ghastly….
My daughter is year ahead of your son. She took her A levels last year, and has been was studying for a year at a university in France, while working as an au pair. No university now of course.
She could still come back if she wanted to, but one wonders for how long this will remain the case. It is a slightly strange feeling to realise that, very shortly, I might not be able to visit her, and she may not be able come back to visit me, and that we could be separated in quite a definitive way.
Apologies for being slightly off topic.
I get all that as a parent! Good luck…
When he was Education Secretary, Michael Gove once said that he wanted all pupils to achieve above the national average in literacy and numeracy. Errrmmm …
What hope is there for a better understanding of percentages?
From my wife Alice: “There are other ways. Reform at the upper secondary level has developed in Australia over the last 30 years for at least two reasons: ï¬rst, to reduce the curriculum control exercised by universities through externally set examinations, in order to address the needs of the majority of students; and, second, to respond to the need to broaden the curriculum to include more practical and contextualized learning. Queensland and ACT (Canberra) have no school exams.”
So there are enlightened examples….
I’m a former secondary school teacher. IMO we don’t need SATs at the end of KS2, which just cause stress and provide fairly meaningless data to keep number-crunchers occupied. GCSEs have become less meaningful as all pupils have to stay in some sort of education setting until 18 anyway. Post-16 providers should be able to rely on teacher assessments and references, although some kind of core curriculum is probably needed up to 14 and there would have to be some serious thinking about consistency and reliability up to 16. Some kind of goal and recognition of learning is probably a good idea too. We seriously need to abolish the annual scramble for schools to appear top of league tables – let’s stop pretending that the curriculum benefits all learners. 16-18 education and training is a shambles, which is providing very few with what they want/need. Sadly, too many learners see the exam as an end itself to open doors to Higher Education and see very little value in what they’re actually learning.
I agree with all that
And bizarrely, all the exam focus really does not prepare people for university – as I saw, all too often when teaching there
Hi
I’m thinking about young people who can’t go to school and face a long wait until college starts
Just listened to Radio Scotland lunchtime news programme. They had a feature on the difficulties fruit and veg farmers are facing getting the crop picked and packed as not expecting foreign workers this summer.
Perhaps some young people who have been put out of school could think about this work? The interviewee was saying the pay rate is national living wage with overtime and holiday pay.
If a group of young people went together as a group they could probably have a great time and earn a fair bit towards supporting themselves at college or university next year.
I picked tatties many years ago, it was hard work but OK
I did fruit picking as a youngster
Fruit picking sounds ideal for young folk. They can distance themselves while picking a row each, they’re out in fresh air, all that vitamin d helping their immune system. If they get to eat some of the fruit they’re getting vitamin c too. Maybe something to think about for future gap years etc.