Maths GCSE's

I think that maths, like foreign languages and music, tends to be taught by people to whom it comes naturally. Maths teachers, therefore, tend to teach in a way that works for students who also have an interest and natural ability in maths, but not in a way that suits those with little interest or ability (probably the majority). Maths teaching often fails such people. It failed me. I find no beauty in numbers, solving problems for their own sake is not particularly rewarding to me. What I really needed was to be taught why a certain mathematical process was useful in the real world, as its abstract nature was not of any interest to me.

I scraped an O-level pass, but went on to do physics A-level (and 3 others) where the maths content had some real-world relevance. I later went on to be a molecular biologist working in research, any maths that I needed for my work I taught myself, with the impetus of it being directly relevant.

I think one of the problems with maths GCSE is the majority that sit it probably won't use a good half of it ever again. Personally think we're going too big too soon with what we're teaching kids.

I absolutely agree, a qualification involving real life maths would be far more useful at that age and those that want to go on to a career that involves high level maths can go on to do the higher stuff after GCSEs. 

But if all you're taught up till 16 is addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, fractions, percentages, simple odds and maybe how interest and pensions work, it would not be enough for those looking to progress in technical subjects. It's like you need two qualifications, which is why there were O levels and CSEs.

But they merged them and created something with 9 result levels, of which 6 I believe are a pass.

But I think you probably need 2 different syllabuses, which would serve people better. However, you then run into the lower one being looked down on, which is probably  why they got merged.

Something like 20% of the population are functionally innumerate, i.e do not reach the level expected at 11.

This represents a challenge for those individuals. Even things like discounts in stores can be confusing. This is partly why stores do buy one get one free (50% off), or buy 2 get one free (33% off) as it is easier to understand than the percentages. It also shifts more volume, in the hope people will eat it faster not just stick in the cupboard.

It is also why stores are required to put the price per 100g or per kg on the labels, so you can tell if 2 small items are cheaper than 1 big item, as it is hard for people to do it on their head. Often the offers are not what they seem.

This is the governments expectations. That all kids will leave school with a 4 in English and maths. They have to keep repeating it until they either get a 4 or leave education. They may get a 1, 2 or 3 but 4 is the standard pass mark. Many employers and college courses now have a 4 in maths and English as an entry requirements but not all the jobs and courses that are requiring this need people to have that level of education.

I don't think we should be viewing kids education as separating those who could learn from those who will not. Not at that stage. We want to be getting the very best we can for each individual and setting them up to achieve in life. At the moment we're not. We're teaching them that they're failures very early on. We're making it that everything revolves around their ability in maths and English. 

Educating kids should be about making sure they have the skills they need for later life not lasered in on the content of a GCSE. If these kids weren't being pushed through GCSE content. Perhaps they could be learning the skills they haven't yet such as being able to manage time and money so they have a chance at independence.

Expecto_Patronum said:

we currently have a literal rule that all kids should get a 4 in English and Maths. We all know that this isn't possible so why is it an expectation.

Can you explain this more please?

What is the kids are not capable or reaching this 4? I assume they would fail the exam but that is part of the exams purpose, to separate those who could learn the subject from those who cannot or will not.

Am I missing something?

They have to do Science. That's not really a choice. They can sometimes choose between combined or single so that they can have an extra subject to choose. 

I disagree. I think there's a lot more we can do. Going back to the point of this post, we currently have a literal rule that all kids should get a 4 in English and Maths. We all know that this isn't possible so why is it an expectation.

The weaker learners used to have the option to do entry level qualifications. Whilst schools may still offer these in some circumstances, there's been a massive push away from them because the government stopped them counting in the league tables and how a school is seen to perform is sadly what is cared about most.

At the moment there is a huge SEN and schools funding crisis. The SEN learners in mainstream, not to mention all of those that go without their needs being picked up, are not having their needs met or the support they need to access the curriculum. It's a rubbish system.

Expecto_Patronum said:

They can pick a few subjects to their interests at GCSE but usually from certain lists.

There is at least an element of choice thought. I recall I couldn't do 3 science subjects for my Highers although I really wanted to because of this, but the justification is that education at this level needs to be broad to form a base for the further education process.

Expecto_Patronum said:

main stream education doesn't suit the weakest learners at all.

This is the result of ability being on a bell curve - the upper achievers are held back and the lower achievers are not really catered for and are expected to fail.

I think the education system lacks the capacity to cater for everyone and that the outliers will always suffer unless there is a support system for those with these special needs.

I used to coach a friends son in maths because he struggled badly - I picked up on his dyslexia and could present the theory in a way that made more sense to him by demonstrating using objects initially then real world examples (booking odds, calculating prices using fractions etc).

Once the school was made aware of the dyslexia they were able to help him with his English classes etc so it was a win.

The point is you sometimes need to find a way to help those that are struggling but accept that there are inevitably those who are simply not capable of even being average.

The more gifted may not be able to reach their true capabilities just as the less intelligent may never be able to grasp calculus or understand how rainbows form.

So long as the available resources are made open to those who need them, there is not much more we can do.

Agreed

I'm so glad that employment has opened up not just to women, but to people of colour and the disabled, I was at school when the equal opportunities act came in and and the male teachers marching around school really angry and telling us that there was no point in educating us as we'd just go off and have babies anyway. It seemed as though doors had been unlocked, but few of us had the skills to know how to open them. Everything was so limitied then, but not as much as when my mum was at school when you really were educated according to your gender.

Geography is one of the odder subjects in my opinion. There is actually very little done on skills like map reading or knowledge of where things are in the world. But it goes very in-depth into things like river formation and natural disasters which is very niche career wise. It also goes very in-depth into certain places around the world like Lagos and doesn't touch on other areas at all which seems bizarre to me.

Unfortunately it is not currently how our education system works at all. They can pick a few subjects to their interests at GCSE but usually from certain lists. Some schools may insist they do a humanities subject for example. Or the subjects may be grouped randomly but the kids can only pick one from each column so if all the ones they want are in the same list they cant do them. Even the seemingly more practical subjects like PE have difficult exams so we are not catering at all for those that are less academic at this stage of schooling. And it doesn't account for the fact that GCSEs in the core subjects like maths that they're all expected to do in main stream education doesn't suit the weakest learners at all.

TheCatWoman said:

I think the careers you mention that a geography GCSE migh be good for weren't open to women when I was at school, or not women like me.

Your experiences were 30-40 years ago and much has changed. Women have much more in the way of equal rights now so the careers are more accessible than before.

TheCatWoman said:

English might be about teaching communication skills, but not how I was taught, my generation weren't taught grammar we were supposed to just learn it from reading, like gramatical structures would pass from a book to our brains by osmosis.

I'm sorry you had such a poor experience. I recall having to do a lot of my own research to understand some of the English skills the teachers were supposed to teach us but I was always a bit of a bookworm and spent a lot of time in the library.

TheCatWoman said:

Psychology wasn't a subject when I was at school,

This is more of a higher education thing as it needs a lot of foundation skills to be ready for it, so isn't really a school subject on its own.

Iain, Of course I know that! But how many people actually use geography in thier everyday lives? It just felt like one of those time filling subjects with no point to it. I think the careers you mention that a geography GCSE migh be good for weren't open to women when I was at school, or not women like me.

English might be about teaching communication skills, but not how I was taught, my generation weren't taught grammar we were supposed to just learn it from reading, like gramatical structures would pass from a book to our brains by osmosis.

Psychology wasn't a subject when I was at school, or not at my school anyway.

I think there's still a big gap between the value placed on academic and vocational subjects, I hope it's changing and vocational courses are getting proper recognition. 

I hope they're better than NVQ's, I saw a lot of people get a hairdressing qualification who probably shouldn't of done, because the system was set up so that people couldn't fail, it annoyed the hell out of tutors too.

Expecto_Patronum said:

How can you make a system where kids can do the right qualifications for their abilities but aren't made to feel inferior

I guess this comes down to the students chosing the best electives for their interests which happens about age 14 I think.

The point of the exams is to grade the students based on their abilities so the more capable ones can be identified for being ahead of the queue for further education or jobs. Market forces basically.

It is part of the sorting hat of life.

And this is the big problem. How can you make a system where kids can do the right qualifications for their abilities but aren't made to feel inferior or as if they've missed out on opportunity.

Stuart333 said:

to progress in technical subjects. It's like you need two qualifications, which is why there were O levels and CSEs.

But they merged them and created something with 9 result levels, of which 6 I believe are a pass.

But I think you probably need 2 different syllabuses, which would serve people better. However, you then run into the lower one being looked down on, which is probably  why they got merged

You are correct,  I remember the GCE and CSE divide.  Schools claimed that that the highest grade in CSE was equivalent to a pass at O level GCE.  But nobody believed it.  At the age of  14, the teachers decided if one did CSEs or GCEs,  both the kids and parents were angry when they were placed in the CSE stream,  the teachers at my school were obviously never allowed to say that CSEs were inferior, the code word was suitability, 'You are more suitable for the CSE, the CSE is more suitable for you", were the phrases.

TheCatWoman said:

Whats the point of geography?

It explains a lot of the physical world around us and how it came to form.

In terms of preparing us for jobs there are fields like forestry, meteorology,  mining (not just coal) and some civil engineering elements plus the skills of map reading and elements of survival skills.

TheCatWoman said:

I didn't see the point of English

This builds our communication skills and our comprehension skills of the written word. 

I agee that musty old books like Shakespear should be left to be elective options and the focus much more on practical items like contract, instructions, understanding what someone is really saying to you (although this ties in with psychology too) and how to enjoy reading a good book without having to understand every nuance.

TheCatWoman said:

I was so glad I missed out on the Blair governments bums on seats, compulsory computer stuff when I was at uni

Computer access was still very minimal when I started uni - Commadore PET computers that were robust but incredibly simplistic. Learning some of how they worked proved invaluable when I ended up in my research job though as they bought me an IBM PC (one of the earliest 8086 ones with a 5.25" floppt drive and a hard drive that sounded like a continual car crash) and told me to learn to program and write an interface for the thermal sensing equipment I was responsible for so they could graph the temperatures and save the data instead of just getting a printout from the device.

All this was pre-internet so I had to do a lot of learning to code with limited instruction manuals and a lot of trial and error - I can't say I enjoyed it but I got it working.

Computer science finally appeared as a degree course in my last year at uni in 1986 and the people there had these Sinclair QL computers which had a tape drive - horribly unreliable but normal for the age. Long before laptops or usable hard disks there were many tearful students who lost work when their tapes stretched or broke.

This experience did help me get a job as a mianframe operator in a bank that led to getting in at the start of the desktop computer revolution in the IT departments.

I didn't find uni a 'cram course', but then I went as a mature student.

Education has canged so much since my time, my secondary school was more like a warehouse for young girls than an educational establishment. The nearest we got to techenical stuff was cookery and needlework. A few girls in the top maths group would go to the boys school opposite and have computer lessons, it was all punch cards back then. Most of us weren't allowed to learn to type as it was some kind of reward for what I never knew.

I'd ask serious questions about what is taught, history seems to be more old news than anything else, I don't think something can be history until theres no one left alive who remembers it. I'd like to see much more breadth of history taught, history lecturers would too as many of them complain about that students know nothing from before the industrial revolution and many from the end of WW1.

Whats the point of geography? I was good at it, but hated it, I wasn't good at the trigpoints and compass stuff though, that went right over my head.

I didn't see the point of English, we had to read bits of musty and boring books and then write it our own words, it put me off reading for years.

I didn't understand most of what my kids did at school, it was like they were speaking a foreign language.

My access course was interesting, although I had to be excused from computer classes as they were in rooms with overhead strip lights that give me migraines. I remember the first maths lesson, I totally freaked out, I'd never seen sums like the ones we were given, numbers in brackets etc, apparently you're supposed to be able to work out how to do them yourself, how, why? Needless to say I failed that bit too and was failed on the whole course because you were only allowed to fail on one module and as they had no systems in place for someone not being able to do a module for medical reasons, they put me down as a fail.

I was so glad I missed out on the Blair governments bums on seats, compulsory computer stuff when I was at uni, I escaped by a year. The tutor was horrible to anyone who didn't know anything about computers to the point where some people left uni altogether, convinced that they were to stupid to learn. 

Stuart333 said:

A business needs staff to do a job, in return for which they get paid.

The staff are also going to face a lot more competition with more people living in the country and people having to work later due to a rising pension age and lack of pension planning.

I guess how to compete in the job market would be a good skill to add.

Since graduates used to earn more than non-graduates the gov decided at least half of children should go to uni. This way they would all be rich and pay more tax and the UK would be more prosperous. The only problem is the economy doesn't need that many grads.

All the the polytechnics turned into unis. There was huge expansion of education, salaries went way up. The state could not pay so students had to pay fees, using student loans.

Students didn't want to do hard technical subjects do loads of less useful subjects were created, the idea being any degree would work. Except now those people are emerging with 60k of debt and starting only just above minimum wage. Partly as minimum wage has gone up so much.

Unis have been prevented from increasing fees, partly as all the student loans the gov are underwriting are not being paid due to low salaries of many grads. Unis can charge overseas students more so increasingly looked to have more, increasing immigration. 

So we have a dysfunctional higher education system that is now a business with big costs that has sort of lost sight of its original purpose.

Work is a shock as people have lost sight of what it is for. A business needs staff to do a job, in return for which they get paid. The better everyone does their job the more money gets made. Ideally some of that goes to the staff, although some companies have abused that position.

The public sector is another problem.

I think schools need to teach kids how to study too now you've made this point. We're expecting people to go to uni and be able to independently learn but they've not been given those skills during their school years.

100% agree with the technical classes. Also think home economics should be brought back to teach kids some actual life skills to live independently.

I think schools need to teach kids how to study too now you've made this point. We're expecting people to go to uni and be able to independently learn but they've not been given those skills during their school years.

100% agree with the technical classes. Also think home economics should be brought back to teach kids some actual life skills to live independently.