[Pecker]

Originally Posted by Rasczak

As for sneering at Pecker or any other teacher - you might like to consider that just one in six pupils in England has achieved the new English Baccalaureate. This is a damning condemnation of the education system - we are saying that it has failed to qualify our children in the vital core of subjects that they will need for their future.

Thanks for pointing out just how stupid the publishing of the figures was.

The pupils represented by those figures had no idea that an EBacc would even exist, let alone what subjects would be counted in them.

From our Year 11 who left last summer, our top pupil gained straight As and A*s in everything (including English Language, English Literature, Maths, statistics, Science and French), is currently doing A levels at one of the top 6th form colleges in the country, and bound for University.

But they didn't get the EBacc, because they didn't opt for history or geography. Instead they did business studies and music.

These aren't vocational qualifications. They're not OCR National Diplomas, or GNVQs, or BTECs, they're proper, rigorous, academic GCSEs, which have a history of being taught at some of the best private schools in the country.

Whatever you think of the EBacc, publishing figures for pupils who had no idea what the qualification would contain is ridiculous.

Gove's idea is simple, and I have sympathy with it. Many schools have been putting pupils through English and maths, and spending extra time on those to ensure as many pupils passed as possible, and then putting them in for GNVQs which were 'equivalent to 4 GCSEs' - bingo, a high % of your pupils make the grade (5 A*-Cs including English and maths). I can understand why Gove is concerned about that, and I largely agree.

But he had so many alternatives for these first 2 or 3 years.

He could have said he'd only count GCSEs, not equivalents. He could have said that any 'multiple' pass (this GNVQ is worth 4 passes, etc) only counts as 1 pass. He could have chosen to omit any subject with a large 'partical' element to it.

Instead he's jumped in with this ridiculous retrospective moving of the goalposts.

Right now schools up and down the country are changing their options process for the current Year 9 (that's the third year in old money). For most schools they'll be insisting that any pupil capable of gaining the EBacc will have to do a language and will have to do either history of geography. But those pupils won't have their figures published until January 2014.

Steve W