C
cantaloup63
Horse maintenance is no longer worth 4 GCSE's, as you are all aware.
The reason behind this is that these GNVQ's, BTECs or whatever they're now called were taking the mick a little and making it ridiculously easy for schools to take the easy option to score remarkably well in league tables, at the expense of actually suggesting that the students learned anything "difficult".
League tables include the "including English and Mathematics", and thus obviates the need for the old "5 or more A*-C" tables. Indeed, student fees had already led to a 10% reduction in university applications, and I suspect that this social engineering is being rolled back to younger ages - we no longer need a "highly qualified" work force, nor can we afford it, so we may as well stop making out that so many 16 year olds should have easy access to some FE courses.
I used to work in a school for over a decade that regularly scored 65%+ A*-C's, but which if you adjusted it by removing the vocational subject weighting would bring it down to 25-30% and thus put it into special measures. The head was quite blase about using GNVQ and I fell out with him since IMO he wasn't doing the more capable students any favours by forcing them to sit Science GNVQ (to buck the statistics up), even though this meant that they would not be permitted to study science based subjects post-16, since colleges did not consider GNVQ as sufficient grounding.
Never fear though, the powers that be will be able to find some way of making things looks better than they are.
The reason behind this is that these GNVQ's, BTECs or whatever they're now called were taking the mick a little and making it ridiculously easy for schools to take the easy option to score remarkably well in league tables, at the expense of actually suggesting that the students learned anything "difficult".
League tables include the "including English and Mathematics", and thus obviates the need for the old "5 or more A*-C" tables. Indeed, student fees had already led to a 10% reduction in university applications, and I suspect that this social engineering is being rolled back to younger ages - we no longer need a "highly qualified" work force, nor can we afford it, so we may as well stop making out that so many 16 year olds should have easy access to some FE courses.
I used to work in a school for over a decade that regularly scored 65%+ A*-C's, but which if you adjusted it by removing the vocational subject weighting would bring it down to 25-30% and thus put it into special measures. The head was quite blase about using GNVQ and I fell out with him since IMO he wasn't doing the more capable students any favours by forcing them to sit Science GNVQ (to buck the statistics up), even though this meant that they would not be permitted to study science based subjects post-16, since colleges did not consider GNVQ as sufficient grounding.
Never fear though, the powers that be will be able to find some way of making things looks better than they are.
