Is this anything other than renaming GCSEs to a once respected brand.

Come on people they would have to spend money on education to do anything else.

............".Better to seek some sort of cross-party collaboration or even take the issue out of the hands of politicians and give it to an objective body that can review the evidence away from the day-to-day political maelstrom.."............

Indeed - Gove certainly isn't an objective body but is delusional and a liability to the educational welfare of children.

A two tier GCSE system would be offensive, but we already have a two (at least) tier system where those who can afford it hire private tutors to get their kids through exams, while the rest get mediocre grades or worse. That's the reality of the wonderfully egalitarian comprehensive schools this paper supports.

Anyone protesting against the "introduction" of a two tier system is either ignorant or dishonest. Children are prepared for and set different examinations with the less able being deprived of the opportunity to achieve the top grades. Giving these examination different names would be a welcome dose of honesty in the system.

They don't divide, or track, children into different streams and they don't entrench failure as selective tests and two-tier qualifications do.

Streaming is crucial to standards. That is why they do it in private schools.

I was in the bottom stream as an 11 year old, so I knew I had to do better. Which I did.

Also, one thing you hear from a lot of state school teachers is that the mix of abilities in a class slows down the best ones, so they get bored, and get distracted and play truant etc, with drastic consequences for their future.

If streaming were compulsory in state schools, standards would rise dramatically overnight.

This would of course contravene the egalitarian ideology which has all but ruined our education system in this country, and which Fiona Millar is such a relentless advocate of.

The most successful school systems in the world have several common features. ... They don't divide, or track, children into different streams and they don't entrench failure as selective tests and two-tier qualifications do.

Curious statement given that German schools do select and stream, do have selective tests and differential qualifications and Germany is an economic powerhouses whilst we in the UK are not.

Yeah but GCSEs are rubbish, i dont really understand why the left is leaping to their defence.

There is already a chasm dividing those who go to good schools with high expectations and the majority. The dumbing down of the curriculum simply hands an even greater advantage to those whose learning continues beyond the classroom as a matter of course. Telling children that 5 C's at GCSE's constitutes some sort of achievement does them absolutely no favours whatsoever. Reality will knock them down soon enough.

Better to seek some sort of cross-party collaboration or even take the issue out of the hands of politicians and give it to an objective body that can review the evidence away from the day-to-day political maelstrom.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Involve universities and employers but keep policitians out of it if possible and DEFINITELY ignore the Dail Mail (who would have the birch back if they had their way).

Michael Gove is ludicrous!

i dont really understand why the left is leaping to their defence.

It's not the left, it's the Guardian. They are not one and the same.

I don't know about Gove, but most Tories certainly know about the benefits of a good education, even if they don't always want to share it with the masses. I went to state schools, and I've also sat in Oxford college tutorials with kids from Eton, Westminster, St Pauls etc, and the amount they knew and I didn't was frightening. If most people knew of the educational gulf that separates them from their betters, they would be bloody furious and desperate to do anything that would make state schooling more rigorous, more like the elite demands for its own offspring.

I'm not defending Gove, just pointing out that there's not much worth keeping in the current system.

I finished my A levels last year and my GCSEs 3 years ago. I frankly it doesn't matter what grades you get in your exams because there's sod all work and employment for young people in my area. A levels are just used for an arbitrary system of University entry and thankfully I got a University place, The government is doing its utmost to alienate young people by messing around with our schools and universities and by there being little chance for employment anywhere due to having us having little experience of working world because we have spent all our time studying for endless exams that don't prepare you for the real world

The precipitous dumbing down of the education system and media in the last twenty odd years has made us more egalatarian, but a lot more stupid. It suits big business to have idiots in all but the top positions. The want employees who like Americans, who will do what they are told without question.

Brave New World was an amazing set of predictions.

Fiona, these proposals are so ridiculous and ignorant that you must think the real purpose is to further collapse motivation, moral and standards in the state sector as a prelude to breaking it up in to a hierarchy of chunks with the higher levels privatised. Even Gove can not really be this idiotic can he?

Im sorry but every time i read of some sort of policy statement from Mr Gove i immediately lose interest , a bit like visiting my old grandmother who was afflicted with senile dementia .

Michael Gove is the enemy of promise

No the 'banana skin in waiting' is just the biggest dick-head in a government full of bell-ends!

Michael Gove is the enemy of promise

No the 'banana skin in waiting' is just the biggest dick-head in a government full of bell-ends!

Thanks for that amazing insight. What on Earth would we all do without well educated and intelligent people like you to enlighten us with your powerful arguments?

A good video of Ed Balls humiliating #Gove over GCSEs in parliament.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNR0AuGnoUg

You can bet your mortgage that this won't get shown on TV news (esp Sky) so please pass it around,

Hilarious!

This is a desperate act of a struggling government, based on what they are fully aware are media-peddled myths about the 'dumbing down' of the education system.

The Daily Mail has been relentlessly criticising the Tories as of late, particularly Gove. It has also relentlessly propagated the idea that todays youth have it oh-so-easy by comparison and that none of us are able to read or write. By some complete coincidence, this was 'leaked' to the Mail, the paper that has forever championed the old ways of grammar schools, O-levels. It's a desperate attempt to regain lost ground in the polls and a distraction from their disastrous economic record so far.

This is one of the worst things I have heard about this government. Apart rom the scrapping the league tables it's an awful proposal. Weighting the whole qualification on one exam at the end makes every exam purely a memory test. Coursework prepares one far better for real life, it's far more realistic and allows for the production of far better work at that age. It should remain a mix of the two forms of assessment.

This is an exmple of populism triumphing over sensibility. The education secretary carres far more about the ill-informed opinion of the Mail than he does every teaching and educational body in Britain.

I am genuinely furious.

Old red herring !
Virtually all Comprehensives stream.
As for "standards would rise dramatically overnight" this doesn't happen in real life, standards rise with sustained hard work by teachers and pupils.

How about everyone has the best education especially in Maths and english if everyone could achieve a pass at o level in these two subjects the other subjects could probably be based on academic qualifications, or more practical qualifications. I think at 14 an individual can pick one or other of these paths lets face it in the 70 s one could leave school at 15 and enter an apprenticeship. Until we stop assuming university is the best outcome for our kids and a decent job is the ultimate goal we will not see any progress for our kids The guardian columnists may have had great experiences at A level and a university education ,but The thought of staying at school until 18 fills me with horror the absolute boredom of learning from educators with no practical knowledge and being tested every 6 weeks........horrendous! This will hamper pupils and teachers just a stupid idea. Many of us are happy to attain the basic s so we can enter further education at any point in he future, give youngsters a chance to learn a trade whilst actually getting paid to do so. Tradesman are not a lower class of citizen please can all you class conscious guardian folk recognise this. We do not all think the same, we need practical and academics to create a balanced society.

Well I agree to a large extent JD, but this is serious in so many ways.

Placing huge pressures on children* has always been shown to not work, and to lead to severe mental problems. It is a form of bullying. Gove is not the first to do this, it has been a policy of all governments since Thatcher, but the number of prescriptions handed out to children under 16 for depression and mental health disorders has quadrupled in a decade.

Gove has a huge personal problem of not wishing to listen to anyone else, even the advisers he himself appointed, as reported in the Guardian in the last week or two.

And as for people thinking he wishes to go back to the "golden age" of the fifties and sixties .... I believe that we should place "18" or even "17" in front of those decades!

A levels are just used for an arbitrary system of University entry and thankfully I got a University place, The government is doing its utmost to alienate young people by messing around with our schools and universitie

Agreed, but don't forget the massive cuts to education funding which is having a huge impact on college places from this academic year onwards. If you fail your exams at school for whatever reason (anything from plain laziness to illness) you're pretty much denied the opportunity to advance your education later when you're back on your feet.

It's becoming more and more apparent that anything less than perfect is enough to have us cast on the scrapheap - we'd better have a good tutor or we're in for a hell of an upward climb over the next few years.

Hilarious!

It would be if it employers thought GCSE's were worthwhile qualifications. They don't and we have a large number of young people who entirely lack the education that would see them employed. I don't think that's amusing, do you?

And please, don't bother with the mindless 'there are no jobs' retort. Only someone with zero understanding of economics thinks there are a fixed number of jobs in an economy.

What is Mr Gove's vision for the future of young people in this country? In the long term?

* I meant to say in my previous post that long before the UK began with their obsession on exams, Japan had gone down that route, and saw a huge number of child suicides. There are now at least 4,000 child suicide attempts in the UK each year.

This kind of "policy" is anti-child in every way it is possible to be.

Or perhaps he just wants to improve educational standards which despite disingenuous results under the 13 years of the last Labour government have declined drastically.
I suspect that The Guardians real resistance to educational reform is that teachers may have to actually earn their money & give their students a real education.

Michael Gove is the enemy of promise

Do Guardian sub-editors have a degree in melodrama?

AntID

21 June 2012 5:45PM

And please, don't bother with the mindless 'there are no jobs' retort. Only someone with zero understanding of economics thinks there are a fixed number of jobs in an economy.

Well, I agree there. Since the Tories came in, the number of full time jobs has dived dramatically. Just as they did under the Mad Woman.

Michael Gove is the enemy.

Err, Fiona, have you not been reading exam headlines for the last decade or so? Everyone's a total genius these days. They'll ace these O-levels.

Today Andre Neil challenged the one of the Labour education spokesman whether the following question in the GCSE Science paper is an appropriate question to ask in a GCSE Exam.

The question was a multiple choice question that asked whether a Microscope is used for looking at the Stars or the smallest of items in a laboratory. The spokesman was too embarrassed to answer in truth and instead stuttered into rolling out verbiage that the paper is to test "all abilities", equality of opportunity and all that.

Even if one is too generous and concedes that Labour and the teaching establishment are motivated for the best of reasons about education- I certainly do not.

If a peasant in developing country who had never gone to a decent school answered it correctly, then of course it would have shown that the peasant is clever, an uncut diamond even. But pray whether the question is an appropriate question to ask a sixteen year old- even the most dullest or the most deprived- after over ten years of state education, and in what way does getting it right indicate the students ability?

All that the education establishment and Labour want is the protection of the producer- Teacher's- interest and a maintenance of a supply of an underclass who are the voting fodder for Labour. They are only too glad to fob off others children with indifferent sub-standard education while sending their children to schools that maintain high standards.

As always the case Lib-Dems either are absolutely confused in their sense of guilt of been "born in privileged" or too steeped in their dogma for "fashionable thinking- in either event they know not what they are doing.

Would you let Michael Gove anywhere near your kids ?

This is a desperate act of a struggling government, based on what they are fully aware are media-peddled myths about the 'dumbing down' of the education system.

Higher tier GCSEs are fine but I'm wondering what use foundation tier GCSEs are, where the highest grade someone can achieve is a D and the lowest pass mark is a G grade. I'm genuinely curious, can anyone involved in education explain what the benefits of having these are?

DoingItForVanGogh

21 June 2012 5:46PM

Or perhaps he just wants to improve educational standards which despite disingenuous results under the 13 years of the last Labour government have declined drastically.
I suspect that The Guardians real resistance to educational reform is that teachers may have to actually earn their money & give their students a real education.

For the last 24 years, teachers have been told to do as they are fg well told by politicians, teach how they are told by politicians, and teach what they are told by politicians. As the politicians come and go, they all say one thing at the start of their power-crazed tenure .... "If this doesn't work, then you can blame ME!"

Funny that folk such as you don't take their advice and blame THEM.

But there again I suppose you blame the waitress on table 46 for the Titanic hitting the iceberg, too.

I suspect that The Guardians real resistance to educational reform is that teachers may have to actually earn their money & give their students a real education.

I don't think it's anything that selfish. It's just more of the same tribal kneejerk reaction that seems to define so much of the left and the right. Forget party politics, looked at objectively there are pros and cons to what what Gove is suggesting. You would think that an intellectually advanced organisation like the Guardian would be interested in exploring the debate, but instead we get this endless one-eyed propaganda, and it's perfectly mirrored in the Mail of course. I honestly think the Guardian should give adult conversation a go. People might actually like it. Sales might increase. It really could be a good thing for the media, for politics and for the country.

As usual whenever reform of a public service is proposed the clever clog enemies of reform step forward to let us know why changes to the existing system should be resisted. It is all so predictable.

If our economy is to thrive we need to improve educational attainment and aspirations. Gove has the courage to implement much needed reforms and should be congratulated for putting the interests of schoolchildren before powerful vested interests such as the teaching unions and trendy educationalists.

Evidence if it were needed, that the Leveson Enquiry has to find a way of separating politics and the press.

Great article.

Well, I agree there.

That's progress.

Since the Tories came in, the number of full time jobs has dived dramatically. Just as they did under the Mad Woman.

While those facts might be related, you would do need to do more to demonstrate the fact. Correlation does not imply causation.

It's just going to make some children feel failures again; it won't work until vocational studies are given the same amount of respect as academic ones. Of course, they all need a good standard of core educational subjects and be encouraged to do as well as they can but to think that everyone has to go to university to be deemed a success is just nonsense.

Quite true. In many respects it is simply a rebranding exercise.

Current GCSE students are already entered into different examination papers in several subjects based on their ability and aptitude for a subject. This move by Gove to recreate an O level/CSE two tier model will create a false distinction in that many students who obtain lower grade GCSE's (D'sE's and F's) will in some cases have sat the lower papers anyway and thats the best they could possibly have achieved anyway. Will there be any real difference between young people getting a D grade at GCSE or a Grade 2 in the New CSE? What difference will it really make between those getting A or A* now at GCSE and the resurrected O Level?

Ever since the introduction of the GCSE examination a Grade C (Equivalent to a pass at O level) was still seen as the benchmark and it still is at present.

We already have a two tier system at GCSE it just isn't recognised as such.

There's already been far too much meddling in our education system over the years by politicians who think they know best when they don't . If we really wanted to raise educational standards then every school should get the same amount of funding as its private sector counterparts.

I feel very sorry for young people because the harsh reality is many of them are already well educated way beyond the type of employment that is actually currently available. Its not the way things should be, but it is sadly the way it is at the moment. Yes their are faults in our education system, nothings perfect, but the bigger problems will still remain if we follow this Government smokescreen.

I've just finished my A level's today and i can confidently say that the whole system needs a re-think. The largest problem I see in the system is how applied some subjects available are, okay this may suit some less able students but the reality is that few know is that the good universities have a blacklist of subjects that they feel are worth very little ( subjects on the Russell group blacklist include: General Studies, Critical Thinking, Performance Studies, Media Studies ect....) teachers push students to take these subjects for GCSE & A level as they know higher grades will look good for schools but is bad for pupils. If we really want to become a competitive country we need to up standards (yes they have dropped despite what is said) in particular we need to encouraging the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects those are what give Germany the edge not more (insert any name) studies, students should study less subjects at GCSE but just focus on Maths, Core Science (Physics, Chemistry & Biology) and English. The system fails these essential STEM subjects, our attitude towards mathematics is in particular very poor with people just saying it's a waste of time when in reality its essential. However unfortunate we must accept that some students are better than others and so streaming classes in core subjects is essential in particular the non subjective subjects, some people can understand an idea in seconds while it may take others months!

A two tier system is a good idea, push the brightest while ensuring that the less bright learn enough to have a good qualification, the staggering difference between different pupils standards means that one exam simply can't cover all students.

AntID

21 June 2012 5:57PM

While those facts might be related, you would do need to do more to demonstrate the fact. Correlation does not imply causation

I suppose not, on condition that you've been living in a cave in Borneo without contact with the human world for the last 2 and a bit years.

If making exams more difficult 'raises standards' then what will giving an easy exam to those who don't sit the new O-level do for them? I'm trying to follow the 'logic' that says if you change the way something is measured, it has an effect on what's measured. Make the measurement harder, everyone tries harder? Is that the theory? So then for the thousands who don't sit the hard exam, they're told they've got an easy or easier exam and they work harder? Or not so hard?

What is the rationale here?

By the way, in case you hear anyone go on about how in the 1950s everyone did Shakespeare for O-level, it's lies. Shakespeare was only on the English Literature O -level which was a minority of students within the 20 per cent that Fiona has already identified. At my grammar school it was about 30 out of a 100. Let's say it was 50 per cent nationally - just to be generous - that makes 10% of all pupils reading Shakespeare for O-level exam.

So you claim that teachers are totally blameless for the dismal state of education in the UK?
Let's face facts here, a lot of teachers enter the job because of the holidays, pension & because it's almost impossible to get sacked regardless of how good they are at the job.
Also it must be remembered that most teachers are Guardianistas like yourself, who seem to think that it's more important to teach kids about diversity & self esteem rather than science & maths.
What we need to be competitive is to examine what makes the educational systems of countries like Germany, Japan & South Korea & then implement these ideas into the UK education system.

Exactly is this Gove or Murdoch?

I doubt we will ever find out.

TheGreatRonRafferty

Is it possible for you to write in a thread with out mentioning the word Thatcher. She was in power 30 years ago, she is old now, she has alzheimer's. Education policy started before her and has been changed since her.

OK she was the best PM the UK has seen since Churchill but can't you just stop having wet dreams about her.

It does sound slightly worrying, however if colleges can provide for children who obtain the lesser level and get them to university or their desired trade then it could be okay pointless but okay.

I do think it would give children something to work towards though if you really want that O level then you will study that much harder to get access to it.

Its about creating a a two tier education system that reinforces class divisions. O' levels only appeal to those who either know nothing about education or those who want to recreate a class bound education system that condemned the vast majority of children to a second class education system.