Education
The likelihood is that they have. The standard of O level GSE has gone and been replaced with GCSE. During the 12 years of this government the stats they have issued show that more and more pupils achieve higher standards. The inevitable conclusion of these phenomena is that these figures could only be achieved by lowering the pass mark level. That conclusion might be totally unfair to those students who have worked their socks off to achieve their goals. However it is the feeling that most people, outside government, have.
The same phenomenon also applies to “A” level results, where more and more pupils are obtaining higher grades year on year.
Our government is obsessed with targets and tests. Although tests for 7 year olds have now been dropped, pupils still face being tested far too often. The main problem with tests for the pupils is that the results determine the ranking of the school, so you can have the situation where schools will not enter pupils for exams where they think a pass is marginal because if too many of their pupils fail a particular subject then the school’s position the exam results tables can be compromised.
We have created an underclass in the UK; thousands of kids can see no future at all, they are brought up in an environment of non-work and within a benefit culture. Many of the kids brought up in this environment will, when they leave school, enter the benefit system without any real ambition of getting out. Many will also turn to crime. As already stated many are brought up their mothers, with the father long gone. We have got to solve this problem, kids have to have hope; they have to have a chance of making something of their lives.
How to do it is the problem.
Problems at home lead to problems at school.
There is a major problem with discipline in many of our inner-city schools. Teachers are regularly compromised by unruly and ill disciplined pupils who have very little interest in learning anything at all. Many of these kids come from very poor backgrounds and single-parent families and are brought up by often hard-pressed mothers.
The curriculum is one of the causes of these problems. In many schools pupils are allowed to drop subjects when the get to 13 or 14. In problem schools this means that you have huge chunks of pupils having to attend lessons they have no interest in at all. Inevitably this means that many of these pupils will prove to be highly disruptive and destroy any hope of the pupils who do wish to learn about the subject achieving their aim.
So the first step is maybe to set the curriculum at the first year of senior school and keep to that curriculum until students enter the pre-GSCE stage.
Because many of this type of pupil believe that there is no future they can’t be bothered to learn, which means that they leave school with very few schools and find it is almost impossible to break into the job market at any decent level.
Before targets were brought in most pupils left senior schools being able to read, write and add-up. Unfortunately that is not the case today.
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