GCSEs to be replaced by EBacc (From St Helens Star)
Send us news by text, start your message Star News and your send photos and videos to 80360
GCSEs to be replaced by EBacc
9:27pm Monday 17th September 2012 in News
Education Secretary Michael Gove (pictured) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg unveiled the plans today.
The GCSE exam for 16-year-old children in England is to be replaced by an English Baccalaureate Certificate (EBacc), with the first courses to begin in September 2015, it has been announced.
The new qualification will scrap the retaking of "modules", reduce reliance on coursework and bring back tough end-of-year exams.
Children of all abilities will take the EBacc and there will be only one exam board for each subject, in order to prevent competition between boards to deliver tests which are easier to pass.
Education Secretary Michael Gove and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: "We need a new set of exams for students at the age of 16 - qualifications which are more rigorous and more stretching for the able, but which will ensure the majority of children can flourish and achieve their full potential."
The announcement was made in a joint article in the Evening Standard several hours before Mr Gove was due to outline his plans in a statement to the House of Commons - something which is likely to anger MPs who believe that Parliament should be informed first.
Mr Gove and Mr Clegg wrote: "We believe that if we remove modules and reduce coursework, get rid of the factors that encourage teaching to the test and, above all, ensure there is just one exam board for each subject, we can restore faith in our exams and equip children for the challenges of the 21st century."
Teaching of the new English, maths and science certificates will begin in September 2015, with the first pupils receiving EBacc rather than GCSE qualifications in 2017. Other subjects, including history, geography and languages, will follow.
Mr Gove and Mr Clegg said that the EBacc will become a "near-universal qualification" taken by almost all English schoolchildren. Where schools feel that pupils are unable to sit the exams at 16, some will be able to defer their EBaccs until 17 or 18.
Mr Gove and Mr Clegg clashed openly over the future of exams earlier this year, with Mr Clegg insisting he would not accept a return to the two-tier system of qualifications that pre-dated GCSEs, when the academically talented took O-levels and the rest sat CSEs. It is understood that Mr Gove and Mr Clegg have worked closely together over the summer to find common ground.
In Monday's article, they wrote that their reforms "have only been made possible because in this coalition we have been able to be more radical, combining the best ideas and building a consensus broader than either of us could have hoped to on our own".
bettysenior says...
9:48pm Mon 17 Sep 12
ced-bread education systems. But they usually fail as history has shown us well. What politicians do not comprehend is that to excel in future times education has to driven by creative interest. Build our education system around this concept and we would lead the world. But again it also has to be said that politicians do not know the difference between perceived higher intelligence and higher creative thinking. The two are totally different as the history of S&T has shown us throughout millennium. In this respect the best educated minds are not the best creative minds. Indeed, many of the world's greatest technological inventions that have changed our modern world were not at the fundamental level conceived in our universities or advanced corporate centres of R&D, but in the confines of a special individual's private environment, far, far remote from the perceived environments of educational excellence.
Indeed Kilby, Baird, Fleming, Berners-Lee, Whittle and Edison to name only a few conceived their ideas out of personal interest and where no employer or institution had any bearing on their thoughts at the fundamental thought level. In the case of Kilby who invented the 'chip' in his own spare time and when he initially showed his employer Texas Instruments his prototype, they simply did not want to know. Now the 'chip' underpins a global industry turning over around $2 trillion a year and where probably it is the greatest technological wealth creator of all time.
Therefore we have to come away from the education thinking that has not worked in the past, will not work in the future and move towards creative interest-driven education. For this thinking will initiate a nation of excellors, not the unfit-for-purpose failures of the past. This goes doubly sure in industry where it is creative thinking that is vitally needed to conceive the next global level of technological industries. Indeed we would be far better off economically in the future if creativity and innovation were driving our education system and not the basics that have failed the nation in the past. Will politicians ever listen? I very much doubt it and where in another 10-years time they will be moving the deck chairs around the Titanic again to no avail. And with that the sheer waste of locked-in talent that is totally unoptimized by the present and prevailing educational systems that have been spawned since after WW2 and have so badly failed the nation and the people of this country. Time for great change therefore, but the right change.
For it is time that those looking in at the problem were given a seat at the table and where they can see the wood for the trees. Will Whitehall allow this? I fear not as they are seen as the so-called elite of our society and have all the answers. But history of course says something totally different and where we are today predominantly because they have always got it so terribly wrong. Oxbridge is not therefore where the great thinking comes from to create multi-trillion technological industries but second division universities usually, just like the one that Kilby went too and could not get into MIT (voted recently the top university in the world). It is a fallacy therefore that only Oxbridge can provide our nation with a future, but that is exactly what Whitehall have thought for decades and where it has got us nowhere but in a downward spiral of economic decline. Time has come therefore I feel to come out of this misconception and to consider highly creativity people over the perceived higher intelligent people that pervades our current society.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
United Kingdom - Switzerland