Posts Tagged Edexcel
How to avoid another exam board scandal
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 15/12/2011
By David Green
The Telegraph’s brilliant exposure of the behaviour of some exam boards should not be dismissed with a couple of sacrificial sackings. It revealed profound flaws, not just in our school system, but also in the way our democracy is currently functioning. The attitudes behind the scandal are closely allied to the self-serving atmosphere in Parliament that led some MPs to fiddle their expenses. Deception of the people had became the norm, whether it was creative use of second homes, or manipulating exam results. The rot always starts at the top, and getting rid of the hapless examiners who got caught will make little difference unless we go much further.
GCSEs – or the poor-man’s equivalent
Posted by Claire Daley in Education on 21/08/2008
Poor quality ‘vocational’ or ‘vocationally related’ qualifications at GCSE are locking both low-income pupils and vocational education into second-class status.
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Pseudo ‘vocational’ qualifications being used to artificially reach A*-C GCSE targets
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Poorer pupils more likely to be pushed into vocational qualifications
Out of the thousands of pupils getting their GCSE results today, many will have been sold short with sub-standard vocational qualifications.
A new report from independent think-tank Civitas, School Improvement – or the ‘Equivalent’, shows how a blind focus on the A*-C benchmark, together with a failure to truly improve schools, has led to a scenario in which pupils are being encouraged to opt out of academic courses and into irrelevant so-called ‘vocational’ qualifications to boost national GCSE results.