Our children are people – not statistics!

I thought that I would try to explain what EBCs, the EBAC and ‘Facilitating Subjects’ were to people today since so much of this is misunderstood. With examinations and league tables, our children are all too often being treated as numbers, rather than people.

EBCs

Mr Gove had the idea of replacing GCSEs with EBCs (English Baccalaureate Certificates) which were planned to rely much on rote learning, and to be much harder. However, after the whole of the Educational establishment, the Educational Select Committee and many eminent people from the world of the Arts all condemned the plan, Mr Gove backed down.

As I said in my blog last week, whilst GCSEs do need some reform (such as eliminating Controlled Assessments), there is much which is right with them. This fact that GCSEs are staying with us will be of great importance for anyone with a child in Year 8 or Year 9 since Year 8 were to be the first group of students to study the new examination from September 2015, and Year 9 would have been the last group to have spent Years 10 and 11 studying for what would have been a ‘defunct’ exam. None of that will now happen.

The main thing which was wrong with the EBCs was that the idea was that they were only for a proportion of the population and not everyone. If a child was of such an ability that they could not access these courses then the idea was that they would leave with some form a local school certificate, and not one which was recognised nationally – therefore condemning them as second class citizens for the rest of their lives.

As it is, the GCSE does, already, cater for all abilities and whilst it could be argued that the brightest could be challenged further, that is so easy to achieve – by simply adding some further extension questions to the Higher Paper.

Good schools will already be ensuring that their able students study topics at a deeper lever and helping them gain the highest grades in a range of subjects. The examination simply does not need replacing, although it does need refining and longer essay questions require expert examiners who will spend time marking them. This in itself could be a challenge.

EBAC

The EBAC (English Baccalaureate) is something completely different and is a performance measure for 16-year-olds / schools which was introduced a few years ago – without any warning and then applied retrospectively. So schools (and students) suddenly found themselves judged against a measure they knew nothing about until after the examinations had been taken– but that’s another story!

The EBAC is ‘achieved’ when a student gains grades A* to C at GCSE in English language, mathematics, at least two science subjects, history or geography and a foreign language. You might think that this is very sensible and ensures ‘rigour’ for students.

However, apart from the fact that the whole notion of a Baccalaureate suggests the student is awarded something (as is the case in France when students gain the ‘BAC’), the fact is that nothing is awarded – it’s just a measure in school league tables. You might still think that this is sensible and it enables parents and the public to see which schools are ensuring their students are studying ‘hard’ subjects and not ‘soft’ ones.

A major problem is the list of subjects which ‘count.’ You will notice that GCSE religious education does not count as a humanity subject – only history or geography. Religious education is, to me, a vitally important humanity subject and at A-Level (known as Philosophy & Ethics), is valued by the top universities.

Some might argue that in a world where misunderstanding about religious and cultural differences all too often cause conflict, that it would be vital for all our students to have a very good understanding of world faiths and cultures – and hence be included in any ‘performance measure’; it doesn’t! Then what about GCSE music which is both rigorous and ‘hard’? That doesn’t count either.

You could then ask about hard ‘technical’ subjects such as GCSE electronics or ICT, or GCSE design & technology – perhaps something which might be pertinent for the 21st Century… they don’t count either; neither does English literature which is also particularly demanding. And of course – none of the Arts count and not one vocational course counts either. This is important since schools are judged by the EBAC figures and it would be foolish to say that schools should not push students into these subjects – if the performance measure is there, and the public judge the success, or otherwise, of schools against it, then schools simply have to respond.

So when readers are looking at this measure – please remember what it actually ‘counts’ – which is nothing since any exceptional student who misses out just one of the subjects which do ‘count’, is not included in the EBAC figures for a school. Rather than being a poor school, is could well mean that the school is more concerned with ensuring that students have a well-balanced and appropriate curriculum for their students, than ensuring a particular league table score.

What is particularly sad, however, is that the press and the public seem so taken with league tables that many schools made children change courses when this measure suddenly ‘popped from no-where’ and are now forcing students into courses which they might not like, or be particularly strong at, simply because they are afraid of how the league table will portray them.

Facilitating Subjects

This is another measure which the Government introduced, retrospectively, once students had taken their examinations. The public are told that unless students studied subjects from a list of what are called ‘facilitating subjects’, then students could not access places at the top universities to study top subjects such as engineering, law, medicine etc.

This list of subjects is: mathematics, further mathematics, English literature, biology, chemistry, physics, history, geography and classical and modern languages. But the government’s message is completely wrong!

The measure which the government introduced into league tables was the proportion of students gaining at least ABB in three from this list. I have been advising our own students and those from across Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole for a number of years on how to get a place at a top university and I need to make it absolutely clear that NEVER has any top university insisted on THREE subjects from a list of ‘facilitating subjects’ .

What I have always advised is the same as the advice from the London School of Economics and Cambridge – and that is: for students to be able be taken seriously when applying to top courses at top universities, they need to ensure that they do not study more than one subject from a ‘non-preferred list’. To explain this list here would take too long, but all of this is explained on my school’s 6th Form website and can be seen by clicking here

I know that my advice is correct because we have many students now at top universities studying subjects such as law, medicine, physics, mathematics, English literature, history plus many, many more - all at Universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial, LSE and so on. The vast majority of these students did not take three of the subjects in that list – because the whole notion of students not being able to gain places at the top universities unless they have ABB in three from that list is simply wrong.

One last thought on this – in that measure, the student who is in his first Year at the Royal College of Music does not count in the ABB figure in the league table, nor does the student who has just won a scholarship to the Birmingham Conservatoire for pianoforte! Nor do the students who are at the top art and design colleges in London, or…. I hope that our readers can see the point I am making here?

Summary

I’d like to finish where I started which is to make the point that our children are people and are not statistics. What makes this all the more important is that the messages which the government are giving people are all so often completely wrong. All that I ask is that you question them and I hope that this blog has helped to expel some of the myths which are prevalent at the moment.

Perhaps I will leave the final word to Mark Twain, who in "Chapters from My Autobiography", published in the North American Review in 1906, popularised a saying which everyone will recognise…."Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’”.

Dr Terry Fish

Headteacher

Twynham School