Sunday 6 March 2011

Keep studying Maths and English - Students are told

Mp900399895

Teenagers in England should be forced to study maths and English until they have a good standard in both subjects, a key government education adviser has said.

In a government-commissioned review into vocational education, Professor Alison Wolf, an expert in public policy, found only 45% of 16-year-olds achieve a C in GCSE maths and Engish and just 4% of those who fail the subjects go on to re-sit them and achieve a C grade or higher.

"It's an absolute scandal," Wolf said. "No young person should go out into the working world without a good level of English and maths," she told educationalists at the launch of her review in central London. They should go on study leave to get the qualifications if they do not achieve them the first time, she added. The subjects should be compulsory up to the age of 19.

Wolf said in other European countries knowledge in these subjects was taken more seriously. "We have told young people in the UK that [non-GCSE qualifications] are equivalent to GCSEs in English and maths and when they arrive at college they have discovered they aren't. It is immoral," she said.

Up to 400,000 teenagers are wasting their time on publicly funded college courses that do not lead to jobs or further training, Wolf added.

"There has been a lot of vocational education that has been pointless. Young people would have been better off had they not spent their time on these courses. They go in and out of education, trying to secure jobs but not getting them." She said the problem lay with qualifications and the system, rather than young people.

Wolf will tell the government to ensure the funding for practical education follows students. At the moment, colleges are funded according to how many students they put in for qualifications and the number of courses they offer.

The number of vocational qualifications has boomed in the past decade and many fear that some courses are not of sufficient quality. One of the leading exam boards, Edexcel, has said the number of students signed up to its vocational qualifications has risen from 66,000 in 2003 to more than 700,000.

She said work experience should no longer be a requirement for 14- to 16-year-olds because it was very difficult to find enough placements. But she said businesses should be paid to hire 16-year-olds as apprentices. "Employers should be subsidised for offering teenagers high-quality training. All students on practical courses should be forced to continue to study some academic subjects, such as maths," she said.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, said he would consider the recommendations. "We already know what good looks like," he said. "Apprenticeships at BT or Rolls-Royce are more oversubscribed than the most desirable course at the best university." He said many young people were competing in "life's career race crippled from the start".

It has emerged that one qualification in "personal effectiveness" teaches teenagers how to claim unemployment benefits and use a telephone. It is offered by the Asdan charity, was taken by nearly 11,000 people last year and is worth one GCSE.

Martin Doel, the Association of Colleges chief executive, said the difficulties facing young people in the labour market were not a reflection of the quality of vocational education.

"They are instead fundamentally related to the state of the economy, the challenges colleges and others face in picking up the pieces, where pupils leave school with few or no qualifications and an education system that has centrally prescribed qualifications."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/03/retake-maths-english-gcse-educ...

 

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