Plans to scrap GCSEs in key subjects in England and replace them with English Baccalaureate Certificates are now being abandoned by the government.
BBC News has announced the u-turn by Michael Gove alongside other curriculum changes.
The education secretary had wanted to bring in more rigorous exams in some core subjects from 2015, but faced criticism from MPs, teachers and even Ofqual – the exams regulator. The change means plans for the new qualification, announced in September, are now being shelved, while GCSEs are to be retained, despite having been previously condemned by the education secretary.
The announcement is going to offer reassurance to those teaching and sitting GCSEs at the moment. Pupils over 14 have already begun revamped GCSE courses, where exams are mainly taken at the end of two years’ of study. Mr Gove has also announced that from autumn 2015, teaching will begin for the new re-vamped GCSE courses in English, maths, the sciences, history and geography.
In a speech to the Social Market Foundation think-tank, Mr Gove said research showed that children needed to commit facts and concepts to their long-term memory in order to understand the world. Giving a glimpse of how the new curriculum would be structured, he said: “There is new and detailed content on the mathematical processes every child should master – including early memorisation of tables, written methods of long division and calculations with fractions – which was either absent or obscure before.
My primary school day always began with a recital of the times tables and calculators were rarely used in Maths lessons (except to type 5318008 and turn them upside down) and they certainly weren’t allowed to be used in exams. So, Im guessing the revamped curriculum will in fact be a return to the original methods of teaching?
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