Reform to GCSE is nothing new. Educators have been calling for changes for some time but the pandemic has not only increased the desire to look at things in a new light but also shown how quickly changes can happen.
For Sarah Fletcher, High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School in London, GCSEs have simply not kept up with the pace of change in the last thirty years. "I think the fundamental problem is that the world is now very different to the one that existed back in the 1980s."
Read MoreWhile most teachers express frustration about the education system in England, with its focus on Sats, GCSEs and league tables, what they don’t usually do is set up their own school instead. But that is exactly what Lucy Stephens did.
Stephens had been a primary teacher for six years but grew disillusioned and left. “I was just shoehorning kids through test papers,” she says. “Everything was so competitive. You’d find the headteacher in your room, looking through your books, checking on you. Behaviour managers can rule by fear, the staff as well as pupils. I’ve seen them scream at kids in front of the whole school, humiliating them.”
Stephens decided to resign and work for The Prince’s Trust charity, helping vulnerable young people. But now she is back teaching – this time in her very own school, where she writes the rules and sets the pace.
Read MoreIt’s not easy being a teenager in 2021. It could even give you the blues. What it rarely does, however, is make you want to play the blues, the musical style that emerged from black communities in the American south at the turn of the 20th century and went on to form the foundation of 1960s and 1970s rock. Toby Lee, a 16-year-old from Oxfordshire who has been celebrated by such greats as Buddy Guy and Joe Bonamassa as the best blues guitarist of his generation, is a rare exception.
“I’m going to be honest: I’m quite a nerd,” Toby says, actually looking quite stylish in a flat cap and patterned shirt as he speaks from his parents’ living room in Oxfordshire, a custom-built Gibson335 electric guitar leaning on the wall behind him. “If I’m not playing guitar, I’m taking a guitar or a pedal apart to figure out how it works. I have a mechanical mind and I’m into things my friends aren’t into, but I quite like that. It’s something different to talk about.”
Read MoreMilo Beckman was studying advanced algebra when he was 8. By 15, he was a Harvard prodigy. Now aged just 25, he’s written a brilliant book that takes everything we know (and fear) about maths out of the equation – starting with numbers.
Read MoreBoth my husband and I were asked to leave recorder club at our primary schools. I was even asked to mime in a concert. My problem - I didn’t practice. Not sure if that’s because I always forgot or because my mother didn’t remind me. She wasn’t big on helping me with anything to do with school. My husband on the other hand, is musical and spent 20 years as a Sound Engineer and Producer, before switching careers.
Our daughter is very musical, although she’s also not big on practicing. She was very lucky and managed to be offered a 3 year plac, on the Royal Academy of Music’s First String Experience course. She made it to grade 5 violin (then gave up to work more on her ballet), grade 4 piano, grade 3 recorder and is now just beginning grade 5 flute (her only weekly lesson instrument now). She’s spent lockdown teaching herself to play her guitar (Rolling Stones, A Star is Born soundtrack and random Siri inspired tracks), learning how to use GarageBand and back to playing her piano.
Read MoreWe just saw a news report about this group of London birdwatchers and loved it. They are an incredibly cool group of people.
Back at the end of June, as the strictest lockdown restrictions in London were beginning to ease, there was one thing, above all others, that Ollie Olanipekun and Nadeem Perera were itching to do: go birdwatching. “So much of the appeal of what we do is the escapism, and we’ve never needed that more than the past six months,” says Olanipekun. As birds (or, at least, birdwatchers) of a feather who bonded online over a mutual passion for this relatively esoteric outdoors activity, it wasn’t just about the chance to return to nature, whip out the binoculars, and tick another rare sighting off their list. It would also mean a tentative step back into the pre-pandemic social lives so many of us have struggled to ease back into. As Perera puts it: “It’s really just the perfect Sunday out.”
Read MoreAnother article about Shamsea Alizada, which makes her achievement even more inspirational.
A coalminer’s daughter whose tutoring centre was bombed by Isis has come top in an Afghan entrance exam.
Read MoreIn this letter, leading educators demand urgent action as they launch a group aiming to overhaul the testing regime in schools.
We were told this summer that it was a “mutant algorithm” that had caused the anguish of the exam fiasco. Covid may have exposed the failings, but in truth, something more profound is going on, and it has been brewing for years: we have a mutant exam system.
Created with good intentions — “to raise standards” — it has mutated into something that neither measures the right things nor is very reliable, and leaves in its wake a trail of stress and unfairness.
Many of those who are involved in the exams merry-go-round are reaching the same conclusion — it’s not fit for purpose and needs to change.
This week a new group— Rethinking Assessment — is being launched to do something about it.
Read MoreFirst came ‘Attack the Block’; now two new releases are redrawing how we see young inner-city kids on screen. The directors tell Beth Webb why it’s time to see teenagers differently.
Read MoreDirectors are queueing up to work with the Welsh actor about to hit the big time in her first lead role, in acclaimed psychological thriller Saint Maud.
When Morfydd Clark was 16 years old, she crashed out of school. “After my GCSEs I just couldn’t go back,” she says. “I tried for a term but didn’t do any work and my mum said: ‘Why don’t you just drop out? There’s no point in being there if you’re going to be like this.’ So I spent a month in my pyjamas in my bedroom with the heating on, eating chocolates, and then she said: ‘Right, you’ve got to do something. You like acting, don’t you?’”
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