The cut off age for going to primary in England/Wales is to be 5 years old by September. In Scotland, you have to be 5 years old before the following March the 1st, so the ages of children in what is called ‘primary 1′ in Scotland is from 4.5 to 5.5 at the start of the school year (in August). In England, the children will range in age from just turned 5 to just about to turn 6. However, even this comparison is not easy because in England some (or maybe all, I’m not sure) schools have a reception year, followed by 6 years (called years 1 to 6). This makes a total of 7 years at primary school. In Scotland, there is no reception year, they just call it ‘primary 1′ to ‘primary 7′. I think this is where some confusion lies, because English people hear the term ‘primary 7′ and assume that Scottish children have spent an extra year at primary. Scottish children will be aged between 11.5 and 12.5 when they go to secodnary. I think this is on average 6 months older than English children going to secondary, not 12 months older.

Another source of confusion is the number of years spent at secondary. In the Scottish system, there is no equivalent of what is currently called ‘year 9′ in England (that’s 3rd year in old money). Scottish kids will sit their Standard Grades (GCSE equivalent) at the end of 4 years at secondary (called ’4th year’), whereas English kids sit GCSEs after 5 years (year 11, or 5th year in old money). Now, having skipped this extraneous year the Scottish kids having done their Standard Grades are, on average, 6 months younger than English kids having done GCSE.

After GCSEs and Standard Grades its time for AS levels (in ‘year 12′ in England) and Highers (in ’5th year’ in Scotland). Contrary to what’s been said before, the brightest kids in Scotland will get their 5 highers and go off to uni without bothering with 6th year. Most kids in 6th year are either upgrading Highers they didn’t do so well on, or doing more Highers. Its actually quite difficult to muster up enough pupils to even offer 6th year studies (SYS) in most subjects. Teachers are usually really pleased if they have some pupils interested in doing SYS, and they certainly don’t run SYS classes in all subjects every year in most schools. The reason for the low interest in it is because SYS qualifications are no great advantage to getting into uni. Scottish universities want to see your Higher results, SYS isn’t that relevant unless you want to skip first year, which is actually very rarely done. In fact, some teachers advise pupils against doing SYS as its designed to be taught in a lecture and project way (40% of it is project based), a bit more like university teaching than school teaching. Pupils have to be very self motivated, especially as they probably already have the Highers they need to get into uni. If you have great Highers and you bomb out on SYS because you lacked the discipline to push yourself, it looks really bad on your application to uni the next year. Some kids just want to do 6th year because otherwise they feel too young going to uni – at the end of 5th year, Scottish kids are aged between 16.5 and 17.5. The youngest won’t turn 17 till the following February, half way into their first year at uni.

As for the first year of uni being A-level catch up, that’s quite an oversimplification. A2-level teachers have a varied crop of pupils, and have to teach to the middle to make sure the C and D grade students don’t get left behind. Compare this with a first year cohort in a Scottish university – a self selected, much smaller group who all have As or Bs at Higher, and are, by definition, extremely motivated to do that one subject. University teachers expect far more out of their students than school teachers, and generally get it too. The lab equipment is far superior too, and expectations of lab reports bear very little relation to what’s expected at school. You’re also expected to behave like an adult and be responsible for your own learning right from the off, far more so than if you were still at school.

I think each of these systems has its relative merits – I think year 9 is a waste of time for most pupils, but going to uni when you’re only 16 is a bit too young.

There are a couple of regards in which I think science teaching can be better in Scotland though. 1. Science is taught as a practical subject so there is a statutory class size limit of 20 pupils per class. This applies from 1st year at secondary onwards.
2. Teachers must be qualified to university level to teach a science subject beyond 2nd year at secondary, so e.g. physics teachers must have a degree in physics to teach from Standard Grade upwards. (Or some related degree such as engineering which had enough physics in it to satisfy the stringent demands of the Scottish General Teaching Council)
3. Teachers in Scotland have a quite generous statutorily protected minimum number of non-contact periods every week. These are invaluable for preparing for practical lessons. In England, although teachers’ timetables included non-contact periods, they are not protected and you can be given cover lessons if other teachers are off and they can’t get in enough supply teachers. In my experience of teaching in England, this happens a lot, and you can be taken off to cover just when you had earmarked a free period for setting up practicals. In the end, you just end up demonstrating the experiment, and bang goes another chance for the kids to do something hands on.

Having said all that, the decline in kids doing A level science subjects is mirrored in Scotland with a decline in kids opting for Higher sciences, so maybe it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.

Good point. The exams in the IB Diploma aren’t neccesarily harder than A-Levels (Higher Maths is probably overall easier by itself). The reputation the IB has for rigour and for good preperation for Uni is the overall demands it makes on students.

Sure, that’s anecdotal, but hey.

Except of course that only 3% of the cohort get 3 As and in future the universities will have access to the full marks and so would be able to choose the top A level scores. Having said that it is by no means clear that the raw A level scores are the best way to choose who gets the place – motivation, ability, social background and quality of the school the grades were achieved at could all be more relevant.

A levels are not only about allocating a few thousand Oxbridge places a year, nor should the whole system be geared towards this niche.

I took GCSE Maths in 1999 (early), & my Dad who is an Electrical Engineer was actually quite impressed by some of the content, particularly the stats. Apparently I was doing stats as a 13-year-old that he’d not touched ’till uni. It missed quite a lot of things he had covered at O level, but did give a useful grounding in understanding things like probability which are important to understand a lot of news stories & generally navigate life. GCSEs are the last time in the UK that you can *make* anyone learn stuff, so maybe it’s as well to gear them to ‘public understanding of science’, and assume that future scientists, who will make up a very small percentage of those sitting GCSEs, can learn what they need at A level and beyond.
The other bit of GCSE Maths I found particularly good was the coursework – I had to undertake an independent investigation into a mathematical problem – my parents were impressed & hadn’t done anything like that at O level.

For the last time criterion referencing does not raise grades it is just a mechanism that allows improved performance to be recognised over time.

I suspect a debate on secondary moderns is a bit much on top of the rest, suffice to say, as you would no doubt expect, I am not a fan. Personally I suspect it has to do with lower ambitions within the school, both teachers and pupils plus lower parental support and ambition.

Statistically, that may be true, but we have to be careful. Private schools have had a fair number of people from much less well-to-do backgrounds and much less prior attainment than their peers (because they came from crappier schools) doing as well as or exceeding the performance of their new peers.

Presumably because we know the scholarship exam is all about finding the most deserving not the poor kid with most ability and the highest achievements to date?

Sorry this very select group, often with very education focussed parents, is not representative. Again – the school can make some difference but it is relatively little – even in the independent sector. Their excellent results are a product of excellent teaching, low class sizes, additional resources and the quality of their intake – both in terms of pupils and parents.

I’m sorry if my comments read as a sweeping condemnation of Piaget, they were not intended as such. His focus was on development and stages of development. This is very different to assessment. Twisting his work to create an assessment framework just does not stack up. It would be unclear to Piaget what was being assessed, its relevance and the measures to be used would be unclear even to Piaget.

“It is interesting but hardly surprising the potential A students are going elsewhere.”

They don’t all go elsewhere. They already have 10 percent A grades. Why are the B-grade students frozen, but not elsewhere? Why can’t the teaching and the wonderful new criterion-based exams lift them, if it does elsewhere?

“One of the things that is often missed in the Secondary school type debate is that the best/worst schools make relatively little difference to the outcomes in terms of grades. Prior achievement and social/economic background are far more important.”

Statistically, that may be true, but we have to be careful. Private schools have had a fair number of people from much less well-to-do backgrounds and much less prior attainment than their peers (because they came from crappier schools) doing as well as or exceeding the performance of their new peers.

“Not really Piaget has 4 undefined stages of child development with no clear test for them. In fact they are nowhere fully described and nobody knows the boundaries so it would be startling if different researchers 30 years apart assessed them in the same way – you see they have no mark scheme, they have no definition and they have no transition criteria between the stages.”

To add to what Nick said, there is also this:

“He helped to develop two-year intervention programmes for those children who had been identified by the Piagetian model as being below average in year 7. Science and maths were the contexts through which the programmes were taught, but the prime focus was on general developmental skills.

“These programmes [Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and Cognitive Acceleration through Maths Education] both significantly increased the children’s Piagetian scores and markedly improved their maths and science GCSE grades from those predicted at entry level testing. More important, these children also showed an improvement on predicted grades in other subjects, such as English and history. This showed the programmes had a generic impact, rather than just a specific effect.”

And this…

“VH, which concerns the conservation of liquid and solid materials, internal volume and intuitive density, was chosen partly because it has substantial predictive validity for both science and mathematics achievement and is an effective way of alerting teachers to their students’ range of abilities, but also because it is recognised as a test that measures abilities that are not directly teachable. As such, it was an objective research method, free from any process of adaptation to changing circumstance.”

I’m not the greatest fan of Piaget, but your sweeping condemnation of the approach of someone with good cred. contrasts with the way you blindly urge us to accept the work of the QCA because they are “professionals”, without any assessment of THEIR methods. But yeah, Piaget has a lot to answer for, including a whole bunch of teachers believing that children just learn stuff wen they are “ready” and that they therefore needn’t bother much about the teaching because it is immaterial.

They haven’t made any gains to speak of, the number getting As is frozen at around 10 percent. The teachers are not seeing more people move up from B grades to A the way they are at other schools.

It is interesting but hardly surprising the potential A students are going elsewhere. What would be more relevant is their increase in B/C – The O Level equivalents where I am sure they have seen real progress. These are real gains for these pupils.

One of the things that is often missed in the Secondary school type debate is that the best/worst schools make relatively little difference to the outcomes in terms of grades. Prior achievement and social/economic background are far more important. The value add league tables sow that a “good” school manages to imprve average performance by about two GCSE grades so of say 5 GCSEs Two subjects at B rather than C. Some of the “secondary moderns” are matching this value add – not many but some.

“No, relatively static in percentage terms. Improved significantly but less than at private schools. In terms of the total A grades awarded more of the extra As have been awarded at state schools. 93% vs 7% is the participation rrate overall but it is closer to 13%/87% at A Level.”

The interesting thing is how static it has been for the secondary moderns, the ones which have had the brighter ones stripped out and sent to the grammars. At 0.1 percent over five years, that’s pretty static.

They haven’t made any gains to speak of, the number getting As is frozen at around 10 percent. The teachers are not seeing more people move up from B grades to A the way they are at other schools.

I wouldn’t let the Piaget aspect count too much as far as the actual test goes. The Piagetian developmental stages were the underlying concept between the items in the Voulme and Heaviness test. The test itself stayed the same and was analysed using a standard psychometric model.

The interesting issue here is that the test Shayer used was one of practical reasoning about physical objects -essentially the kind of inner working folk model of physics that the children had. Shayer’s result indicate that had declined. That isn’t inconsistent with either Flynn’s results (on an attempted measure of g ) or school test results.
“On the reasons for the decline reported in this article one can only speculate. Piaget
believed that it was the whole everyday environmental experience of the child that
drove cognitive development, with schooling possibly playing only a minor part in the
process – Vygotsky believed that schooling should change to play a major part (Shayer,
2003). Passive exposure to many hours of television a week has increased since the
1960s when 1975 CSMS students entered primary school. Computer games may have
usurped what might have been, for boys, many hours playing outside with friends with
things, tools and mechanisms of various kinds rather than virtual reality. However, it is
possible that a decline in the use of activity methods in the early years of primary
schools, in favour of an increased proportion of the time dedicated to the 3Rs as
instanced by the National Numeracy and Literacy projects, may be partly responsible for
the continuing decline from 2000 to 2003.”
(Michael Shayer British Journal of Educational Psychology (2007), 77, 25–41)
In other words the decline in students ability to reason sensibly about physical objects and improvements in their ability to add, spell etc may have the same fundamental cause: Primary schools are doing more formal teaching of the 3Rs and less experiential learning. Twisted on its head we could also say that in the 1970s primary school would have been more likely to have explictly taught Piagetian concepts (eg conservation of volume) because Piagetian ideas were more in vouge: so the past results may have been because of “teaching to the test”.

I can’t find a free-access version of the paper

No, relatively static in percentage terms. Improved significantly but less than at private schools. In terms of the total A grades awarded more of the extra As have been awarded at state schools. 93% vs 7% is the participation rrate overall but it is closer to 13%/87% at A Level.

Plus we have a much wider participation rate now compared to a decade ago – in the state sector. The independent sector has been static in size. This wider participation could reasonably be supposed to have mostly included pupils less likely to achieve an A than those who traditionally took the A levels.

The work of the guy behind it was used to benchmark the National Curriculum, so Richas should approve…

Entrails I’m afraid.

Which would be why we have a regulator to check this and why the Exam Boards have a curriculum board they are all members of. They provide the mechanism to ensure that the exam boards award grades of similar (as close to identical as possible) standard.

Do you think you are the only one who has compared questions on papers? They just do it with full information and statistical analysis and apply their professional experience to the task.

Then I haven’t a clue what you are saying. You agree that the in the good-old days A Levels did claim to be able to assess down to O-Level grades and distinguish that from a fail. You also agreed that not all question in the OCR AS paper were at O-Level standard.

“OK, so we have your “awareness” to go on instead. Cool. ”

Erm no. You have actual emprical data which I’ve posted which shows that the test have actually got easier for students. That’s the issue – do we go about looking at this question in a silly woo sort of way (your approach) or do we consider empircal data (my approach).

“There are limits to what can be reasonably expected of grade boundaries, ”

Undoubtedly but your complaint that some questions on the OCR paper were easier than those on the AQA paper wasn’t of the order of magnitude even by your own claims. Two papers can differ substantially in the difficulty of the items but so long as there is enough overlap grade boundaries can be adjusted to compensate OR even render one test easier than the other despite the apparent difficulty.