29th February 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The government is to dramatically reduce the number of vocational qualifications that can be counted as GCSE equivalents, as it looks to give a more accurate reflection of the standard of each school in the league tables. Reported on the BBC, although the government has encouraged many new academy schools to push the vocational qualifications, a report by Dr. Terry Wringley says that many academies rely too heavily on GCSE equivalents to boost overall results.
The vocational qualifications include subjects such as catering, travel and tourism, life skills and IT, and count for up to 4 GCSEs. However, the government has said that these qualifications are too easy, and has scrapped the number of courses with equivalent status from over 3,000 to just 70.
Christine Blower, from the NUT criticised the government’s actions, and suggested that there was a contradiction because while announcing that academies’ results were inflated, they are, at the same time, using these results to show that the academy system is successful, pushing for more schools to take on academy status, particularly primary schools. However, a spokesperson from the Department for Education said that many of the schools currently relying on GCSE equivalents were previously under-performing, and that their achievements in academic subjects has actually improved, despite the reliance on vocational courses to increase their league table position.