6th March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Well I’ve pretty much finished categorising all the qualification names now; a boring job which I’m pretty proud that I’ve managed to get through. The next stage is linking all the unique categories together which will hopefully be a lot of fun. At the moment the picture in my head is me on the floor, surrounded by bits of paper, trying to create some kind of Venn diagram.
I noticed Ofquals orders this week for exam boards to make some GCSEs more difficult, or at least require students to know their subject more broadly. Something I’ve really noticed in the last few years when I’ve been tutoring is that lots of students don’t have any background knowledge about what they’re studying, and don’t seem to want any. The strange thing is that as soon as I mention the background they do seem interested. It would be great if we could start to educate young people as broadly as possible. I’m sure that initially it would mean worse GCSE results, but I think we would end up with more intelligent and better prepared 18 year olds.