issue sixteen MICHAELMAS TERM 2014
SherborneNews SPORT
TRIPS
DRAMA
MUSIC
Comment BY TIM FILTNESS DEPUTY HEAD ACADEMIC
‘Curriculum 2015’ promises a great deal for Sherborne. We plan to combine it with a fresh look at our timetable, making for exciting, liberating and inspiring times...
It is now fourteen years since the wholescale introduction of New Labour’s ‘Curriculum 2000’: a policy that oversaw the removal of terminallyexamined A-Levels in UK schools, and unfurled their replacement - the two-tier AS/A2 system we are all familiar with. In fact, modularised A-levels were available a few years before the turn of the millennium (for example a modularised Chemistry A-Level course was available in 1996 – I studied it). Taking this into consideration, it is the case that students across the UK have been learning compartmentally in the Sixth Form for nearly two decades. As the argument goes, they have performed increasingly well doing so: over the last twenty years the proportion of students achieving an A* or A grade at A2 has risen from about 15% (when I sat my Chemistry modules) to 26% in this year’s examinations. QED, it seems, - a clear win for modules. Or maybe not: anyone who has read Ben Goldacre’s most recent book – Bad Pharma – will appreciate, a) the relevance Disraeli’s opinion of statistics brings to this conclusion, and b) that appropriate consideration of construct validity doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves. How can we expect students to understand ideas holistically and see the connections between things if we compartmentalise their learning and assessment into bite-size chunks?
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