Secret Teacher: I told my student he would fail without GCSEs – I was wrong | Teacher Network

Secret Teacher: I told my student he would fail without GCSEs â€" I was wrong | Teacher Network

Last week a stranger stopped me in town, approaching with the swagger of a young man comfortable in his own skin. I didn’t realise I knew him until he called me Miss.

Looking closely, I saw the eyes of a boy who’d spent many an hour face-planting desks during GCSE lessons. A boy who’d often refused to scribble his name, let alone write an essay on the ambiguities of responsibility in Macbeth. He’d never seen the point.

But I discovered that this ex-student of mine is thriving. With a steady job, a vocation, and a good salary, he’s found more self-worth than he’d ever hoped to find in school. Despite most teachers telling him he “wouldn’t amount to anything without GCSEs”, he’s unrecognisably happy and healthy. Proving the system wrong, he wanted me to be proud of him.

And I am. But I feel guilty, too. School was hell for him. I remember the fists through walls, broken knuckles, the fights. He was frustrated. I’d told him he needed an English GCSE to move on to grander things. I perpetuated the myth that without GCSEs he would fail.

But now I think I was wrong. There are plenty of people who, despite the threat of lifelong failure, go on to do great things. Richard Branson is usually trotted out as the go-to example, but some report even Einstein left secondary school with no formal qualifications.

The nature of study often turns subjects of joy into exercises of misery

Qualifications have their place, of course, but some students see GCSEs as the gateway to conform, not be informed. Put simply, these courses don’t always feel relevant. These subjects are learned to pass exams, not gain a living knowledge. With their academic frames so distant from real-life experience, GCSEs aren’t useful, creative, productive or fun.

To make matters worse, GCSE failure lands squarely on the shoulders of students and teachers. The complaints of “What’s the point?” are ignored and aren’t treated as symptomatic of a systemic problem. Rather, the students themselves are considered a problem â€" the bad eggs preventing schools from improving those all-important performance statistics marking out “success”.

So what’s the answer? As Niace finds, to make English and maths engaging, “learners need to see the purpose and relevance of what they are learning”. So I believe we must make these subjects meaningful in a real-world context (even the most disengaged have shown to be hardworking during tasks meaningful to them). Who, for the love of Pythagoras, draws triangles just to calculate their hypotenuse? Instead, why not learn the great man through productive activity, like the construction of buildings or designing of video games? Learning is much more effective when students focus on topics they actually find interesting.

With the Wolf report back in 2011, I thought there may be a shift for English and maths to focus on “employment outcomes rather than an accrual of qualifications”. Yet we’re seeing none of this. Attempts at making learning relevant are but token offerings, while work experience placements become solely the remit of independent schools or those with resources to support them.

So if the government isn’t going to step up, perhaps we can find ways to form links between businesses and schools. Industry knows we need more home-grown workers with the right skills. So let’s bring the resources of business to the world of education, a sector struggling under the pressure of budget cuts and greater class sizes. Let’s think about building mentoring programmes offering aspirational role models, find ways to offer varied learning contexts through more work placements, and make school-based education relevant and purposeful. This wouldn’t just benefit the disaffected, but all students who crave more independence.

No child should be asking, ‘What’s the point?’ â€" much less be stamped as a troublemaker or failure. They should be empowered to find meaning and the self-worth to excel.

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