A five-year-old girl today became the youngest child to pass a GCSE amid concern that tests have become too easy and that pupils are being pressured into taking exams too early.
Pupils achieved record GCSE results this year, with more than a fifth obtaining top grades – nearly three times the number two decades ago.
However, despite the soaring number of A and A*s, teenagers now face being squeezed out of college courses by an increasing number of university rejects.
Today’s results show the proportion of pupils achieving the top two grades has exceeded 22 per cent following year-on-year increases since the exam was introduced in 1988.
And 70 per cent of teenagers gained at least a C grade – up two percentage points from last year.
Dee Alli from Southwark set the record for a five-year-old by getting a C in maths. She said: ‘I treat maths as a game so I don’t think of it as an exam. I find maths very easy.’
Dee said she was inspired to take the exam by her friend Paula Imafidon, who with her twin Peter got the highest-ever grade in a Cambridge advanced maths exam at the age of nine.
When asked whether she would like to do any more maths exams she said: ‘I want to be a princess that lives in a big house so I can count my money.’
Seven-year-old Oscar Selby was celebrating after he became the youngest to achieve an A*.
Oscar, from Epsom, Surrey, is believed to be the youngest to score the top grade in a GCSE.
He spent four hours every Saturday for nine months studying for the course through Hertfordshire-based Ryde Teaching.
But experts raised new fears that children are under too much pressure. Professor Alan Smithers said schools wanted to push pupils to pass while some parents were competing with each other over results. ‘Our education system has become too dominated by exams,’ he said.
The record results have prompted an expert to slam the exam questions as ‘predictable’.
While teenagers have been warned that as hundreds of thousands of A-Level students set to miss out on a university place, many will return to sixth form or college – meaning fewer places for pupils.
And pupils face increasing pressure as more universities are now selecting candidates on their GCSE results as competition for higher education places becomes tougher.
Schools minister Nick Gibb said: ‘While celebrating individual success and welcoming the fact that there has been an enormous take-up of GCSEs in the individual sciences, we believe that more needs to be done to close the attainment gap between those from the poorest and wealthiest backgrounds.’
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union said: ‘These are the best ever results but the worst ever outcomes now exist for young people.
‘These fantastic results stand in stark contrast to some of the worst ever employment and training prospects for young people and the reality of rising youth unemployment as a result of the coalition Government’s austerity programme.’
This year’s GCSE exam pass-rate increased for the 23rd year in a row, however the number of entries has fallen again to 5.37million compared with 5.47million in 2009.
After a drop in the number on English entries being awarded a C last year to 62.7 per cent, the pass-rate has risen this summer to almost two-thirds.
Overall, girls continue to out-perform boys, with more than 70 per cent gaining at least a C grade compared with 65.4 per cent.
And for the second year in a row boys have out-performed girls in maths – after the coursework assessment was dropped – with 58.6 per cent scoring at least a C compared with 58.3 per cent.
However, modern languages were the major casualties again this year, continuing the decline seen since the previous government decided the subject would no longer be compulsory after the age of 14.
The number of students studying French is down by 5.9 per cent, while entries for German have dropped by 4.5 per cent.
Bucking the trend is Spanish, which saw a 0.9 per cent rise.
The numbers of pupils taking GCSEs in the three separate sciences – biology, chemistry and physics – has also risen, although the proportion being awarded top grades has fallen.
Despite the rise in passes, school leavers face being squeezed out of further education this year as college places go to older pupils who have failed to get into university.
However, more pupils are expected to fall into the ‘neet’ – not in education, employment or training category – as college places are snapped up by A-Level students who are set to miss out on a university place.
Many will return to sixth form to resit exams, take more A-Levels or to turn to qualifications like BTec and HNDs.
And colleges will be keen to take on these higher-achieving older students to boost performance indicators, the lecturers’ union warned, reducing the number of places available to 16-year-olds.
More than a quarter of students who applied for university still have no place, figures released yesterday revealed.
Dan Taubman, further education policy officer at the UCU, told the Guardian: ‘Schools and colleges are to a large extent judged to be a success or failure on their exam results. That’s a big incentive not to take kids who have just failed.
‘It’s just like the universities – they can be more selective, and the kids without are not going to get in.’
One assessment expert has warned that the exam questions have become increasingly ‘predictable’ and compared the relentless rise in results to currency inflation.
Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, suggested highly tailored teaching and ‘built-in inflation’ were responsible for the consistent rises in results.
‘The questions themselves are becoming much more predictable; they are highly structured and teachers are increasingly familiar with them,’ he said.
‘Exams just seem to have the same built-in inflation that our currency has.’
It comes as a report claims teenagers are wasting school time learning ‘bogus’ vocational qualifications to inflate exam results.
Under-performing pupils are being steered towards ‘sub-standard’ and ‘irrelevant’ courses such as hospitality and travel and tourism, according to the Civitas think-tank.
The courses, including many BTECs and OCR Nationals, entail simply learning about different job sectors and include practicals such as learning how to serve drinks.
Every parent of a ten-year-old should be sent national exam league tables because pupils do better in GCSEs if families use the rankings to choose schools, a study said yesterday.
Research among half a million schoolchildren flies in the face of claims by teaching unions that the tables are worthless and should be scrapped.
Parents who consult league tables to find the best available schools in their area help boost their children’s performance at GCSE, the study by London’s Institute of Education and Bristol University’s Centre for Market and Public Organisation found.
Pupils do better at schools which rank highly in league tables than youngsters of similar ability whose parents make ‘uninformed’ choices not linked to school performance.
The authors of the report, Dr Rebecca Allen and Professor Simon Burgess, called for all local councils to include details of schools’ exam results in the admissions brochures they send to the parents of ten-year-olds.
No Comments on this post