English and maths GCSE gap grows

Ministers are now focusing more on the core skills

An increased proportion of teenagers in England who appear to have good GCSE grades do not have English and maths qualifications, research shows.

The government has changed the way school league tables will be calculated to emphasise these core skills.

Last year 71,513 pupils with five or more GCSE-level qualifications at grade C or above did not have English and maths GCSEs. This was 13% of the total.

The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust study found it was 11% in 2002.

Until now, the benchmark has been five good grades in any subjects, including a wide range of qualifications other than GCSEs.

One of the misfortunes is that the emphasis on IT - which is important - has been at the expense of keeping libraries stocked Sir Cyril Taylor Specialist Schools and Acadamies Trust

But from this year, the benchmark will be that the five good grades must include English and mathematics GCSEs.

The trust researchers, former head teacher David Crossley and Prof David Jesson of York university, said in their report: "Clearly there are important issues to be addressed here and it is timely that attention is now being focused on this specific area."

Usability

Their work concentrated on pupils in comprehensives and modern schools, both specialist and non-specialist, and excluded the performance of grammar schools.

Prof Jesson told the BBC News website the widening gap when English and maths results were taken into account was "really very serious".

"What the government has done by changing the framework, to say we need to focus on the basics, actually does highlight an issue of some substantial importance about the usability of those qualifications," he said.

He said there had been "grade inflation" in the improved GCSE-level results in recent years.

This had been driven by the way the GNVQ vocational qualification officially counted as four good GCSEs - which he described as a "doolally" equivalence.

GNVQs are now being phased out. The renewed focus on the basics was "almost like a payback time", Prof Jesson said.

'Wisdom'

The main thrust of the report for the trust was to confirm that pupils in specialist secondary schools, and especially in academies, made more progress and achieved higher exam results at GCSE level than in non-specialist schools.

"In summary - every comparison of school and pupil performance shows that specialist schools and their pupils achieve substantially higher GCSE outcomes whatever measure is used," it said.

Trust chairman Sir Cyril Taylor said he believed this confirmed "the wisdom of successive secretaries of state for education" in supporting specialist schools .

But he sounded a warning. The agenda was changing, he said.

Need for libraries

As all schools became specialist, he said, the new challenge was to improve the performance of the 653 schools where currently only a quarter of the pupils or less achieved five good grades at GCSE including English and mathematics.

The researchers said that although there were extremes, the average gap of 12 to 13 percentage points between schools' results with and without English and maths tended to refute "cynical and unhelpful" media comments questioning their improvement, "at least as far as the generality of schools is concerned".

Sir Cyril also expressed concern about the increased emphasis on information technology in schools.

"One of the misfortunes is that the emphasis on IT - which is important - has been at the expense of keeping libraries stocked," he said.

"This is really important stuff. I think we need to combine the general IT provision within the libraries but to have the books there as well."

Educational outcomes and value added by specialist schools: 2005 Analysis, by David Jesson and David Crossley, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust