Is the current GCSE curriculum relevant to the needs of future careers?

I'd say that GCSEs need a revamp or need to be slowly phased out, they have essentially become a memory game in my opinion, too much focus on memorising stuff then seeing how much of that memorised stuff you can spit out on the page within 1-2 hours with a hint of application. The leaving age for education in England is effectively 18 years old anyway i think so i'd like to maybe see GCSEs phased out due to this or keep GCSEs but make the leaving age 16 again.

I would signpost you to Blooms taxonomy, humans begin their learning journey by remembering stuff, them move to understanding, application and beyond

Maybe the manner in which GCSEs are assessed is outdated but the intent is to have a good (knowledge) grounding in a wide range of subjects - which is essential for both career and citizenship

I would signpost you to Blooms taxonomy, humans begin their learning journey by remembering stuff, them move to understanding, application and beyond

Maybe the manner in which GCSEs are assessed is outdated but the intent is to have a good (knowledge) grounding in a wide range of subjects - which is essential for both career and citizenship

but OP why do you think that the GCSE curriculum isn't relevant to the needs of future careers? what's your argument on this topic?

I completely agree with this. I sat almost 30 gcse exams, and can tell you about 3 things from gcse science (and I did alevels in the sciences lol), I couldn’t really tell you anything else I learnt in those 3 years, it is just a memory game. Im now at medical school and to be completely honest, although you NEED good gcse grades to get here they aren’t exactly RELEVANT.

Society is changing also, given the fact that these days, sometimes a degree level apprenticeship is more valuable career wise vs going to university, employers like you said value being creative, having critical thinking and problem solving. Realistically you don’t develop those types of skills much in the traditional educational setting.

GCSEs have also got harder, and have become more exam based (Alevels also)- my teachers always reminded us of this, I was the 2nd year to use the numbered system. Coursework would allow people to be more creative, and not everyone can remember absolutely everything about α subject in 1-2hrs, exams get harder but that doesn’t make it easier to get a job.

The current GCSE format has been criticised for pushing students to remember large volumes of information, rather than think independently and critically.At the end how much you understand doesn't matter but its the overall grade that you get matters, there could be people out there who really do understand contact but these exams pushes students off and everything becomes into memorisation , which if you cant do, well you aint getting that A-C grade.

Labour MP Lucy Powell has argued there is too much emphasis on rote-learning.
“The balance has shifted greatly to having to cram stuff in at the expense of a love of poetry or a love of maths and being able to apply that love and that knowledge,”

There is also a lack of focus on creativity. Russel Group universities who are to give creative thinking at A level greater prominence. However, by narrowing the curriculum and stifling creative thinking in favour or memorisation, are GCSEs ill preparing students for employment or university?

Lord Baker, a prominent force in the education sector has also been vocal about what he describes as the squeezing out of creative and technical teaching in UK schools. All of this leads to the question of whether GCSEs are relevant and appropriate for now and in the future. Are they providing value to pupils in the long-term?

If world economic organisations, universities, employers and business groups are calling for creative, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, are GCSE which focus on memorisation and narrow syllabuses suitably preparing students for life in employment?

If not, schools may have to prepare themselves for GCSE reform once again in the future in order to meet the demands of employers and global organisations. The ultimate risk is having a workforce which is ill-prepared and an education system which is undermined on a global scale.

It's swings and roundabouts. Exams involve a lot of memorisation. But...

Exams are done by you and you alone in the same conditions as everyone else. Coursework massively favours people who have a big support network around them, a couple of degree-educated parents to look over (even write bits of) their essays, time and space and tools and materials to work on it in the evenings and weekends, and so on.

It also means the pressure is constantly on. Everything counts. Right now, so what if you make a mess of a test in year 10? Nobody will know or care down the line. If you make a mess of a piece of coursework then it counts. (Unless you allow infinite do-overs, at which point we're back to non stop pressure for two years and even more advantages for the privileged who have access to more help.)

No, not everyone can remember everything about a subject in 1-2 hours. That's the whole point of graded exams - to have a way to differentiate between people who are good at a subject and people who aren't. There is no point even having a testing system if everyone can do it. Yay, let's give everyone a 9...? Now, should be we be having a testing system at 16 given that nobody leaves school then any more? Maybe not. Though at least it provides a method for guiding people into (or away from) Alevels, and university applications, based on what they are capable of as well as what they dream about. But we do need to be prepared to stand up and say "the whole point of the exam is to differentiate between people who are good at the subject and people who aren't, and the way we do that is by giving people who aren't good at it a poor grade." The point of the course is for everyone to learn about the subject, but the grade at the end is for achievement, not participation.

Is the GCSE curriculum relevant to future careers? It shouldn't need to be. It's for children. Children should be exploring knowledge at a much wider level than only what's useful for their future career. 16 is plenty young enough to be narrowing your choices down to career-oriented subjects - in fact it's much younger than it happens in most countries.

I completely disagree. Memorising stuff for an exam doesn’t mean you’re the best αt the subject, just at memorising, and same can be said about exams, if you go to a private school, and get private tutors you are going to do better in those exams.

Exploring much wider yet you have limited amount of options you can choose during GCSEs. There is α reason the government has seriously considered scrapping them.

I never said narrowing done the curriculum would be wise. I said I disagree with how GCSEs are structured. Funnily enough, I go to a Russel group uni, even in medicine, a very heavily memory and exam based subject, we have coursework, in jobs there is paperwork, group projects etc, GCSEs May give basic knowledge that you’ll never use again but there is 0 prep for the real world, and again I’ll have to disagree with you here as I honestly believe that there is α need for that.

Because I remember something α minute after an exam has ended, and the mark differentiates between an Α and a B, does that make me less smart than someone who got an Α. I got straight As because I crammed at the end, not because I was good at the subject, even in alevels I was failing throughout the whole course until the end- I crammed, memorised and then dumped the info. There are people who got Bs who probably had α greater depth of understanding. Doing coursework means your utilising what you were taught, doing exams just means your regurgitating it, you’re good at memorisation not necessarily the subject ESPECIALLY AT GCSE LEVEL.

yeah, the problem with linear exams (despite me being strongly opposed to CAGs/exam stuff not being externally marked) is that they don't always show that you can work consistently at a certain grade (at least not at GCSE level imo) and your grade could be different depending on when you sat the exam (like seriously bro 28% needed to get a grade 5 on the 2020 GCSE maths higher paper? 💀, you can't be legit here and actually tell me that knowing just over 25% of your GCSE higher Maths (grade 5) stuff is somehow good/ better than knowing say 40% of your English Lang stuff (grade 4), it doesn't add up to me (no pun intended)). You can cram and still potentially get the grades that you want (happened to me), that doesn't mean that because you got the grade you'd be able to get that grade consistently.

I feel like there should be a mix of both exams and coursework (all externally marked) but the entire structure of GCSEs needs to be reformed in my opinion.

With the % discrepancies, they’re based on how well most people do on the exam, I believe a certain % of the cohort need to get each grade, which I don’t really have an issue with

I get that but I think that we should be looking at the percentage as well as the grade and the circumstances that the grade was earned. Not just simply "oh X got a 4 in English that's no good, we need a 5" even when they got like 40% or "brilliant Y you got a grade 5" even though they only got ≈30% if you see what I'm saying (especially for English Lang, Maths and MFL (I'll take responsibility for inflating the MFL grade boundaries)). Some subjects shouldn't have coursework (Maths) but I agree that pupils need to be assessed in a more diverse manner.

See that’s where I disagree, because even in medical school, our grades are based off of how the whole cohort has performed i.e harder questions in our clinical skills assessment, lower amount of questions you have to get right to pass and in our written assessments too. Most grades for exams are calculated this way, this assures people that get above average get the top grades and that if the test was hard and so most people got a lower %, not everyone fails.

And yeah, maths for example, you can’t have coursework, but I just mean multiple methods of assessment in general.

Think that kids could do with being taught life skills in school too.

I agree with that. I think life skills are really quite different from career prep though. GCSEs in things like law and business are a complete waste of space IMO.

I note that the person who said they disagree with me completely has quietly ignored my points about privileged kids getting their coursework done by someone else. That's not me making stuff up, it used to be a real problem and is one of the reasons coursework-only subjects were scrapped. This isn't a new and radical idea, it's been tried and in practice it didn't work very well.