English literature. I could never understand why it was a compulsory core subject for GCSE. All it is about is reading and analysing old bedtime stories. It’s a hobby with no relevance to the job market apart from a few careers in theatre.
PSHE. A complete waste of time. It rarely focused on issues that were relevant to me. It was full of loony left political correctness. Hardest to understand was why so many teachers took PHSE so seriously.
ICT. I would have loved to have done computer science but ICT was a complete waste of time bumming about with trivial features in obsolete versions of Micro$oft Word and Excel, and learning deprecated HTML tags when real websites used CSS. The teacher didn’t even come from a computing background and half the kids knew more about computers than he did. He had absolutely no idea what a compiler was and had never done any programming.
PE. A lack of variety in the activities and too much obsession with football. The sporty kids took PE too seriously then got uptight with kids who weren’t good at team sports and accused them of ruining their game. The teachers always favoured the sporty kids and treated the less able or co-ordinated ones as badly behaved or spoilers who deserve all the ‘punishment’ they get from the sporty kids after the lesson.
Music. At the end of year 7 I still could not play any ‘proper’ instruments because all we had done was bum around with pointless things. Most of the kids who took music for GCSE already could play a proper instrument by the time they had finished primary school and learned outside of school. Unless your schools are rare exceptions I think there is lots of favouritism amongst kids when it comes to music.