Vale headteacher pleased by education secretary Michael Gove’s GCSE rethink - Local

Sponsored by

Vale headteacher pleased by education secretary Michael Gove’s GCSE rethink

Education Secretary Michael Gove

Published on 11/02/2013 17:14

Education secretary Michael Gove’s decision to back down from scrapping GCSEs has delighted a Vale headteacher.

The Mandeville School’s Peter Patchett said he is pleased by the move after pressure by exam regulator, Ofqual, politicians and teaching unions resulted in a government U-turn.

Mr Gove admitted he had tried to ‘cross a bridge too far’ with his plans to scrap GCSEs and introduce a single exam board and an English Baccalaureate, originally announced in September.

Mr Patchett said: “I’m really pleased that he’s decided to listen to the professionals and people who work in schools.”

The Mandeville head added there is still changes ahead.

He added: “The GCSEs will still require some revision. You can’t have one qualification to fit all abilities. It’s important to meet the needs of the youngsters.”

It is believed Mr Gove pulled the plug after exam boards said they would go bankrupt if there was only one qualification body and that the reform would therefore break EU procurement rules.

The education secretary had embarked upon a grand scale reform process of the educational system since the coalition Government came to power in 2010.

But Mr Patchett disagreed that people are against reform in education.

He added: “What people are against is rapid change without consultation or thinking things through.”

It remains likely there will be significant upheaval to the GCSE format in the coming years with Mr Gove still keen on a single exam.

Mr Gove is now starting a consultation process on a range of reforms including the future of GCSEs which closes in April.

The past year been a turbulent one in educational circles with the battle over the English GCSE results still continuing.

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Sponsored by
Vale headteacher pleased by education secretary Michael Gove’s GCSE rethink

Top stories

News