From GCSEs to English Baccalaureate

British Education Minister, Michael Gove, has decided that the British General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is no longer an adequate qualification, and is due to replace it with the English Baccalaureate. In practice, rather than representing the culmination of work on coursework (usually essay projects) and modular exams over a two-year period, the focus will be on the final set of exams instead. For me, this is damaging in two key respects: firstly, by saying that the GCSE is inferior and the new qualification is superior undermines the generations of job-seekers today who are armed with GCSEs through no choice of their own. What would have been better was to improve GCSEs and keep their name. Secondly, I do not personally consider an exam-focused replacement as an improvement, given that not everyone deals with exams well (which doesn't make them less intelligent) and a focus on exams means that new generation's qualifications will be based more on memory (through exam revision) and having a good day and good luck with their exam papers, rather than getting the overall evidence of genuine understanding that more staggered and varied examination methods provide. What should be the focus of the government is not examination methods, but the nature of school education in general. The national curriculum needs to focus more on equipping pupils for the real world, including more actual experience in the workplace and skills they can use there, rather than basing education on knowledge, probably over 80% of which is not useful and forgotten by pupils a couple of years after leaving school. Wouldn't a greater understanding of loans, interest rates and mental arithmetic be more useful in maths lessons than algebra and Pythagoras' theorem? Equally, wouldn't perfecting the art of letter-writing be more useful than squeezing in numerous Shakespeare plays? Knowledge is important, but in this more competitive world British pupils need to be better prepared for the world of work than they currently are, a world which generally favours experience over knowledge.