The Telegraph reports today that in many subjects one in four pupils makes no progress or falls back between 11 and 14. This suggests that either secondary school standards are truly dire or primary schools are failing to equip their pupils for the jump to secondary school. Either way for three years of full-time work to yield little or no result is a massive failure in our education system. It can be added to a litany of other failures; those key statistics on education from the TaxPayers' Alliance Better Government paper again:
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- 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient
ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school
curriculum.
- 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient
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- 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
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- 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
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After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per
child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate
and unskilled:-
- 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.
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- Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
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- 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
- The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of
low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the
level of Germany or the USA.
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In fact it will be increasingly hard for the country to operate effectively,
when at present:
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- The average attainment of prospective teachers entering a B.Ed course is less than three grade Cs at GCE A-level.
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- 52% of would-be prison officers failed a simple literacy and numeracy test.
- 33% of nurses completing their training failed to achieve the
60% pass rate in basic English and Maths tests, despite having GCSEs in
these subjects.
Typical questions for the nurses included:
How many minutes are there in half an hour?
a 15 b 20 c 30 d 45
Which of the following times is the same as 8pm?
a 1800hrs b 1900hrs c 2000hrs d 2100hrs
What is the correct decimal nomination for six hundred and fifty pence?
a 605p b £6.50 c £65.0 d £6.05