CGS-Es - what our school thinks about the new GCSE system

Do your GCSEs actually affect your future? We spoke to some teachers at our school to get their views on the new GCSE system and how their lives are affected by their choices. At our school in Bristol, it is compulsory to choose a language but how useful can they actually be?

Out of the seven sixth formers we questioned, two took Spanish GCSE; three took French and Spanish GCSE; one took Russian and one took Latin. Of those seven students we asked, only two were continuing with a language for A level. All of the teachers took a language for GCSE with a strong trend of French and/ or Spanish. All the teachers had taken the subject that they now teach however said that they don’t really use the other GCSEs so with all the pressure on Yr9s to pick the perfect subjects and to have decided on what they want to do for the rest of their lives at the age of 14, in the long term, does it really matter? With the new system that was introduced in September 2016 lots of controversy came and the Yr10 s preparing to take them next year is all the stress worth it? We spoke to some teachers to get their opinion on the new curriculum; the main consensus was that it is definitely much tougher, one Music teacher said “It allows top students to be more challenged and really shine through” however the students involved have slightly different different views. One student said “it makes you feel worse about yourself because you are constantly being compared to other years who were ‘doing better’ than us”. This is just one example of the pressure people can face...is this new ‘rigorous’ system really the best system there can be? We even spoke to sixth formers who did their GCSEs before the new change and they also say it’s a bad idea with one of them going as far to call it ‘gross’.

This is still a new system though and no one has yet sat the actual exams or gone on to have a career so we still can’t say if the stress does pay off and if it actually affects what you do in life - whether or not grades go up or down and if in ten years time all the new teachers will have taken a language for GCSE.