According to the school league tables published today no pupils at Eton are “achieving 5 A*-C GCSEs including English and maths”. How can that be? Well, Eton like various other top private school have abandoned GCSEs in certain subjects and instead have their pupils take international GCSEs which don’t count in the league tables. IGCSEs, though, are far harder than their British counterparts, more like the old O-Levels than GCSES.
For all the talk from Balls and Brown about “social mobility”, they have presided over the erection of a new barrier to social mobility: the rise of an alternative set of exams that are more highly valued by universities and employers but are unavailable to children edcuated in the state system. Michael Gove’s policy of allowing all state schools to opt out of GCSEs and do iGCSEs (or the IB or Cambridge’s new ‘pre-U’ exams) has received little attention. But it, along with his broader school reform agenda, will be key to creating a more meritocratic education system in Britain.
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