Remember the Madness.
Geoff Bannister
gbannister10 at aol.com
Tue Jun 7 22:44:48 UTC 2005
--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <bboyminn at y...> wrote:
Steve/bboyminn
> Once again, rules outweigh common sense.
> If I understand correctly GCSE exams are /national/ exams; they are
> set and controlled by the national government. I would think that a
> /national/ exam would take precedence over the dress code of the local
> school. I further assume that the local school mearly host the
> location of the exam. That is, there must be some national GCSE
> approved person on the scene who is the true exam authority. The
> school presumably only provide a location for the exam and some
> assistance in administering it.
Geoff:
Coming in a bit late on this thread, I can add a few thoughts to the
above.
Those of you who have the iron will required to wade through my waffle
will have picked up that I taught in the same school in South London
for 32 years.
For 15 of those years, I was the Examinations Secretary. That meant
that I had the responsibility of ensuring that all entries were passed
to me, I liaised with pupils to see that these were correct and then
ensured that the correct papers were obtained, that pupils knew their
timetables etc.
GCSE was introduced in 1986 as a combination of the old GCE (dating
from 1951) which was really aimed at academically better pupils and CSE
which had appeared in 1965. It was intended to give a single umbrella
examination to all pupils. There are still certain exams which remain
outside GCSE - specialist and vocational papers among them.
There is not a nationally approved person in the strict sense of the
word; each school has a member of staff who oversees all the
administration and documentation for the tests and is answerable to the
Head for the conduct of the examinations.
Many schools have "Study Leave". This means that when the exams begin,
pupils in Year 11 (the old Fifth Year) are only on site when they have
tests due. For many years, we also worked a policy of allowing pupils
to dress informally for exams rather than wear uniform for them.
Knowing the way uniform has declined in recent years, I am quite
surprised to find a school making such an issue over a pair of shoes.
At my own school, a rule was introduced shortly before I took early
retirement - and this is a few years ago now - that all-black trainers
were permissible instead of shoes.
Sad, innit?
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