Joe Robertson is having a terrible summer. Despite being one of the brightest boys at a consortium of three state schools in Hertfordshire, he has just discovered he does not have a university place. And more than three-quarters of his schoolfriends are in the same boat.
Sitting in the garden of his family home in St Albans, Joe, 19, who was head boy of his school and has a string of A and A* grades among his 12 GCSEs, says: “I was disappointed when I received my exam results a couple of weeks ago. They were not what my teachers predicted.”
His mother, Yvonne, nods vigorously. “I feel the boys have been used as guinea pigs in a disastrous experiment,” she says.
In 2006 the BeauSandVer consortium — consisting of Verulam, Beaumont and Sandringham schools — decided to teach the international baccalaureate (IB) to its cleverest pupils. Tony Blair, then prime minister, announced that every local authority would boast at least one state school offering the qualification.
The following year, when the schools held a meeting about the IB, Joe went along. “They were really pushing people to join up,” he says. “It was offered only to people who had done well at GCSE because it was thought to be very demanding. We were told the class sizes would be much smaller than the A-level classes.”
Yvonne adds: “We asked what risk there was in being in the first cohort. They said, no risk at all.”
Joe was among the first pupils at Verulam to take the baccalaureate instead of A-levels. His teachers predicted a high score for him, and on that basis he was offered a place at Edinburgh University to study economics and management.
When the IB results came, however, Joe found he had done much worse than his teachers expected — as had most of his friends. Yvonne says only one IB pupil at Joe’s school gained enough points to meet his university offer. Four out of 31 across the consortium failed completely. “Quite a few of my friends are trying for universities abroad,” says Joe, “some in Australia, as they have missed out on British universities because of this.”
Their parents say other schools considering introducing the baccalaureate should think carefully first. In recent years 190 British schools have adopted the IB, which involves studying six subjects in the sixth form and is seen as a tougher alternative to A-levels for clever children.
“It’s important that parents realise that introducing the IB to a school is a really risky option,” Yvonne says. “I would say, ‘Do not go near it,’ after Joe’s experience. The IB is far harder than A-levels and not well understood by British universities.”
Among Joe’s peers at Verulam is a boy who had been offered a place at Cambridge if he scored 38 IB points; with just 34, he knows he is unlikely to be admitted. Likewise, Sahib Phull, 18, has probably lost his place at Durham to study biomedical sciences after scoring 29 points, five lower than the 34 the university stipulated and nine fewer than his teachers predicted.
“If he had done A-levels,” says his father, Garsh, “ he would have been home and dry. We are very upset.”
The parents are not taking their disappointment lying down. Letters, phone calls and e-mails have been fired off to universities, teachers and the IB board. On Thursday they even lobbied the local MP to try to persuade the board to upgrade their children’s results.
The IB course at Verulam was plagued by hiccups. The school’s head, Paul Ramsey, has admitted to problems, including closures because of an arson attack and, later, snow. In German, Joe’s IB class was taught by five teachers in two years, and his physics teacher, who suffered from stress, was on leave before the exams.
The main difficulties, though, were more deeply rooted. Unfamiliar with the course’s demands, some teachers were too optimistic in their predictions. Similarly, the marks some gave the pupils’ coursework — which counted towards their final scores — were routinely lowered by the IB exam board, in one case by 55%.
The pupils ran into another difficulty too. Although the Universities and College Admissions Service has created a conversion table (see panel) for A-levels and the IB, many universities ignore it when making offers. While the standard offer of a place at Oxford and Cambridge is conditional on three grade As at A-level, some IB pupils have been asked to score up to 43 points, equivalent to six As. Joe was asked for 34 points by Edinburgh — which equates to four As at A-level; he scored 32. A-level applicants for the same degree course were asked for only three Bs.
Parents believe that the IB organisation, which sent officials to the BeauSandVer meeting at which pupils were invited to sign up, did not monitor the schools closely enough. The IB ombudsman, Anthony Flatley, has rejected demands that the results be re-assessed, saying there is no precedent to change grades because a school is inexperienced at teaching the IB. He suggests that the fault lies “in the classroom”.
Flatley’s response has infuriated the father of the boy at Verulam whose Cambridge place is in jeopardy. “The school says it can’t do anything; the local council says it can’t do anything; the IB organisation says it can’t do anything,” he says. “From their point of view our son took a gamble — which he didn’t even know was a gamble — and it didn’t pay off. How would they feel if it was one of their children that had been put in this position?”
Oh Dear!
Sitting in the garden of his family home in St Albans, Joe, 19, who was head boy of his school and has a string of A and A* grades among his 12 GCSEs, says: “I was disappointed when I received my exam results a couple of weeks ago. They were not what my teachers predicted.”
His mother, Yvonne, nods vigorously. “I feel the boys have been used as guinea pigs in a disastrous experiment,” she says.
In 2006 the BeauSandVer consortium — consisting of Verulam, Beaumont and Sandringham schools — decided to teach the international baccalaureate (IB) to its cleverest pupils. Tony Blair, then prime minister, announced that every local authority would boast at least one state school offering the qualification.
The following year, when the schools held a meeting about the IB, Joe went along. “They were really pushing people to join up,” he says. “It was offered only to people who had done well at GCSE because it was thought to be very demanding. We were told the class sizes would be much smaller than the A-level classes.”
Yvonne adds: “We asked what risk there was in being in the first cohort. They said, no risk at all.”
Joe was among the first pupils at Verulam to take the baccalaureate instead of A-levels. His teachers predicted a high score for him, and on that basis he was offered a place at Edinburgh University to study economics and management.
When the IB results came, however, Joe found he had done much worse than his teachers expected — as had most of his friends. Yvonne says only one IB pupil at Joe’s school gained enough points to meet his university offer. Four out of 31 across the consortium failed completely. “Quite a few of my friends are trying for universities abroad,” says Joe, “some in Australia, as they have missed out on British universities because of this.”
Their parents say other schools considering introducing the baccalaureate should think carefully first. In recent years 190 British schools have adopted the IB, which involves studying six subjects in the sixth form and is seen as a tougher alternative to A-levels for clever children.
“It’s important that parents realise that introducing the IB to a school is a really risky option,” Yvonne says. “I would say, ‘Do not go near it,’ after Joe’s experience. The IB is far harder than A-levels and not well understood by British universities.”
Among Joe’s peers at Verulam is a boy who had been offered a place at Cambridge if he scored 38 IB points; with just 34, he knows he is unlikely to be admitted. Likewise, Sahib Phull, 18, has probably lost his place at Durham to study biomedical sciences after scoring 29 points, five lower than the 34 the university stipulated and nine fewer than his teachers predicted.
“If he had done A-levels,” says his father, Garsh, “ he would have been home and dry. We are very upset.”
The parents are not taking their disappointment lying down. Letters, phone calls and e-mails have been fired off to universities, teachers and the IB board. On Thursday they even lobbied the local MP to try to persuade the board to upgrade their children’s results.
The IB course at Verulam was plagued by hiccups. The school’s head, Paul Ramsey, has admitted to problems, including closures because of an arson attack and, later, snow. In German, Joe’s IB class was taught by five teachers in two years, and his physics teacher, who suffered from stress, was on leave before the exams.
The main difficulties, though, were more deeply rooted. Unfamiliar with the course’s demands, some teachers were too optimistic in their predictions. Similarly, the marks some gave the pupils’ coursework — which counted towards their final scores — were routinely lowered by the IB exam board, in one case by 55%.
The pupils ran into another difficulty too. Although the Universities and College Admissions Service has created a conversion table (see panel) for A-levels and the IB, many universities ignore it when making offers. While the standard offer of a place at Oxford and Cambridge is conditional on three grade As at A-level, some IB pupils have been asked to score up to 43 points, equivalent to six As. Joe was asked for 34 points by Edinburgh — which equates to four As at A-level; he scored 32. A-level applicants for the same degree course were asked for only three Bs.
Parents believe that the IB organisation, which sent officials to the BeauSandVer meeting at which pupils were invited to sign up, did not monitor the schools closely enough. The IB ombudsman, Anthony Flatley, has rejected demands that the results be re-assessed, saying there is no precedent to change grades because a school is inexperienced at teaching the IB. He suggests that the fault lies “in the classroom”.
Flatley’s response has infuriated the father of the boy at Verulam whose Cambridge place is in jeopardy. “The school says it can’t do anything; the local council says it can’t do anything; the IB organisation says it can’t do anything,” he says. “From their point of view our son took a gamble — which he didn’t even know was a gamble — and it didn’t pay off. How would they feel if it was one of their children that had been put in this position?”
Oh Dear!
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