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Education secretary wants baccalaureate for England

The education secretary, Michael Gove, today announced plans to combat the decline in exam standards by proposing an English baccalaureate qualification to recognise the achievements of GCSE students who complete a broad course of studies.

The "English bac" would not replace GCSEs, but would be a certificate to reward pupils who pass at least five of the exams, at grade C or above, including English, maths, one science, one foreign language and one humanity. "If you get five GCSEs in those areas, I think you should be entitled to special recognition," Gove said.

The details will be set out in a white paper in the autumn, but Gove will flesh out some aspects in a speech tomorrow, seen by Labour as an attempt to divert attention from the fact that he is only able to announce 17 new free schools, state-funded institutions outside local authority control.

Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary, said it was laughable that Gove claimed he was on course to succeed with plans for new schools set up by parents and teachers.

Gove also revealed plans to "declutter" A-levels, slimming down the number of modules and exams faced by students in order to allow them more time for extra-curricular pursuits such as art, music and sport, as well as "deep study" in their chosen subjects.

Speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, Gove said he wanted to "transform the accountability systems, the league tables, the whole qualification system in this country".

GCSE league tables obscured the exams pupils were taking and hid the flight from languages and tougher subjects such as science, his aides said. The education secretary was not seeking to tell pupils what exams to take, but the baccalaureate would be a way of rewarding those who took a wider range of subjects.

Gove said the narrowing of the range of exams being taken was "depriving young people of the things they should get from education, which is a rounded sense of how to understand this world in all its complexity and richness.

"If you don't understand science and you don't understand other cultures, you are deliberately cutting yourself off from the best that is going on in our world."Gove said he was "very attracted" by the baccalaureate systems operated by many European and Asian countries that deliver a broader educational curriculum than in England.

"One of the concerns about the English education system is that people's options are narrowed too early," he said.

Read the rest of the article from The Guardian.