Your report about weightings of the latest GCSE league tables (Cookery outrank Physics, 12 January) gives worn-out teachers another reason to stop teaching.
I am a design and technology teacher with 30 years’ industrial design experience.
In the GCSE classes I have taught, half the students don’t want to do the subject and another quarter do not have the academic ability to do the exam – only 10% of which involves making something.
You are left with a quarter of the class engaged in each lesson.
The discrepancies and inadequacies of the exam are amazing. It’s possible to get a high mark in Food element without having any practical cooking ability.
Students taking Food get five to ten per cent higher marks than those achieving a similar standard in Resistant Materials. And how many employers know that a C grade in the higher paper is not the same as a C grade in the foundation one?
What a great idea the vocational courses proposed by Tomlinson would be. But, when everytime you use scissors you have to include the relevant page from the health and safety manual in your scheme of work, it is next to impossible to see they can come about.