Low-ranking school defends vocational exam bias

LONDON, Jan 11 (Reuters) St Luke's, a Church of England secondary school situated in a economically-deprived area of Southsea in Hampshire, says it is changing its curriculum in response to the government's new way of ranking schools.

The school's vocational bias meant that just 3 per cent of pupils achieved top A*-C grades in five GCSEs including maths and English last year, putting it near the bottom of government school tables published today.

Some 36 per cent achieved the government's previous target of the equivalent of five good passes in any GCSE subject.

The government adopted the tougher target after criticism that the previous benchmark was distorted by pupils taking ''easier'' vocational exams.

But St Luke's defended its focus on vocational subjects, saying they were more suitable for its pupils and as well as teaching them to be literate and numerate.

''In subjects like construction, the level of mathematics they are required to do is higher than that in GCSE,'' the school's bursar Mark Pearce told Reuters.

''We would rather have carried on what we were doing because we felt it met the needs of our students,'' he said.

''About seven years ago 12 of our students went on to further education, whereas last year 90 went on to further education, so we were giving our students a passport to progression.'' Critics have accused schools of artificially boosting their ratings in the league tables by encouraging pupils to take GNVQ vocational certificates, which counted as four good GCSE passes in the rankings.

Schools Minister Jim Knight said this distortion would no longer take place as GNVQs were being phased out.

Nationally, less than 7 percent of pupils recorded as achieving five good GCSE grades in any subject last summer qualified thanks to GNVQ passes, said officials at the Department for Education and Skills.

The government had aimed for all schools to have at least 25 per cent of pupils achieving five good GCSE passes in any subject by 2006.

In the end 47 schools failed to reach that target, although that represented a reduction from more than 600 in 1997.

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