A C grade at GCSE mathematics is usually considered a minimal passing grade.

Typically, a student who can interpret and answer simple ratio and proportion questions will reach a C grade.

I would expect a student who scores lower than a C grade to have some significant difficulty in answering this type of question:

"Here is an ingredient list for 2 cakes; write an ingredient list for 5 cakes."

As you might understand, students below this level are excluded from almost every skilled career.

In my experience, there are very few students who are intellectually incapable of reaching this level, but there are many (37% of all students in the UK) who don't reach this level because they don't have appropriate educational opportunities.

Universal access to good education is not a solved problem.

That is just such an artificial and competitive way of doing things. If I teach somebody something, I want them to understand it completely. If I teach 10 people something, I similarly want all 10 of them to understand it - I want them all to get an A. I can artificially jack up the difficulty and cause some people to struggle, but why on earth would I want to do that? To make it easier for corporations to select employees? Fuck that noise. I agree that in a high achievement academic environment raising the difficulty has value in that it teaches you how to strive and succeed, and that is important to know. But knowing how to do your taxes, order enough wood for the winter, keep your business in the black? Everyone should be getting As in that. Shrugging our shoulders at the people failing to keep up and saying "eh. bell curve" is treating people as disposable and not worth our efforts.

I happily stipulate that grading to a curve doesn't, in itself, imply that. But the reality is that some students are not mastering the core material, and we should not be okay with that.

Earning five GCSEs at grade C or better is an extremely low threshold, roughly equivalent in difficulty to passing the GED. The exams are not graded on a curve but are competency-based, so falling short of that standard does indeed mean that the student is terrible. Young people without those grades are more than twice as likely to be unemployed, and have very limited opportunities for further education or training.

Some children have the capability to pass a GCSE at grade C or higher, but fail to do so because eg they are child carers for disabled parents or because they had a terrible teacher or etc.

Those children are being failed.

The numbers of children who cannot (not just do not) attain grade C in English and math are a rough proxy for rates of innumeracy and illiteracy. The UK has worryingly high levels of innumeracy and illiteracy.

Here's the English national curriculum.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculu...

Here's the maths national curriculum. Key stages 3 and 4 cover the GCSE exam.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

This sounds reasonable for 16 year old children, but don't forget that this work covers clever children who will easily achieve A.

You can get a rough idea of what a grade C means by comparing it to the new numerical grading system to be introduced in 2017. In that system grades range from 1 (low) to 9 (best) (with U still meaning failed). A 4 is expected to be equivalent to a current C.

http://www.aqa.org.uk/supporting-education/policy/gcse-and-a...

> But there are a couple of indicators to help us with this matching. Firstly, a grade four is going to be set at the level of a current grade C. What this means practically is that the same proportion of students who would achieve at least a grade C now will achieve at least a grade four under the new system. We also understand that a grade seven is going to be set at the level of the current A. That means we’ve now got grades four, five, and six to cover C and B… and grade seven, eight and nine to cover A and A. And if we look a bit more at this very top level – where three grades now allow for greater differentiation – we might expect the top half of the current A* students to achieve a nine grade in the new world.

It's great that there is more differentiation between very high attaining students but it's a pretty low bar.

>it's a pretty low bar.

Whether the scale puts a C on 4 out of 10 or 7 out of 10 doesn't really tell us anything about the ability if we don't know how the grading is done.