The Bill introduced the concept of national curriculum tests for all 7, 11 and 14-year-olds. The Labour government introduced AS-levels at 16 or 17 and added a key-skills qualification. The Government has come out against the scrapping of GCSEs even though it admits their importance will be diminished by the advent of new post-16 vocational qualifications and a strengthening of the modern apprenticeship system for pupils who traditionally would have left school at 16. Ministers will announce their recipe for the new system within months.They should remember a poll of secondary school teachers published in April, which showed that 31 per cent no longer had confidence in exam marking. For a profession that usually rallies round to protect itself from outside criticism (markers are teachers, too) that is highly significant.. Pupils at one of the country’s leading public schools have become the latest victims of the examination crisis after being forced to wait nearly an hour for their biology AS-level papers to arrive.
The blunder is the latest in a series of errors that has led to calls for Edexcel to have its licence to run exams revoked.A statement from Roedean said: “On Friday 24 May we checked our examination paper supplies as usual in preparation for Monday’s exams, only to discover that the 30 papers we required for biology were not included in the box we received from Edexcel despite being on the packing lists.”The school in Brighton, East Sussex, received an assurance they would be there by 8am on the Monday but – when they failed to arrive – it contacted the board again. The board then faxed the paper to the school two minutes after the exam was due to start.”We then had to photocopy and collate this by hand,” the statement added. “We were finally able to start the exam at 9.50am.” Edexcel said last night it had apologised to the school.The blunder emerged after a third exam board had admitted earlier in the day it had been responsible for a script error. A diagram in a GCSE health studies paper set by the OCR board used scientifically inaccurate information.Meanwhile, exam boards are being forced to enlist the help of priests and vicars as part of a move to overcome a drastic shortage of markers this summer.
They have sent an emergency letter to various churches because religious education is the subject area with the biggest shortage of markers.The Government appointed the Australian educationist Dr Ken Boston as head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority yesterday, with orders to ensure that “all qualifications meet the highest possible standards”.. The shortage of headteachers in schools in England and Wales has reached its highest level since 1997, the year Labour came to power, according to a survey published yesterday. Professor Howson said his survey showed why the Government had to reduce the pressures on headteachers and deputies.London schools faced the most severe difficulties finding suitable senior managers – one quarter were forced to re-advertise after failing to attract any satisfactory candidates in response to their first advertisement.Professor Howson said: “This shows that the high cost of living in London is not just a problem for teachers at the bottom of the career ladder It is also affecting those at the top. Srul Irving Glick was one of Canada’s most prolific composers and a successor to Ernest Bloch in the articulation of a particularly Jewish idiom in music destined for the concert hall.
The best of his work glows with an unashamed lyricism – but it wasn’t simply melody for its own sake, as Glick explained in an interview in 1985:
Srul Irving Glick, composer, conductor, radio producer and teacher: born Toronto, Ontario 8 September 1934; married 1957 Dorothy Sandler (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1994), 1996 Sara Wunch; died Toronto 17 April 2002. it’s time to say something that is powerfully positive in the world, now.Glick’s origins stamped the rest of his life: his father was a Russian-born cantor who had emigrated to Canada in 1924 and sang in synagogues in Toronto. For Glick, music and Judaism were very strongly intertwined: his Jewishness had a very strong feeling of relating to my father’s singing in the synagogue. and my singing with him, because I was in his choir when I was 11 years old.Determined to be a composer, Glick took the advice of his elder brother Norman, a professional clarinettist, that he should study the piano first. He then completed nine grades in an astonishingly swift two years at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and studied composition for five years at the University of Toronto, where his principal teacher, John Weinzweig, gave him a solid grounding in form, analysis, harmony and orchestration.