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English Baccalaureate

An addendum to the White Paper makes it clear which subjects will be counted in the new English Baccalaureate. (EBacc??)

http://www.linguista.es/resources/ebacc_addendum.pdf

"Humanity" includes history, geography and ancient history. Not religious education, though. I am pleased, however, that more pupils will end up doing history or geography. It should be both though.

There will no doubt be some debate about which languages are eligible. Hindi, ancient Greek, Latin and biblical Hebrew appear, but no other "community languages".

The government is going to publish league tables in January 2011 to indicate how schools woud have performed under the new regime which will include the full range of EBacc subjects. Seems a bit odd, given no-one knew about the new diploma until recently. They will also publish data based on the existing benchmark of 5 GCSE passes at C or better including maths and English.

The new policy is already having an effect. My own authority (North Yorkshire) is consucting an audit of MFL provision. Looks like they are having a minor panic.

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