Sentence examples for IGCSE from inspiring English sources
initialism
International General Certificate of Secondary Education; an internationally recognised qualification taken by secondary school students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Similar to the GCSE.
Independent school leaders said this could be as a result of the drift to the IGCSE.
"A gulf has opened up between the independent schools, which have moved to the more traditional IGCSE, and the state schools, where it has been banned.
The fall in the number taking GCSE English – about 200,000 lower than the number taking maths – appears to have been the result of more schools entering pupils for the iGCSE English exam, an alternative qualification not included in these figures.
Inspections to be targeted on failing schools, an effort to get more science and maths graduates to be teachers, and state school pupils to sit "elite" exams like the iGCSE.
But he also claimed that an increase in the number of pupils taking English iGCSE, a GCSE alternative, may have been a factor too. "Those figures are not in today's release, and it could be that when they are factored in you see a slightly different picture," he said.
The new GCSEs operate against a background of the independent schools abandoning the domestic product for the international GCSE (IGCSE).
There was also an increase in the numbers of students taking other qualifications such as iGCSEs, and there were changes in entry patterns, which all means that the cohorts were not comparable from year to year.
Figures published by exam regulator Ofqual, combining the results in both GCSEs and iGCSEs, revealed that the net effect was grades only slightly lower than previous years.
GCSEs will continue to exist in the other subjects, as will iGCSEs (International GCSEs) and Welsh GCSEs in all subjects, but it would take a brave school to opt for these if they don't count in the league tables.
The number of private schools taking iGCSEs has tripled in four years and top independent schools, such as Wellington College – which has had the International Baccalaureate's alternative, the Middle Years Programme, for six years – are also moving away.
If they feel that an internally-designed course validated by an exam board will help, it is a great way to go," he says, adding that Berkhamsted, which already does iGCSEs, isn't considering a change yet.
