The Department for Education recently announced that it planned to make some changes to the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) average point score measures that it publishes in Secondary School Performance Tables to incentivise entry in all 6 subjects: English, maths, two sciences, a humanity and a modern or ancient foreign language.
For all the noise about the EBacc since it was introduced by Michael Gove in 2011, it hasn’t really caught on. Published statistics for 2023 show that just 39% of pupils entered all 6 subjects.
This is largely due to low take-up of languages. Just 45% of pupils entered a language in 2023. This compares to 82% of pupils who entered a humanity (history or geography) and 95% who entered two sciences. Not only that, the 45% is boosted by a proportion of pupils entering a GCSE in their home language. We warned in 2016 that low numbers of MFL teachers would make the EBacc hard to deliver.
Given that the idea of performance measures is to drive behaviour, I’m not sure why changing the EBacc average point score would be worthwhile, unless DfE thought that schools could solve their own recruitment problems.
