The Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) was a school leaving qualification awarded between 1965 and 1987 in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
It was introduced to provide a qualification available to all schoolchildren distinct from the GCE (O-Levels) that were aimed at the more able pupils, mostly those at grammar and independent school (rather than secondary modern schools) aiming for places at a university. Before the introduction of the CSE, the majority of those schoolchildren at secondary modern schools did not take O-Level examinations and so left school without any qualifications at all. However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, counties frequently had introduced their own examinable qualifications for the bulk of Secondary Modern School pupils who left in 'Form Four' (at 15 years of age). For example, the county of Monmouthshire in Wales awarded the Monmouthshire Certificate in Education.
There were five pass grades in its grading system ranging from grades 1 to 5, with grades 2 to 3 being recognised with equivalence to the three (later two: D and E) lowest O-Level pass grades (of which there were originally six, later five, A, B, C, D and E).
Achieving CSE grade 1 was equivalent to achieving an O level in the subject where the student may have reasonably gained an A, B or C grade had they taken an O-level course of study in the same subject. Gaining a CSE Grade 1 therefore implied that that student should have followed an O level course in that subject. As the comprehensive schools replaced secondary modern schools in the 1970s pupils could increasingly take a mixture of CSEs and O-levels until finally the examinations were merged with the new GCSE certification courses.
CSEs and O-levels were replaced by the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in 1988.
Famous quotes containing the words certificate, secondary and/or education:
“God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in Gods coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (17291781)