What does matriculation mean?

I like local, national and international politics. All are important and they all affect our lives, but this time I will deal with a big national issue, education, education and education. I have written about it in the blog 'who should go to university?' but really I think the important years are the early years at nursery and primary school. You can get a good idea as to how well pupils are doing at the age of 16 by looking at the league tables, and the next time they come out take a look at the percentages for those who get five good GCSEs. More than half fail to get this figure.

There is a possibility that pupils are late developers but in general teachers know how well the pupils are going to do at GCSE when they arrive at secondary school. The teachers are pleased if some value is added to the abilities of their pupils. This leads to the conclusion that we have to improve our primary teaching if we want better standards at GCSE. If we want half of our students to be academically excellent and go to university then we need to do a lot more at an early age. Alternatively we can direct teenagers to university who have just managed to matriculate or we can say the world of academia is not for everyone and train for skills. Ironically matriculate, meeting the standards to get to university, comes from the Latin for little list. We need a new word that means big list.

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