Michael Gove’s so-called English Baccalaureate, a notional award to pupils who gain at least a C grade at GCSE in English, mathematics, science, a humanities subject (either history or geography) plus a foreign language sounds to me suspiciously like the old English School Certificate which lasted through most of the first half of the C20th until replaced by GCE O levels in 1950.
The flexibility of O levels in both range & number of subjects which a pupil could sit was considered to be a great advance, as was the fact that you got credit for each & any subject you passed, not penalised because you failed in maths or English.
Of course the main purpose of the School Certificate was to produce a nation of clerks or liberal romantics with clean hands, not engineers, not even of the ilk of Brunel or Lord Simons, & certainly not the horny handed sons of toil.
