Livre d'Or

To defend the exam-based approach,
I don't actually have huge issues with teaching to the exams; I just think there should be fewer exams in the first place. Pretty much the key skill I learned at school was how to optimize exam results with minimum effort and ability. That skill has done me loads of good, it got me into Oxford which I loved, and it got me a job getting paid to do stuff I find both fascinating and enjoyable. I suspect that not all secondary pupils actually want to get into Oxford and become academic researchers though.

My point is that as the system is, I have admiration for any teacher who has the energy and dedication to look beyond exam results. Which is not by any means a condemnation of teachers who are just doing their best in a very imperfect system.

5Cs at GCSE are actually rewarded more in society than skills like scientific literacy.
See, this is the problem. Not the fact that teachers recognize that the situation exists, but that society operates like this in the first place. I don't really know what can be done about that, and it's certainly a valid approach to try to give kids the best defenses they can have.

My favourite example of this is differentiation and other basic calculus. The first few rules are no more difficult than Yr 7/8 stuff, yet it's often portrayed as a membership card for A-Level mathematics,
You're quite right about that. Calculus has the potential to get very hard, but then so does number theory and nobody would balk at teaching young kids how to count. When I was at school I thought that knowing calculus and the subjunctive in French would give me the keys to the universe, which is a very strange impression for me to have taken from my GCSE education!