Do you DC's school have text book for KS3? What do you do to support?

Anything has to be better than nothing for him.

Hang on. When have I said textbooks are the golden standard. I’m just describing what happened at ds’s schools and what we provided try and help him.

But Cromefromaway you again are mostly talking about a couple of subjects. And even then, text books not fully covering those. What do you suggest people do when a Key Stage 3 text book does not exist? Why is a text book the golden standard?
( and in my subject, the Seneca module is full of errors and the person they advertise as ‘being the expert’ is not actually a teacher, never mind for the subject...I don’t use it or recommend it, for my subject)

It's why most schools have put Of Mice and Men into KS3, mine included. It's a good story, short and we already have all the stuff.

The thing with KS3 is that not only do schools have full text freedom, since levels were abolished they also have to design their own assessment systems. Some are good, some are awful, some are essentially 5 years of GCSE and there's no benchmarking of quality between schools so school A could say that X Y Z is the right standard for y7, whilst school B could say A B C is. Nobody compared for parity. Even within schools KS3 assessment is inaccurate at best and a mess at worst.

School 1 was a selective school. School 2 is non selective comp.

In Year 7 (school 1) they did read a novel (can’t remember which) but that wasn’t the basis for any tests or exams. Year 8 was very poetry/transactional writing based.

Ds did tell me the reason they did Mice & Men (school 2) was because school had the books from the previous GCSE Syllabus.

That sounds like an English curriculum built around panicking that students won't know the write PEE/PEA/PQI/PETAL etc format for an exam so they do endless repetition of exam questions.

Analytical writing is a core part of English, but doing death by PEE over teaching a range of interesting texts is an illogical decision on the school's part.

I remember endless year 7 homework tasks on PEE.

The ignite one is probably a skills based approach then rather than what most schools do where they study whole texts or topics (e.g. conflict poetry / journalistic writing / persuasive speeches / Dracula).

The CGP you mention is also skills based not text based so useful to recap skills (I suggest the KS4 version for GCSE) but not so much for revision or assessment preparation at KS3, unless the school have done their whole KS3 around the skills for English Lang GCSE and are therefore doing death by extracts and exam style questions. If that's the case then curriculum design is a much bigger issue.

The reason they'll have textbooks then for Romeo and Juliet and Of Mice and Men is because Romeo and Juliet is also a GCSE text and Of Mice and Men is a former GCSE text so (as with the current GCSE texts) there's extensive material.

I bought the CGP kS3 English Complete Revision & Practice study guide to try and help him.

Previous school for English in Year 7/8 they used a textbook called Ignite English. I remember end of year 7 exam being based on study of a war poem. They also studied Macbeth but that was in drama class and mostly practical work.

Current school they did Romeo & Juliet & Of Mice & Men plus lots of work on creative writing. He really struggled and I ended up getting a tutor to help him.

What texts were they doing for English then?
Because CGP have KS3 guides for 3/4 Shakespeare plays max and some grammar workbooks and that's it.

So not:
A range of novels
Poetry
Plays
Non fiction
Creative writing
Speaking and listening

So they don't have the vast majority of the KS3 English curriculum available because the curriculum is taught through the schools choosing their own texts.

Bitesize has some skills based activities, but again it doesn't cover a school's full KS3 offer.

At his previous school they used online textbooks and he got on much better with them. But he had to leave that school

It was the same for KS3 (bar Seneca) CGP guides and mathswatch plus whatever bits of bbc bitesize were relevant.

Schools can’t afford textbooks (well ds’s school can’t anyway). I do feel that for someone like Ds (slow processing/poor organisation etc) it has disadvantaged him.

Comefromaway
All that you refer to is for GCSE. However, this thread is about Key Stage 3.

We found BBC Bitesize invaluable for GCSE revision. DD hated English lit, poetry in particular. Fortunately BBC Bitesize covered her poetry topic (conflict) and she basically memorized everything to regurgitate it in her exam. She got an A.

Don't all secondary schools have a VLE anyway

Ds’s school does not have a VLE. Neither did dd’s School but she had textbooks.

He has autism and struggles with note taking but lack of funding for TA & computers means he has blank exercise books & a mess of photocopies to revise from. Not the teacher’s fault (with the exception of a couple who think he is capable of copying reams from the board by hand or making summaries)

Students are expected to buy their own GCSE revision guides & English texts. They get a cheap price through school but a lot of parents are unable to afford this. The school uses mathswatch.

Ds uses Seneca & BBC bitesize mostly.

The differences between different systems are fascinating gin.
Sadly, what often happens in policy, in some schools, and with some parents is they decide X system does X and is better so therefore the UK System is wrong for not doing X, often whilst paying little to no attention on variables A B C D E etc.

I recall that there was a discussion on MN a while back about students from countries like China where they had been hothoused all the way through school, but weren't taught to think for themselves.

They learned through rote and mainly studied science and maths subjects rather than subjects that involved providing opinions and different points of view. DH has worked in China and South Korea and confirms that the workers need directing all the time because they have no initiative at all. Yes they can score highly in a maths exam, but they don't know how to critique an industrial process and work out why it isn't working.

Not just that gin but a totally different system.
One of my colleagues worked over in Asia, can't remember where, and said that every y8 student did the same maths lesson on the same day and the lesson content was identical for every class.
Compare that to the differentiation and SEND support we have in the UK. It's not perfect, far from it, but I think we've got to be really careful before drawing inaccurate conclusions from international systems.

Shanghai and Finland both score well in international rankings. Their systems are chalk and cheese.

Most countries outside the UK seem to have textbooks. The no-textbook thing in the UK looks quite weird to outsiders.

I suspect that most countries outside the UK have better funding for education Kokeshi123. I don't think you realise just how underfunded the UK education system is.

When DD was at school her school was the fourth worst underfunded school in the country. The SLT, governors and parents campaigned for fairer funding. We had the backing of local MPs and the press. The HT appeared on TV and the news item was featured on the national as well as the local news.

Thankfully the campaign was successful, and the school received an injection of funding, but it still isn't enough.

The result of underfunding is no textbooks, larger class sizes and fewer subjects being taught. Schools are dropping subjects like music, drama, photography etc to concentrate on the core academic subjects.

FullOfJellyBeans
They didn't just make the request to me. They asked multiple teachers!

It's why I'm suitably skeptical about claims that lessons should be available at home / all PowerPoints etc should be made available online.

Some lessons I have no PowerPoint, others we are doing group discussion, others they work through workbooks or exercises, others we work straight into the text. Sometimes the lesson goes off on a tangent, often I'll adapt the lesson in the middle of the lesson, add things in, take things out to meet student needs etc.

All of that is entirely standard secondary teaching which can't be made available online. That's just life.

People are more than capable of knowing their students and putting things in place for them (eg. Printing diagrams, knowing who needs tables printing or headings already pre filled). I also have a resource board with tables and graphic organizer templates that students can help themselves to if it helps rather than sorting the layout themselves.

Ireland has textbooks and frankly their education system looks better than the English, Welsh and Scottish systems.

Most countries outside the UK seem to have textbooks. The no-textbook thing in the UK looks quite weird to outsiders.

@LolaSmiles

That's ridiculous to critique your lessons it's incredibly insulting to you and from a purely selfish perspective it's doing the child a disservice as they'll be confused. That said many students - even those without diagnosed SEN will have trouble both taking notes and understanding a lesson simultaneously. Even within NT children there is a big difference in processing speed and it would be wrong that children have no external record of the lesson except their own notes. Even if it's a picture of the black board uploaded online which they can look at in their own time.