Why are Labour so shit at education policy?

[noblegiraffe]

It should be pretty clear that I am as keen as anyone to see an end to this Tory government and their destruction of education through consistent and persistent underfunding and deprioritising.

So it is incredibly depressing to turn to the education policy of a Labour manifesto and every time experience a feeling of wtf.

Anyway, Labour have just realised a report that will be used to inform education policy in the next manifesto, and it's that sinking feeling once again.

They acknowledge that teacher recruitment and retention are a massive issue.

And then:

"This will include, beginning from initial teacher education, being trained in a wider range of methods than the traditional ‘chalk and talk’, including high quality team-based learning which will lead students to understand how to approach the delivery of projects in the workplace."

"Labour should introduce multimodal assessment so that young people’s progress is no longer just measured through written exams"

"A syllabus should be designed to ensure all students have accessible and practical, hands-on applicability of digital skills, so that they are able to engage with the transformative approach to problem solving that is rapidly changing the economy."

"For primary and secondary school, Labour should design an inclusive, inspiring, creative and future broadening curriculum which will liberate talent, promote the enquiring mind of every young person, and prepare young adults for the ever-changing world, designed to ensure that no child is left behind. Not only are we preparing students for their contributions as employees, but unlocking their potential as entrepreneurs, and therefore the innovators and job-creators of the future."

And how will ripping up the curriculum and assessment system again improve teacher recruitment and retention, eh, Labour? Teachers were massively pissed off with Gove when he did it, it created massive workload and we're still dealing with the problems of its rushed implementation.

Teachers will see the prospect of all their current practice and knowledge being ripped up and put in the bin and say 'fuck this, I'm off'.

I understand that Labour want to be seen as the party of bold and ambitious plans. But education cannot support bold and ambitious plans. It needs careful investment, tweaks to the current systems that will lead to immediate improvements (like reintroducing AS levels), and major focus on fixing immediate problems that urgently need fixing, like the state of school buildings, mental health and SEN support. Not the curriculum and assessment system.

And Labour need to talk to and listen to actual teachers who will have to implement their ideas before publishing their policy.

So if anyone on here has anyone in Labour's ear (or an MP you can beg), please tell them to stop this crap before it gets to the manifesto.

schoolsweek.co.uk/major-labour-review-calls-for-creative-curriculum-and-less-exams-focus/

Actual report:
labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/WR-16813_22-Labour-Skills-Council-report-Edit-19-10-22.pdf

Certainly on AQA, marks are not lost for poor spelling. Marks are only lost if the examiner can't work out what the student means by the word they have written, or if it becomes ambiguous with another key term.

E.g. Pankreas or Mitocondria would be fine, but Mietosis would be not, because it could mean mitosis or meiosis.

OFSTED can go in my fantasy bin too. In fact, I need a big skip.

@BungleandGeorge

That element of being marked down for students with dyslexia is absolutely crushing..

It totally demoralises them trying to do English and very good writer's have no confidence trying to write because they are embarrassed or worried about their spelling.

Firstly, they should never have been made to feel bad about that.
2nd....yes we need basics understanding of spelling which is why teachers/ta need to be flexible in their approach to teaching spelling.

My own child went from never passing spelling test to getting very good spelling mark's with one simple tweak

I didn't think she was capable of spelling at all and it beggar's all belief that it took a chance conversation with someone to tell me one tweak that enabled her to move forward.

What would have happened if we had not known . It's nothing expensive either.
Yes more children will need deeper help but many teachers have never even heard of behavioural optomitry!

With the advent of spelling check and computers they are a god send to such children and definitely need to be deployed properly.

@TheHouseonHauntedHill what was the tweak out of interest?

I like the suggestion that they should be more like food hygiene inspectors and less like restaurant critics.

FWIW, I think it's possible to think that both an overhaul of the curriculum is probably needed, and think that radically changing styles of assessment right now would cause teachers to leave the profession. There's no way to do it without increasing workload, and I do think that has to be a priority, especially for shortage subjects.

I do think at every stage of the curriculum, we probably need to slim down the content taught- certainly for science. It's just too much, and there's no need for anyone to know it all by 16, or 18- and so much of it ends up being taught badly, because we rush through it, and the curriculum doesn't contain our most recent understanding of e.g. genetics.

A PP mentioned assessing practical skills- again, this is done post 16 in science. Science A-levels have a "practical endorsement" where the teacher marks off whether students have demonstrated certain skills. It's pass/fail and students can redo a practical if needed, so not especially high stakes.

In theory, I think this could be good at GCSE- but there are some issues.

1. Class sizes. It's much easier to assess everyone individually in a class of 15 than say, a class of 32.

2. Expense. The amount of reagents etc needed for all of Y11 to do, say 12 practicals individually could be quite expensive, and it might reduce practical opportunities for students in lower year groups. It would also increase demand on technician time. It's very different to running this sort of thing for 3-4 classes.

3. Behaviour. Unfortunately, there are some GCSE students who can't be trusted to participate in practical work because they simply can't/won't work safely. (Nearly) every school will have a small minority of students who are "banned" from some or all practical work due to their behaviour. Ultimately the consequences if something goes wrong can be very serious. But equally, you can't really exclude a student from a qualification. So what do we do with these students?

There are also students who can't do practical work due to disability/health issues/mental health. So what do we do with them?

4. Staff time. I already mentioned that this could become a major burden on technicians. There's also the admin involved which becomes an additional burden for teachers and heads of department. Science (in my opinion) is already a subject where there's quite high workload, and people are expected to teach out of specialism all the time- which again often increases workload. Chemistry and Physics are both massive shortage subjects, which schools struggle to recruit for all the time. Many schools only have one full time physics teacher. Everyone is always teaching their maximum number of timetabled hours. And it's a subject where there's often an expectation to run clubs etc.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, and I actually think some kind of practical assessment or coursework in science would be a good thing for the subject overall. But it would need to be implemented in a sensible way, and support (i.e. funding) would need to be given to schools to enable this to run smoothly. And you would lose teachers over it, because unfortunately some science teachers would hate it as a concept, no matter how it was implemented.

Personally, I would start by cutting things from the overloaded curriculum, and then, maybe after that had bedded in for 2-3 years, consider introducing some new type of assessment.

I think maybe maths teachers are more chilled about 'cutting things from an overloaded curriculum' because we rarely teach it all anyway.

@verastan

I don't mind telling you in a pm but can I ask why you want to know please

I'd be interested in a tweak that turns a dyslexic poor speller into a good one too. because I have a dyslexic poor speller. I think there would be a lot of parents out there who would feel similarly.

The thing is, you can choose not to teach some things- e.g. if I have a class aiming for, say grade 6s, I probably won't spend much time, if any on half equations. They often don't come up, and if they do, they won't be worth more than 2 or 3 marks. They're another thing students find challenging and confusing in a topic they already find challenging and confusing.

I'd still leave them in, as students aiming for 7+ can usually get them, and it's a way of differentiating.

But even for a student who's going to sit a foundation paper, there's often a huge amount of named examples they have to learn:

9 parts of the cell + key features of prokaryotic cells, 6 named examples of specialised cells, 4 named places stem cells can be found, 3 named examples of where diffusion happens, 3 factors that affect diffusion, 3 exchange surfaces and their adaptations, 2 examples of active transport.

That's not the subject content as such, that's the specific examples they need to learn for the first topic in biology for combined science. And they're expected to know all these things for the foundation paper, and it's very hard to know what to cut out, because some of these things will come up and some of them will be the "easy" questions, at the start of the paper.

That's alongside the ridiculous number of key words etc they have to learn just to understand the questions.

It's not just biology, either. The first topic in physics includes:

8 energy stores, 4 energy transfers, definitions of power, work done, efficiency, 10 energy resources- not just their names but their pros and cons, 5 equations.

All these things have to be memorised.

It would be much better if we could have a style of exam where understanding and application could be assessed without so much rote memorization.

@TheHouseonHauntedHill oh just interested for my son who is 9 and struggling with spelling.

@TeenDivided

My ds was a crap speller, he had dyslexia. It improves as they get older and they tend to do more written work on a computer.

Mines 18. It did improve a fair bit around 12. Computer doesn't help much as poor motor skills plus type of spelling errors tends to mean spelling suggestions are often not good enough / DD doesn't pick the right one anyway.

Keep BTecs

And they're expected to know all these things for the foundation paper, and it's very hard to know what to cut out, because some of these things will come up and some of them will be the "easy" questions, at the start of the paper.

Do you not have crossover questions? 25% of the maths questions are the same on both foundation and higher, so you know the easiest questions on higher are not going to be 'higher only' content.

I also know it's not worth teaching a borderline foundation group trig, or a grade 5/6 group finding the equation of a tangent to a circle.

Yes some questions are crossed over on foundation and higher. I'm talking about AQA, I don't have much experience with other exam boards.

So the end of a foundation paper will be the same as the beginning of a higher paper.

I agree with the other poster. It would be great if there was less emphasis on rote memorisation and more on application.

I think about 30% of the paper is knowledge recall, but even for the rest of the paper students still need to memorise a lot of stuff in order to apply it.

This thread should be renamed to "Why has 12 years of Tory education policy been so shit?"

Because almost all posts are about the current situation but a slow clap to the OP for giving CHQ a free shot.

This thread should be renamed to "Why has 12 years of Tory education policy been so shit?"

I've done 12 years of those threads... it's like I actually care about education policy being good and not just the colour of the rosette delivering it.

Anyone wanting to talk about how shit the Tories are for education are free to post on my other recent threads:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4655919-teachers-balloting-for-strike-action-school-closures

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4651549-teaching-assistants-quitting-schools-for-supermarkets-because-of-joke-wages

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4636317-liz-truss-to-lift-ban-on-new-grammar-schools

www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4623297-schools-facing-catastrophic-winter

www.mumsnet.com/talk/coronavirus/4595792-unions-ask-cleverly-to-have-a-covid-plan-for-schools-for-winter

I think, when it comes to Tories being shit for education, I am on it.

@noblegiraffe The good thing about maths is it appears to be known which skills are at which grade levels so if you have a student at about grade 6 you (specifically not generally) will know not to bother with the grade 8 & 9 skills.

With science the topics / information isn't labelled so clearly. You (generally now) certainly can't miss a whole topic out, you have to guess within the topic much more. I found as a parent that DD naturally couldn't do the content that turned out to be Higher tier rather than Foundation but I wouldn't have been able to make informed choices as to what to skip within a tier. The difference comes from within the wording of the question, not the topic itself iyswim?

2 years away from a GE and Labour haven't published a manifesto.

The Autumn statement will have double digit spending cuts in it (only way to plug the 40 billion fiscal hole, pay for defence and energy support)

Education along with pubic health will take a huge hit (Tories don't use either)

So whats the purpose of banging on about Labour?

Look, we all know that Tory education policy is and has been shit in many ways. Schools and teachers are being run into the ground with funding as it is right now. The cumulative effect of 12 years of underfunding has built over time as more and more stuff wears out, falls into disrepair or can’t be replaced.

However, it’s the Labour Party that are likely to win the next election and shape the future of education policy. I think it’s absolutely right that, as a profession, we start looking closely at their policies and make sure that when the time comes for a Labour Education Secretary we don’t up with another unnecessary curriculum overhaul. I think what they need to hear from us is that we want them to fund schools properly, give teachers more time to plan prepare and assess and avoid any huge curriculum overhauls.

So what's the purpose of banging on about Labour?

Umm. Because they have just released a report indicating their thinking so now is the time to jump in and try to influence if people disagree? By the time it makes it into a manifesto it is too late to do much to change it.

If parents / teachers / employers don't like Labour's direction, now is the time to say so, not 3 weeks before they get elected when they will be committed to whatever they said.

Oh yes. And the curriculum could specify certain things as starters and mains, but not insist on specific recipes; whilst leaving desserts free to choose ...

That element of being marked down for students with dyslexia is absolutely crushing

The SPAG marks are for far more than just spelling though. If teachers are labouring spelling as an issue over the things students can do which will get more marks, that's a teacher issue not a mark scheme one.