Things you wish they’d taught you in school

[IrishJP]

Inspired by a couple of threads, and recent things that have happened in my life,
What kinds of things do you wish school had taught you that they didn’t?
I feel I learnt a lot of things I’ve never needed, like algebra (although I appreciate that’s relevant in some careers)
But I feel there should’ve been more ‘life’ lessons, that would have been far more useful.

i finished school mid 2000s and don’t have DC so appreciate that schooling may have changed and perhaps some of these things are being taught now.

Heres what I think they should’ve taught.

1. Budgeting and money management
2. information on benefits, tax, NI Contributions, employment rights etc
3. Useful cookery (I learnt to make random fancy dishes but didn’t know how to scramble eggs)
4. Basic DIY (I did some woodwork/metalwork but again made random things like a jigsaw and metal jetting) but couldn’t have put s shelf up or wallpapered a room
5. Everyday sewing (again I did some textiles where we learnt how to tiedye but I couldn’t sew a button on)

The academic side of schooling is absolutely vital but I just feel like there’s some stuff that isn’t needed until you go in to more specialised subjects at a later age, and some very ‘basic’ life skills would be a lot more useful.

Have I missed anything? Or for anyone who does have school aged DC are they teaching these things now?

"My school taught Sikhism for GCSE RE, so we may well have learnt about marriage but as I am not sikh this information wasn’t relevant to me, or about 90% of my class."

I didn't choose RE for GCSE and I actually would have liked more knowledge of the world's major religions. Instead we got the Egyptian sun gods.

Obviously I have since taught myself but it was rather embarrassing having no WW1 or WW2 knowledge! My maths knowledge is still iffy (but can do %) and I'm a whizz at Excel and SQL Databases.

I'm one of the lucky ones :/

MrsEx, I'm amazed you didn't do percentages.
Netball, well, it's generally only played in schools and not international at all...

The thing about personal finance is that it changes all the time. A few years ago an ISA would have been good advice for someone with a few thousand to invest, now it's not so much.

I know. We barely did maths as our maths teachers were mainly PE Teachers and they didn't have good maths knowledge.

Thing is all the boys could run 5km and swim well. And the girls had no skills as we only did netball.

We were taught about taxation and pensions and probably some other stuff in some life skills lessons when we were 15.

None of us took any notice and we all thought it was incredibly boring. Almost all of us went to uni and didn’t enter the workplace for another 6 years at least.
I actually think it would have been more useful in the last term of university.

"Obviously I have since taught myself but it was rather embarrassing having no WW1 or WW2 knowledge! My maths knowledge is still iffy (but can do %) and I'm a whizz at Excel and SQL Databases."

We never did WWI, but then I've found that hardly anybody really understand what that was about except for a general 'power struggle'.
The UK media is so obsessed with WWII we hardly need it at school as well.

Nobody over a certain age got Excel classes at school, we just learned on the job.

Some people on this thread need to look at their DCs school websites and tick off all the things that ARE being taught. There are posts here demanding that pupils should be taught things that they are quite literally taught.

Also, OP, you’re as old as me. PSHE was taught at school in the early 2000s.

And, finally, it is not the job of schools to teach every single tiny thing that could be relevant in life. Feel free to fill in the gaps yourselves, parents 👍

Looking back I wish I had been taught what jobs/careers you can do by studying certain subjects so you can make more sensible choices about GCSE options. How to plan and write an essay properly. How to actually revise in a useful way.

Well my poor schooling has encouraged me to fill in the gaps of education. I'm quite happy to do that 😊

I'm glad my era of schooling is well and truly in the past.

Some of the most useful things I learnt were at Rangers (older Guides) when I was about 15-18.

We had to find out what minimum wage was and how much benefits were. Work out how much we'd potentially have to live on for each, then go through the local paper looking for a room or flat to rent and work out how much we'd need for that, plus the ads for secondhand furniture.

Ok, so now you'd go online to find a lot of that out, but it was incredibly eye opening finding out the costs of living independently.

How to cope with serious illness & death

Sewing! Basic sewing

We did sewing in Design Tech. But it was with these new fangled (for 1997) CAD style sewing machines. And actually taught us nothing.

In fact we all broke the sewing machines and or couldn't be trusted and we were told to use fabric glue in the end 😂

Basic diy.
I've tried but I'm dire.
Cooking a basic dinner for about 5 people.
Changing a tyre or getting a battery in the car to restart - I joined the AA or I've rung dh

Mandatory “citizenship” (not sure if that’s the right term) but to cover things like how government, Parliament, courts, different international institutions etc work, basics on things like legal rights and responsibilities, discrimination law, etc.

@MichaelFabricantWig that’s already part of the curriculum… assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/908347/SECONDARY_national_curriculum_-_Citizenship.pdf

@AtomicBlondeRose it's great that it's part of the curriculum now but the thread is titled Things you wish they’d taught you in school - not Things you wish they currently taught in school.

So PP are allowed to mention things that were not covered previously but currently are 😊

Absolutely this! School PE put me off exercise for many years until I found my “thing” as an adult.

Everything everyone else said and yoga. As my body and mind would have benefited.

My daughter finished secondary last June and was taught about things like interest rates and looking for bias and spotting fake news. She also learnt first aid. She learnt about budgeting but with a focus on going to university so more relatable to many 16 year old than household budgeting for a family.
Unfortunately when they were learning many of these things was back when you still needed to isolate if you had covid and they had a week dedicated to learning many life skills. By the end of the week nearly the whole year group was off with covid (think they had less than 20 or of over 200!) So many of them missed out

I'd have loved more "real life" practical things. I thought subjects like cookery, needlework, woodwork, metalwork etc were wasted time as they never really did anything useful. I vividly remember an entire term spent making a wooden fish - just what's the point?

What I did really learn from was being on the stage crew (lighting & sound) for school plays etc., where we learned how to wire a plug and change fuses, how to change light bulbs, different light bulbs and different fuses, safe ladder climbing, how to use pulleys and hoists, setting up and using radio microphones, and all kinds of sound systems, wiring up amplifiers and speakers, running lighting and sound control boards, etc. All that was fascinating and was actually useful for later life, as I am confident to do things around the house like swapping a single socket for a double, installing extra light fittings in bedrooms, etc., no problem in setting up new household audio/visual equipment (wiring etc). It also gave me an interest in electronics which became a hobby for many years with me creating my own circuit boards, etc.

I was always envious of the pupils lucky enough to get into the moped building class. The school had an old moped, and every year, there was one class who got to dismantle it and then rebuild it, and then ride around the school grounds on it once it was rebuilt. As numbers were limited, it was virtually "by invitation only" and never appeared in your options choices!

I am a Food Tech teacher by trade, and also taught a bit of textiles along with being in charge of PSHE and Sex Ed. I left teaching in 2014.

In those days, you couldn't possibly have taught something as mundane as sewing a button on as you absolutely HAD to design a 6 week project that was riveting to promote uptake at KS4, had lessons that built on each other and showed at least 3 levels of progression and started with the student designing whatever they were making. Exactly the same went for food. There was also an emphasis in this 6 weeks on presenting the finished item for sale so packaging and POS materials were one of the lessons at least. Things have changed a bit now I believe but I called it a day after 15 years as I was disillusioned with teaching kids to make pizza with 3 different types of flour,.numerous different toppings and a box when I could have spent 6 weeks teaching them 6 different dishes and the associated skills. I promise you it wasn't down to the teachers!

ANY sport other than netball and rounders. I went to a girls school and we played rounders or netball for almost every lesson. We played in different places - at school, at a leisure centre, at another school but the sport never changed. We were allowed to stop PE lessons in year 9 if we weren't planning to take it as a GCSE and most of us did.

Absolutely this. There is a crying need in this country for better exercise/activity/physical awareness and how to look after our bodies. Team games have their place for those who are interested (my DM played hockey for fun in her youth and I sometimes, having no hand-eye coordination and the running skills of a two-legged dachshund, wistfully wonder what it must be like to be able to have fun like that) but a large number of us would be better off walking, swimming, dancing or using the gym. Even digging the school veg patch is better than hanging around shivering at the end of the netball court.