What is really going on in our schools? Well, Laura....

[noblegiraffe]

Laura Kuenssberg appears to have just discovered that schools exist. New to the concept she has written an essay discussing what might be going on in them, from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. Basic errors include "standards haven't crashed because GCSE and A-level results in 2022 were up on 2019".

She mentions the lack of funding, but doesn't mention the lack of teachers. She mentions increased pupil absence but doesn't mention the implosion of support services for children like CAMHS, or the huge waiting lists for SEN diagnosis and the cutting of TAs in schools due to lack of money. She suggests covid might have had an impact, but not that the government have done basically nothing to address this and that their covid catch-up adviser resigned in disgust.

She says a minister says that 'teachers have had a bashing since covid'. Since covid! She doesn't mention this is led by the government and has been going on for years.

So, what's really going on in our schools? Anyone want to help Laura out?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-65360168

There just seems to be a general feeling from kids that they don’t have to respect anyone, teachers, peers etc. and screen time is a big problem. So many kids are worried that they are going to miss something if they don’t check their phones constantly and they just seem to really struggle to focus on anything which isn’t a screen.
There also just seems to be such an apathy towards education. At my kids school it’s really uncool to be known to be studying and there just doesn’t seem to be any thought that education should be valued as if they don’t do well at school then there’s college or the benefits system. It must be awful trying to work with kids who would rather just not be there and don’t value it at all.

Learning grammar early on helps kids with speech and lang difficulties.

Research please?

This genuinely isn't my experience- the stuff about apathy.

My KS3 students love my subject, they are very enthusiastic, and they enjoy it. They show real enthusiasm in my lessons and want to do well.

My Y9s are a bit different. They didn't have consistent teaching last year, and obviously had interruptions due to the pandemic. They're not apathetic, but they do have huge gaps in their learning, and they know this. They're reluctant to try- not because they don't care, but because they are worried about getting things wrong. They know how much they don't know but not how to solve it.

My GCSE groups are similar. They really want to do well, a lot of them really care BUT they have huge gaps, and they know this. If anything, some of them put themselves under too much pressure, to the point of making themselves ill. There are some of them who appear apathetic, but I don't think it's about not caring. It's about self preservation. If they try, and still fail, they don't know how to deal with that.

I also teach quite a bit of KS5. Obviously they've chosen my subject, so they've got a lot of enthusiasm, but some of them have really missed out in the past few years. A lot have come from other schools, and have major gaps. I don't have time to plug these gaps, and I do still get from Y12, "Oh, that was taken off our GCSEs, so we don't know it."

I try and offer as much support to them as I can, to try and get the ones who are struggling up to speed. The problem is, doing that takes me away from a lot of other things I "should" be doing, and I'm stretching myself very thin. For me, KS5 is my priority + Y11, obviously. I know I'm letting down students further down the school BUT I know can't do anything else on top of what I'm already doing without burning myself out. And that's the hardest thing.

Isn't the opposite ? You need to sort their speech out before you can teach them grammar ? That is what a SENCO told me, but obviously don't know where she got that from....

Speech yes (and phonological awareness). But the language difficulties (constructing a sentence in your head to say out loud) can be supported through teaching of grammar.

Sorry I don't have it. My DD has severe DLD and all her SALTs have said this whenever I complained how hard my DD finds it. They have all said how grateful they are grammar is back on the curriculum as it helps kids massively with correct sentence structure as well as helping the EAL kids.

The problem I have with the KS1 and 2 curriculum is not that it teaches grammar, but that it makes it unnecessarily complicated. Why does it have to be ‘fronted adverbial of time’ or ‘expanded noun phrases’ (which roughly translates as…write more adjectives to describe your noun). I don’t see what’s wrong with teaching them words like nouns and verbs and adverbs and connectives and sentence starters.

My parents (who ended up doing a lot of the SPAG homework with my DC because they picked them up from school that day) were utterly bemused by some of the terminology. They were of tye generation that had received the 1950s grammar schooling that Gove was desperately trying to emulate and they hadn’t heard of some of these terms!

@Appuskidu I do agree with this but I have the same issue with the way music is taught. It makes it very inaccessible. Only those who are analytically minded aka good at maths, find music theory easily accessible.
This is why I suspect if we actually had enough funding and good management of that funding to have good quality training and teaching, less people would take issue with this curriculum.

But if the SPAG curriculum was just simplified, it would be a very quick and simple way to make it far more accessible.

@Appuskidu When we got my DD a music tutor who specialised in teaching dyslexic kids, he managed to teach music theory to her in such a simple way that she understood. I think this can be applied to all subjects. The trouble is, excelling at something doesn't make you a good teacher and being able to teach in a simple way requires a lot of experience and training.

But they don’t NEED to know it in this much detail at such a young age. Some of these terms are meaningless and sound made up. It makes SPAG unnecessarily complex and confusing.

I do not believe that the phrase ‘fronted adverbial of time’ was used in primary English lessons in the 1950s. Why do we need it now?

So no research then. Which is what I thought.

There is research. I just don't have it to send to you. I'm quoting my DDs speech and language therapists. I doubt they would lie to me. I'm sure you can do a quick Google to find it but I'm not here to prove or disprove anything. I know for a fact learning grammar has helped my child and her classmates.

I'm not sure how grammar was taught historically but the reason I brought up the subject of music was because someone said traditional things like grammar aren't useful for our kids futures. Yet they said we should teach more music when that's really not accessible for many kids.
I'm really not interested in a back and forth of what's good and what isn't. What's clear is that we need more experienced teachers, better behaviour and better training. We cannot achieve any of that without proper funding and excellent management of that funding. The only way you get an experienced teacher that can teach things in a simple way is by keeping them in the school. That doesn't happen with bad behaviour, rubbish wages and not even a bloody glue stick!

When we got my DD a music tutor who specialised in teaching dyslexic kids, he managed to teach music theory to her in such a simple way that she understood. I think this can be applied to all subjects.
I suspect that it's not so much that there's a perfect simple explanation that can illuminate every learner, if only the teacher had the skills to do so. It's more the enormous benefit of a 1 to 1 session.
I know that there are a handful of learners in my class who would benefit from a particular step by step simplified approach to processes. The issue is the other 25 chn in the class who get it straight away, and are so bored if I break it down too much that they get disruptive.

I firmly believe in laying down the traditional building blocks of grammar. I don’t agree that teaching children made up phrases in the name of ‘1950s standards’ is necessary or useful.

@NightNightJohnBoy I agree with this too. Would be great if there was any state special schools for SpLD.

There are

@Itstarts it feels like I'm texting a teen. 0 inference. Do you not think it's helpful to list them after saying they exist?

But there isn’t any. The only grammar research I am aware of is Debra Myhill’s which is about teaching grammar in context. 🤷‍♀️

Hm. Maybe it's only done in the context of SALT? We have a meeting with our salt in 2 weeks. I'm actually going to ask about it. Anecdotally, it has really helped DD. I'm not sure if it's because of the grammar or because the whole class is learning sentence structure for much longer than normal, but it helped massively.

Without knowing where in the country you are, it's not very helpful though. I only know ones in my local area: 3 primary SCLN centres in mainstream and 1 secondary specialist. Those are just ones I know of, quite possibly more.

I suspect it is very area dependent. Locally for us, there are no good secondary options for ASD.

@Itstarts Those are all additional resource bases though. And for SCLN. That's not for SpLD or a standalone special school. SCLN bases are usually all taken up by kids with autism and spaces are very very rare and you are in them for a specific period of time. They're not meant to cater for a child that needs a specialist setting throughout their school career. I tried very hard to get my DD into one as she has DLD but they closed them all in my borough. There's quite a few private special schools for SpLDs, especially dyslexia. Absolutely 0 state ones. I looked up and down the country.

That's not my experience. In my experience SLCN centres won't take children with ASD as their primary need, SpLd has to be their primary need. The majority of children in ours have a DLD diagnosis.

Anyway, here is one such school:

www.moorhouseschool.co.uk/?spl=0