What would you like to see studied at school?

[changedmyname24]

We have just been having an interesting chat as a family, about what we think should be taught at school.

I am in favour of a Life Skills subject for all students, incorporating:

• Growing fruit & veg in a garden, pots or an allotment
• Preparing said fruit & veg
• Cooking basic meals
• Basic car maintenance eg changing a tyre, checking oil etc
• Laundry - from sorting to ironing
• Mending clothes
• Budgeting
• Paying bills
• Basic first aid

I think that some of these would alleviate pressure on other services, such as the NHS, so would be of national benefit.

What would you add?

Also, a lot of these things are taught in schools, but I expect that in many cases, they’re presented as an abstract concept, rather than something that will be useful in real life. For a child or teenager, having to do
these things for real can seem an eternity away especially if helicopter parents do not give them any independence. For example, compound interest; teachers might not mention “this is how your savings accounts work”. Some teachers are good at linking these things to the real world, others less so.

And I do feel for the teachers here; it’s hard for them, with the pressure they are under. But I remember a maths teacher I had who was very good at making things interesting. For example, when teaching 3D trigonometry, which other teachers would have doled out as spoonfuls of distilled boredom, he said “go up into your attic: you will see right-angled triangles everywhere”.

At primary school in the 80’s, I remember an exercise on budgeting. “Jill saved a whole pound for her birthday party.” A whole pound. [laugh] And we were told to ignore the half pennies, which meant that the sums didn’t work. So much for the real world.

I do agree about teaching critical thinking. I tutor maths, and I often give them riddle-type questions, such as “how much earth in a hole 1m wide, 2m long, 1m deep?”, to encourage children to think critically about what they read. (Hint: the answer is not 2 cubic metres.)

They do.

Hth.

I agree with:

first aid (which was taught in PE when I was at school)

basic healthy cooking because people seem clueless about that now.

Plus I think doing more complex nutrition in chemistry would be good (eg what IS a fat molecule, carbohydrates, proteins) because people lack a foundation of knowledge in this.

Sewing - yes thing like hemming, adding a new zip etc would be handy. Most parents can’t do that now - a short enrichment course of one week could do this for students perhaps around Christmas or before the summer. I learnt it all in 3 days at an adult college.

The rest of what you’ve said is just hobbies or to be taught by parents. School can’t teach everything.

“Why don’t parents teach these things?” the Mumsnetters are screaming.

Or they simply don't know what they don't know or what they should know, so being told to look it up on YouTube or TikTok isn't helpful if they don't know that they need to know.

There are a lot of parents who really shouldn't be parents. Maybe more contraception education is required. There are countless threads on mumsnet from women with several children from many different fathers who might have benefitted from this.

Perhaps it would be more effective to have compulsory parenting classes and what you as a parent should be making sure you cover for the child you brought into this world.

I agree with @frozendaisy 's points. DD, who is a post grad student, knows how to be independent because a lot of what she knows is modelled on what she has seen me do. When she went interrailing with her then boyfriend they stayed in an airbnb in the middle so that they could have access to a washing machine. The boyfriend was astonished that DD separated the whites and light colours from the dark clothes to do a couple of washes. I don't remember telling DD to do this, she just knew.

I think they should take off cookery/ food technology, that’s a parents job and it’s always such basic stuff

Hard disagree. Too many parents can't or won't cook. Most people my age (67) can cook because we had proper basic cookery lessons at school. We didn't just make scones or rock buns. The first thing we ever made in what is now year 7 was a cooked breakfast.

On the WIWIKAU Facebook page I am constantly astonished at the parents of young people just about to start higher education who haven't taught their DC how to cook, how to use a washing machine, how to budget, how to organise themselves so that they get up on time for lectures and basically live like independent adults. Those should be our jobs as parents, and too many are simply not preparing our DC for adult life.

A lot of parents can’t cook. So they can’t teach it.

Putting aside the "parents should teach this" ones, I would say things like budgeting, how to responsibly apply for a credit card and how the interest rate will shoot up after a year, how to buy a house (it's so complicated), how shared ownership works when buying a house, different tiers of tax.

A few house care things wouldn't go amiss either, like how to stop a water leak, what to do if you smell gas, how to deal with mould on walls, etc.

How about we teach people to parent so schools don’t have to teach life skills.

It seems more like parenting classes would address these sorts of things? It's not the job of schools to parent children. I do have sympathy for parents who don't know how to bring up children - and it would help the whole of society if we could support them more. I worry about the state taking on more and more of the parental role - I'm not sure it's wise or that the state is a good parent, really. But maybe at a remove, parenting the parents? 🤔

Things like running a house: laundry, paying bills, sewing a button on, cooking dinner, applying for a job - this is really basic parenting. Give your kids jobs at home, do things with them, give them responsibility and increase them as they grow. Solve problems together and show them how you learn new things yourself. Encounter challenges and resolve them as a team, with you keeping them safe and supported as you go. This is basic parenting. We do need to support parents to get their arms around this if they don't have those skills. You see on here a lot mums who think their job is to, I don't know, almost keep their kids captive, never letting them grapple with anything in life at all. They clearly need tools as everyone sounds very unhappy.

Even though I've just said all that about it being the domain of parents, I do think that kids would do better if they were more involved with the upkeep of the school, not as a lesson with grades but just as an expectation as a member of the community. I don't think this is parenting, more like the general inclusion of children in their own lives. Cleaning classrooms, serving food, setting up events, there are expectations we can reasonably have of small people that they can meet and feel proud of.

I know it's a ballache because kids are rubbish at everything but it is better long term for kids to be involved in their own lives and feel useful and valuable team players. A friend of mine went to school in Japan, which, yes has its own problems, but they all cleaned the school every day and they felt a lot of pride about it, he says. When I was a kid at my old fashioned primary school we sat at tables of six and one kid was the server -- served food to everyone, and one made conversation with the little ones and we felt it was a very great honour to be made the server and looked forward to it. When the school switched to "airline style" dinners where we all queued up, all those skills were lost to the younger ones.

There has been a slow process of turning pupils into consumers of education that I think has been... unwise.

I agree with this. I lived through the period of the IRA's mainland bombing campaign and it wasn't until a teacher took it on himself to use a spare lesson at the end of term when we were in the equivalent of year 9, to give us the background, that any of us had any context at all. It was really eye opening. And I only learnt about the UK's political system as a result of an optional module I took at university.

I don't agree about life skills though. That's the role of parents. If parents are really so crap or unable it doesn't occur to then to teach cooking, budgeting and laundry, they do need help, but not in place of academic study.

There is actually quite a lot of applied maths in the curriculum but students often aren't interested until later. There probably is an argument for a junior version of core maths.

Schools that want to offer business, economics and one of the various personal finance qualifications are at liberty to do so and thousands of students take those and related subjects every year.

Failing that, the banks offer some great, free apps, which they advertise frequently.

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it think...

I would restrict serious study to year 9+. I genuinely think science and history are wasted on younger pupils. So I would only make Reading and Writing compulsory and mathematics would be taught from the age of 9 or so through termly units which need to be retaken if not passed (so "basic operations", "fractions, decimals and percentages" and "pre-algebra" would be units offered every term and pupils would have to retake each unit as often as necessary to pass before moving on to the next). Apart from that, pupils would be able to choose electives which would get the same number of hours as core subjects and which would ideally include a foreign language, a musical instrument, a sport, but could also be things like choir, drama, chess, drawing, additional sport, whatever they fancy.

Science and History would be taught from scratch in year 9.

????

Maybe I'm a bit odd but if so my husband and two children are as well. We all love history and have taken an interest in it from early childhood. The idea of restricting study in such a fundamental subject to the teenager years baffles me. My husband was fascinated by many aspects of science from a very young age and was more than ready to start studying it seriously when he started secondary school. There are many science topics which a bright interested child can grasp from far younger than 11, never mind 13.

I think the point of the "broad and balanced" curriculum is it's precisely those random encounters that can change a whole life.

The child that has never been taken to a historical site.
The one with a gift for art, music, maths, science...
They need to encounter these things at a formative age.

I think that the concepts of science and history should be introduced early. Children do science experiments in primary school, and rightly so; it’s only later that they have to write more formally about them. I remember a primary school experiment of “which colours make black” involving felt tip pens and blotting paper, and I didn’t learn the word “chromatography” until secondary: nowadays, primary school children would be expected to be able to spell it. Ditto history, and I say this as someone who found history a really boring subject. Learning about important historical events at primary school: absolutely. Working out whether Henry VIII was Catholic or Protestant: later.

I agree with you about the finer technicalities being saved until later, which can quickly turn an interesting idea into distilled boredom. I volunteered recently in a primary school, and I was amazed by some of the technicalities children were expected to learn: some aspects of English grammar which I had never heard of, such as “fronted adverbials”.

The children also learned French from year 3, which I was a bit surprised by, but I thought: fair enough. Then I saw some of the exercises: fill in the blanks with “Yves” or “Chantelle”: est presente. _ est present. In other words, work out whether it should be a boy or girl’s name from the adjective ending. Sometimes they had to do this from hearing it spoken, and the difference is very subtle. This is a fine point of grammar, and working it backwards, I really didn’t see the value of doing this at primary. There were so many cries of “I don’t get it!”, and I thought they would do much better to learn useful vocabulary and phrases at age, rather than finer points of grammar, so they could at least feel as if they were learning French. One year 6 lad on his bike saw me in the street, and called out “French is shit!” I could see why he thought so.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g I loved science, but genuinely don't think I would have missed out on anything (school-wise) if I had only started serious study of it in year 9. But I'm not trying to impose this idea on anyone, this thread is all fantasy anyway. :-)

I told a story up thread of learning about the IRA aged 15. I'm 53.

Right person, right time, right stuff - it sticks.

Yes, and a lot of the things mentioned ARE in the curriculum 😂😂

I agree with your list @changedmyname24

It’s not about being a teacher it’s about being a parent which you chose, I chose, to become.

Teachers have 25/30 pupils a class and a finite amount of time with each. How can they shoehorn everything in?

There are many parents who between them can spend time on the internet/gym/watching tv but they can’t take some time out to teach their child things they think the schools should cover (and the school covers a lot anyway).

Finances

More pushing language competency not just as a random GCSE - start from young and make it core

Home economics properly incorporated into what we call food tech or design tech which is very basic and pointless for real life

Consent, relationships and boundaries done properly not just a quick pshe module

Consent/relationships are given enough time.

If you haven’t seen consent relating to a cup of tea this won’t make sense but when we (as a family) mentioned the Gisele Pelicot case around the kitchen table the teens said
“unconscious people can’t drink tea”

we didn’t teach them the consent tea thing

If when they come home they have unfiltered access online it can sometimes not matter what they get taught by a teacher in stuffy school, there are poisonous influencers with sunny villas and luxury cars telling them that they need to control women to make money etc etc

just because we don’t always see children and teens seemingly know about being decent it doesn’t mean it isn’t taught it needs to be reinforced and discussed at home as well

I think critical thinking is absolutely essential to counteract the influence of social media, advertising and those politicians on both the left and right who appeal to knee-jerk sentiments that have no logical or indeed factual basis. I think it's actually something most children would enjoy if taught properly.

That's the problem, most of the time teaching is wrong person wrong time. You get lucky sometimes but for everyone that "learnt about the IRA at 25" there's 99 more who'd swear they "weren't taught it".

@SoftIce Year 9 in pre 1944 education act was "Standard 7". The last year old school for the vast majority of children.
They left at age 14 and most went into jobs and got on with life.
Can you imagine the boredom of school if you didn't do much beyond the 3 Rs until Year 9 😂😂😂😂

Media literacy, definitely.