to think that OFSTED has done nothing to actually improve our education system?

[OrlandoWoolf]

PISA results out again. We just don't seem to be improving as much as other countries. Of course, for us to make improvements, other countries need to underperform.

But still. We have an issue with basic maths and literacy in this country.

I think OFSTED is the elephant in the room here. So much pressure on schools to show progress that they forget "how to teach" and don't let children have time to actually consolidate learning because there's no "progress" in 20 minutes.

Have OFSTED failed in their remit to improve standards?

I think so. So much emphasis on group work, varied activities, constant mini-plenaries that at times lessons can look good but actually there isn't always deep learning going on. Many teachers would feel guilty about letting kids write in silence for 20 mins these days, when actually extended writing time is really important.

Yes, and having just seen our useless local headteacher promoted to an OFSTED inspector, my hopes aren't high for anything improving.

YANBU.

I think the stagnation is easy to explain. Teaching is better now than it's ever been. However children are harder to teach than they have ever been. Because of the way British society has developed in the last twenty years, for many people the desire the learn and succeed has gone. And there are too many distractions to learning, which weren't there twenty years ago.

Add this to OFSTED being clueless box ticking fault finders, and you have the current situation.

I would put far more blame on the exam system/ league tables actually. Not that I'm a fan of Ofsted either!

When I said teaching is better than it's ever been, I meant insofar as the knowledge teachers have of individual children, catering for different learning styles, resources and so on. When I was at school, the general quality of teaching was lamentable and the facilities were shocking, but most of us did pretty well.

Parliamo, ofsted are similarly obsessed with exam results though - a secondary school will fail inspection if it's fantastic in every way, but "insufficient" students achieve their ridiculous GCSE target grade.

YANBU

SATs, league tables, Ofsted - it is all a buggers muddle.

Flip flopping policy changes with successive governments politicising Education provision doesn't help either.

Personally I think the whole construct of schooling is archaic and built on a failing industrial model (as Ken Robinson says). Tear it down and start again.

And FFS get rid of Gove.

and FFS get rid of Gove

this

When I was at school, the general quality of teaching was lamentable and the facilities were shocking, but most of us did pretty well.

Actually, most people didn't do pretty well. O Levels were only taken by around 20%, rising to about 35% at the end, of the cohort. There was a massive shadow education system of "special schools", far larger than it is now, which took people who would now be mainstreamed and achieving and did essentially nothing with them beyond child minding (ask David Blunkett about his education: then stand back while he starts shouting). And not just "obvious" conditions like blindness: plenty of things that are now dealt with via statements and mainstream education would have been taken out of the mainstream.

It's just that there was plenty of unskilled and semi-skilled manual labouring jobs, factory jobs, secretarial jobs, catering jobs and so on which would absorb a pretty much limitless number of people with no qualifications, and a huge estate of long-stay residential hospitals to pick up the pieces for people with disabilities.

Thirty years ago, a smaller proportion of the cohort was in mainstream schools, and of that cohort, a smaller proportion obtained meaningful qualifications. It's just that society didn't, for all sorts of reasons, see that as a problem.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/01/dont-let-pisa-league-tables-dictate-schooling

This is quite an interesting article - it seems the results are really quite unreliable.

Actually Friday I didn't do O Levels, I did GCSEs and I wasn't talking about everyone in the country. I was talking about the people in our local schools who I knew. I don't know everyone in the country.

That sounded really snippy. Sorry.

It's just that society didn't, for all sorts of reasons, see that as a problem.

That's because as you rightly mention in your first part, there were plenty of manual jobs to go around.

But those manual jobs have gone abroad now and we cannot compete on price and most young people don't aspire to working in a factory anymore. We're now a knowledge based economy and we need those high end industries like car making and microprocessor design etc. Like Apple, we design it, sell it and let the Chinese make it for peanuts.

But in order to do that we need a highly educated workforce and frankly our societal values don't lend themselves to that.

That's why immigrant families are typically getting better results than UK natives. Because they still value education, push their kids much harder and expect more. Unfortunately your typical UK attitude means that I am usually harangued for expecting my kids to get top grades and told I'm wrong. Yet as a loving parent I can't see what's right about letting them meander.

But in order to do that we need a highly educated workforce and frankly our societal values don't lend themselves to that.

^ Exactly that.

In this country, getting an education was seen as the way to better yourself and get a good job. Now it isn't.

In this country, getting an education was seen as the way to better yourself and get a good job. Now it isn't.

But the way that worked in the 1950s was that a very, very small number of people went to university, fewer than the economy needed. They were able to name their own price upon graduation, because there were huge numbers of jobs for them compared to the number of people who actually had the skills. Good for them: they made good money out of it. But bad for the economy, because we had a massive skills shortage.

A lot of the "a degree used to get you more money" arguments boil down to wanting to restrict the number of Wonka Golden Tickets so that they become more valuable. Suppose you went with some of the arch education conservatives and halved the number of people in higher education. The lucky people who got in would do better than they currently do: same demand for their skills, half the supply. Wages would go up for them. But what about the other half, the people now not going to university? They won't do better, in fact they'll do worse. So overall tax receipts will drop, because you just shrank the economy, with the same number of people demanding services. How is a western economy, with a large welfare state, reducing the number of skilled people in the economy going to play out?

All those white collar and pink collar jobs of the 1950s through to the 1980s don't exist any more. It's not even that they've been off-shored: they just don't exist. Computers killed them. The blue collar jobs are offshore and, again, just don't exist in the same quantities as they did anyway (cars per employee per year out of a factory is, what, four times what it was?) We can't go back to the 1950s, and there's no point in pretending we can.

I don't just mean getting to university though. That's not the be all and end all of education.

We now have a workforce which lacks so many skills, most importantly reading and writing, but also interpersonal skills.

We don't want this to happen to our children

We can hold up Asia's children of being the best educated but children are not happy and under terrible pressure - it's important to have a balance.

In May two teenagers in Jiangsu province committed suicide on the same day after struggling with homework and in 2011 three primary school girls from Jiangxi province were rushed to hospital after attempting to kill themselves by leaping off a building.
The girls, aged around 10, reportedly tried to take their lives “for fear of getting punished by their teachers after they failed to finish their homework on time.

Yes Hee. Simply dreadful. Those poor young souls :(

There must be a balance between stagnating and falling behind, and having the unhappiest children in the world who are merely regarded as a future economic commodity.