To think that British school children doing badly in the PISA tests is not the fault of UK teachers

[ReallyTired]

When England/ Wales/ Scotland/ Northen Ireland do badly in the PISA comparisions I think we are too quick to blame our teachers. I feel that if teachers decided had more say in educational policy then our results would rise. however teachers can only do so much. Our kids are lazy compared with much of the world. Parents have a responsiblity for their children's education.

Countries like Singapore, South Korea do well in the PISA tests because the children work so damnn hard and are tutored outside school. I think that private tutors are responsible for the children doing well rather than state education in Singapore or Korea.

I agree that childhood is important. I am not even sure that doing well in PISA tests is an indicator future economic sucess. I feel that children need a range of experiences and should not be taught to the test

However there is a happy medium between doing sweet FA work and the South korean approach. My son gets hardly any homework in year 7. Children work far harder in British private schools and do well.

Completely agree.

I don't want to compete over children's education with countries who think it's appropriate to send their children to school all day every day.

In the list of reasons for a lack of educational achievement, teachers come way after parents and the government.

Things going well = fantastic teachers.

Things going really badly = parents and government to blame.

I don't think it's the fault of individual teachers but the UK system is not great. My dd goes to what is considered to be a good school. But sometimes I am not sure what she spends all those hours at school doing. She learns more in 30 minutes at home.

I have to disagree I'm afraid as a teacher myself (and this is just my opinion). It isn't the teachers - they are doing their jobs according to how they are trained, following the curriculum, have autonomy to teach the topic how they want and there are many brilliant teachers out there (and many awful ones but who do try). They are not actively doing anything wrong, just following the systems and trying their best. Many are highly skilled, just in the midst of what is a very lost education and highly pressured system at the moment.
The blame IMO, however, goes to our education system. We have let things slip and have had some weird educational ideals going on.
The Gov paint an imagine of Singapore and similar countries rote learning and being far more rigorous. Yes, 10 years ago they were doing that! They have now moved on though and are using far more creative, investigative, problem solving type methods. They aim for depth rather than breath and encourage understanding- not just rote learning. (This was all shown on Dec 3rds episode of newsnight). The gov seems to ignore all this and is copying Singapore etc from 10 years ago!

It is ignorant to say we don't want to compete, we need to compete to a degree if we want Britain to remain a strong, wealthy country and we need to compete to sort out our HUGE problem of educational disadvantage. We have an enormous gap between the rich and poor in this country and hence very low social mobility. Unless we want this to escalate further, we need to do something about our education system. Singapore have very high social mobility, what background you are from is relatively irrelevant in terms of what you achieve and what job you go on to get- a stark contrast from the UK sadly.

I disagree with a lot of what Gove is doing but I do believe he has some of the right intentions and underlying thinking. BUT he is going about addressing it in many of the wrong ways.
While there are some great free schools out there, they seem a very long-way round the issue, costly and risky.
The new curriculum claims to be taken from the best countries round the world, but in reality as I said, is from their systems 10 years ago.
The move from child-centred to formal learning too early is contradicting all the evidence from Norway/Sweden which say we should have better quality child care, with a mix of play and structured games/activities which develop language and key skills AND THEN start formal learning, when children have the skills and are ready, at 6 or 7.
We are missing big opportunities for groups of similar schools to collaborate, perhaps organised by researchers or schemes like ReadWriteInc etc. They should be sharing best practice and developing an outstanding and tailor made curriculum and lessons which all the similar schools follow (and make small adaptions as needed). Yes teachers need autonomy, but it would make their lives and the outcomes far better if resources and ideas were pulled together to create schemes of work.
And much more but I won't bore you all!!

tiggy has it exactly. It's also worrying to note that a teacher can deliver an outstanding lesson, but it will be rated as 'requires improvement' if a single child cannot read from a textbook (regardless of special needs) or does not respond immediately to correction from a teacher, or states anything negative even if it is contradictory to what the teacher is doing....
The next two years will be a very telling time for education. It will be interesting to see what the retention of teachers in the light of the new ofsted guidelines for observation is....

thingsthatmakeyougo I don't know whether you think that is societies belief or teachers beliefs however teachers (including myself) are incredibly GRATEFUL for good parents. I would say a child's success is firstly due to parenting, then it is a blur between media, friendships/relationships and teachers.

Singapore have very high social mobility, what background you are from is relatively irrelevant in terms of what you achieve and what job you go on to get- a stark contrast from the UK sadly.

Was it Wilde or G&S who wrote of the fool that praises any time but the present and any country but their own? It's a very British thing to wildly overpraise other countries, even as the countries themselves are taking a very different view.

news.asiaone.com/news/singapore/taking-steps-raise-social-mobility-spore

"SINGAPORE - Singapore's income gap has widened and attracted much media attention.

But more worrying is that social mobility has slowed, making many ordinary Singaporeans feel it is harder for them to improve their lives and aspire to at least middle-class levels.

Singapore society is at risk of becoming more divided, leading to problems or perceptions of inequity, injustice, alienation, pessimism, envy and conflict.

Tackling social mobility is critical for Singapore to maintain social cohesion.

But social mobility - or the ability of a particular income group to improve their lives in society - goes beyond education and occupation and it is not a purely economic issue. Instead, it is layered with other potentially divisive social issues.

For example, Singapore's social divisions are made worse when those with lower incomes are Singaporeans while many among the wealthy are foreigners. This divide will be reinforced if more foreigners come to Singapore, taking up high-value and leadership jobs such as professionals, managers and executives.

This means efforts to raise social mobility have to be go beyond education and occupation, to include job prospects."

I am a teacher. this time next year, I won't be. I can imagine I might regret that, thinking of the money. but as for the rest

I saw a teacher commenting in a TV interview about this; and was somewhat taken aback when she expressed the opinion that as the nature of the test wasn't known to teachers beforehand, they couldn't teach pupils to pass it.

I hope she wasn't representative of teachers, as 'teaching to the test' is a narrow and stultifying approach. And indicates an 'exam factory' approach that school is about qualifications, not education.

Singapore is hideously racist.

Lots of young kids are horribly stressed.

I know quite a few Singaporeans who do not rate their education system at all.

Granted, I only visited Singapore twice, have family who work there as teachers ( incidentally they recruit a fair few Brits)

But I bet lots of people who praise it know even less than I do...

Too much time is spent in schools doing things for the children that parent were expected to do in years gone by but now don't have time for. The school day hasn't got any longer to accommodate for the extras the schools need to cover.

Schools are no longer educating our children, they are expected to raise them. Of course standards will suffer!

Teachers are a key part of the education system so of course they are partly to blame for our poor standards.

I would also like to know what the "burn out" rate is among the school children in South Korea. I saw a snippet on TV the other day where a pupil was interviewed and she described getting home from school at 11pm and going to bed at about 2 am after the family meal, and getting up at 6.30. Surely this can't be healthy.

i thought op was going to blame the national curriculum not parents!

i think the nc does make learning a bit dull.

As someone who was educated in an international school in Singapore (albeit 20 years ago) I remember as a teen something that baffled me. On weekends myself and my school mates would be on Orchard Road shopping, going to the cinema etc... After school we'd frequent Holland Village again shopping and socialising.

Our 'local schools' counterparts would have taken over every mcdonalds you could find with their large cokes and homework. They were always studying, revising and doing homework together. Baffled me so much at the time. But actually although I've done very well for myself academically it's more down to luck than hard work.

I think it's the country's attitude to education, their education policy, their curriculum and the expectations of teachers and parents that have played a massive role. Teachers are teachers everywhere, good ones and bad ones whatever the country. But teachers in this country aren't blameless for our poor results, they are the ones teaching and must accept some reaponsibility for some of this too.

I think it is a challenge when a large chunk of teachers appear to be barely literate or numerate themselves. Unless they are teaching English or Maths this doesn't seem to be considered an issue. IME.

Of course teachers are to blame, what is the point of them if it isn't to teach children!

I would also like to know what the "burn out" rate is among the school children in South Korea.

I don't know about Korea, but I worked for many years for a Japanese company and spent quite a lot of time in Japan, where the education culture is said to be similar.

I worked side-by-side with Japanese assignees: young graduates with young families, mostly. Once their children were in British schools (and not exotic places in north London, such as the enclave around Finchley, but ordinary state schools with Ofsted "satisfactory" in the provinces) they had to be pried out with crowbars, and several people got work permits and stayed as employees of the UK arm rather than go back. They absolutely loved UK education for their children, praising its breadth, innovation, creativity and the like. They usually went back to Japan for university, where there is a slightly admissions different route for those that didn't do their secondary education in Japan, where they by all accounts excelled.

Now this is, of course, a highly selective example: these were the cream of the engineering staff of a massive Japanese manufacturing company, and by the very fact that they were willing to do a five year assignment in the UK they proved they were neophiles. Those who have had the pleasure (or whatever) of reading some of Masha Bell's wildly ramblings over on Primary might have seen her theory that immigrants are better in education because their desire to move countries pre-disposes them to be successful in education, and although she's madder than a box of frogs there might well be something in that. But the fact remains that people went through a perfectly ordinary UK education, and dropped back seamlessly into what is allegedly a far superior system. It's food for thought.

Of course teachers are to blame, what is the point of them if it isn't to teach children!

If the problem is structure and syllabus, there's not a lot teachers can do. Suppose, arguendo, the national curriculum were set up such that children were not taught the letter R, and teaching of the letter R were a sacking offence. Would it be the teachers' fault if children struggled to read little red riding hood? Some of the decisions in the primary curriculum over the years have been pretty much as ludicrous as that, and it seems harsh (to put it mildly) to blame teachers for the failures of the curriculum.

"I think it is a challenge when a large chunk of teachers appear to be barely literate or numerate themselves."

Wow! That's a bit of a sweeping statement. Prepare to be flamed. None of DD's teachers are barely literate or numerate. You have to have a degree to teach these days you know.

Thank you Friday that was interesting.

These tables aren't just about education systems.

I read a good article that pointed out that homogeneous societies performed better. Countries with a big division between rich and poor - e.g. USA, compared with Scandinavia - performed worse.

Until relatively recently, Scandinavia was also very mono-cultural. Whereas the USA and GB are the definition of multicultural. Diversity is a huge asset in many ways, but not necessarily for scoring high in PISA.

Finland also traditionally did well in literacy, and Finnish is a much easier language to read and spell than English.

So how good or otherwise GB teachers are is only a v small part of the overall picture.

Mixed views here. I have a lot of (x) teaching school friends. Most of them who trained are no longer working in education. Why? Paperwork and the contant changing of curriculum. They went into teaching to teach and ended up as admin.

One uni friend now teaches in a uni in a maths based subject. One of his courses is an introduction to ... Things he covered at A-level he now has to teach to first year undergrads. This also was the case for friends when they did their English degrees (20 years ago). Classical and Biblical is just not covered in state schools. Very few state schools do Latin/Greek/classics. A huge disadvantage to the people in state system.