To think that a pupil premium should be paid for children who live in home where none of the parents have qualifications

[ReallyTired]

I think that the education of the parents has a more significant outcome on a child's attainment than income. (Especially as many working poor don't have much more money than those on benefits.)

I feel that children who live in households where no adult has five GCSEs or equivalent should get extra support at school. Often these families aren't entitled to benefits because the parents do work so currently don't get the pupil premium.

It is harder for uneducated parents to support their children with homework than someone with a degree. Better eduated mothers are better at getting their children's needs met as they are often more articulate. For example making sure that statemented child gets what they are legally entitled to. (Getting a child assesed by an ed pych so that the child's dyslexia is spotted.)

Unskilled people often do physically hard work for very long hours for very little money. I believe that a child with unskilled working parents is at a major disadvantage as their parents are time poor as well as cash poor.

Amber - why is it so wrong to explain to a child who Will be going to secondary school next year that in order to do what he wants to do in life he needs to be able to read and write to a decent level. I am not talking about children with sen these are children who don't see the value in being able to read and write. Better to be told now than when he's 18. As it happens by talking to this child i have found out more about him and his interests and i am taking some books in this week that he would find more appealing. I am hoping to inspire him a bit.

Thank you Usual Suspect.

I'm afraid I have to disagree again Capsium. I've also done a fair bit of supply work in primary schools, and I'm not sure that the balance is tipped in favour of the 'fun stuff'. The work I've seen certainly includes daily handwriting practice, tables and group reading although more would obviously be better, hence the benefits of doing it at home.

I do appreciate what you're saying Capsium and you obviously have had your struggles but I've only been doing this job for about 3 years and previously, as a parent with a child with SEN I might have been more in agreement with you. Now I see it from the 'inside' I have much more sympathy with the teaching staff, the vast majority of whom would love to have more time to spend on the basics, but life is more complicated now and many more subjects have to be introduced at school to give our kids a chance. If we want our kids to have computing, PE, art, drama etc, then we must accept that some of the consolidation of the basics must happen at home.

prefer that is why I think the curriculum is too prescriptive. We had all the art, drama etc years ago. I actually think if there was less focus on standards these standards might just be raised.

Counterintuitive I know, but this would actually mean teachers would be free to actually teach and not attempt to enforce attainment targets. Children in turn might be more inspired to learn.

Just asked 10yo DS1 what he wants to be when he grows up. He wants to work in a bank or run his own shop - so he can count money all day. His first answer was "I don't know" though.

cassgate if he is unable to read, or read to the minimum expected level, then there is an issue of SEN.

What exactly do you think explaining why literacy is important will do for a child who is barely literate?

You are assuming that his literacy problems are down to not seeing the value in being literate. That is just nonsense.

My previous post was going on yours that said you asked him;

how he would apply if he couldnt read to fill out the forms

That doesn't sound particularly inspiring to me.

If we want our kids to have computing, PE, art, drama etc, then we must accept that some of the consolidation of the basics must happen at home.

It's entirely backwards. Most primary teachers are no more qualified to teach, say, basic IT skills than a substantial portion of the parent body, and art and drama are less taught than just allowed to happen.

Where primary teachers are far more qualified than most parents, even those parents with substantial educational attainment, is teaching literacy and numeracy. Those skills are more important than art, especially for pupils who can't read, and a significant proportion of pupils will have parents who can't help (not just for reasons of their own literacy, but assorted EFL issues).

Leaving to parents things which teachers can teach better than the vast majority of parents, in order to spend more time on things which teachers can teach no better than a substantial proportion of parents seems unwise. Especially when that second set is unlikely to be the difference between long-term educational success and failure.

But what of those parents who don't teach their kids the 'soft' subjects? who don't encourage them to draw, or sing or play games? How will their children ever learn to have clean fun? The parents who don't have the life experience themselves to pass on? I fear those children would be even more the casualties of the system if schools didn't provide those opportunities. I had a 12yr old boy argue with me recently because, as far as he knew, sledges weren't supposed to go on snow, they were only for pulling people around the street on.

Parents aren't expected to do much more than listen to reading and provide support with homework. Teachers don't expect parents to actually teach. Support with homework means encouraging children to actually do it, and providing them with the quiet time and space in which to do it. Then looking at it and ensuring it gets sent back the next day.

That stuff is just parenting, and I don't see why parents shouldn't be expected to do it. But the fact remains that some won't, and whether they will or they won't is not indicated by their income level, which is why FSMs is too blunt a tool to use in deciding who needs extra support at school either because support is lacking at home, or because a child simply struggles with school work.

This is complete crap. My parents both left school at 15 with no qualifications. I have an honours degree and my brother has a phd.

My father was a smart man and got some vocational qualifications but as a miners son in the 60's university seemed out of reach to him. Although I know he regretted not going into further education.

Vocational qualifications are scoffed at.Especially by some MC parents.Which is a shame really.

Getting a degree is not the only way to get on in life.

Better eduated mothers are better at getting their children's needs met as they are often more articulate

As a parent of an SN child....fuck off.

Why are you offended by that statement Farrow?

Fraidy you are being disingenuous. (I hope, either that or a bit dim). There are many factors that prevent children from gaining formal qualifications at school.

I'll make it as simple as I can, for simplicity dealing only with the "thick" half of the argument. Divide all the pupils born in a particular year into two groups based on educational attainment at 21, say. Some people are implying it is outrageous to suggest that the average IQ of the group with higher grades is higher than the average IQ of the other group. I think those people are bonkers.

No-one in this thread has said that lack of educational achievement by an individual means that individual is "thick or lazy", but umpteen people think that has been said, and are outraged. People read someone saying that intelligence and hard work improves grades, and think that is equivalent to saying people with poor grades are stupid and lazy. It isn't, and to think it is is a very basic failure of reasoning ability.

Probably because there's a large group of less educated parents out there who have to fight tooth and nail to get their childrens needs recognised let alone met, and do.
The problem isn't our lack of education, it's the way others misuse their education and a corrupt system that's self serves a particular set of people.

Actually, if a school targets it cleverly, it benefits lots of pupils who are underachieving.

So the money which is supposed to be spent on children which receive FSM is being 'cleverly' channelled elsewhere? Slippery slope....makes the whole process of measuring the 'success' of interventions a bit contrived, if full amount of funding was not spent where it was supposed to be targeted.

WooWooOwl so that is why parents are required encouraged to attend information evenings on phonics, maths methodology, encouraging your child to write etc? No teaching involved....

Getting a degree is not the only way to get on in life

Very true.

Qualifications have become fetishized in this country.
People are totally and utterly obsessed and have reduced the entire learning experience into the acquisition of academic grades.

Skills are what we lack in this country.
We have legions of unskilled and unemployable graduates.

I have told this story on here before but it is worth repeating. We had a young woman, a recent graduate, do some voluntary work for us.
When she had to work out how much ten items at ten pence each cost she wrote 10p out ten times and added it up.

We had a young woman, a recent graduate, do some voluntary work for us. When she had to work out how much ten items at ten pence each cost she wrote 10p out ten times and added it up.

I bet if you had a pound for every time you had told that story...;-)

Now read the entire thread. There's a few minutes of my life I will never get back.

cold it does mean it is not spent where it should be actually. There could be more individually tailored support if schools were not using this money for larger groups of children.

Measuring the success of interventions for the target group would be more accurate. With the school of thought you advocate, children who are in receipt of FSM who do not benefit from interventions, whose success does not rely on interventions, are being lumped in with children who have received interventions. This is misleading in terms of what additional needs, if any, the target group possess.

I used to think or wish that schools could become less standardized. But just how is a school first a. supposed to work out what a person is going to become in their life, when the pupil at age 14 or whatever doesnt know either, and may swap and change multiple times in their lives and b. supposed to cater for the hairdresser, the carpenter, the astonaut and the fisherman.

This is complete crap. My parents both left school at 15 with no qualifications. I have an honours degree and my brother has a phd. My father was a smart man and got some vocational qualifications but as a miners son in the 60's university seemed out of reach to him.

In the 1960s university takeup was around 6% (depending on if we're talking pre- or post-Robbins: it was higher by the end of the decade). Today it's around 35%. There are today far, far, fewer people who could or should have gone to university but didn't. As a result of that, a whole slew of educational opportunities have disappeared (WEA, for example).

It's not a straightforward comparison, because a lot of non-university qualifications then are university qualifications now. For example, there are now no Cert Eds, but the distinction between your mother having done a two year residential teacher training course or a three year residential first degree may not be useful when considering parental education, and the same goes a fortiori for nursing qualifications. But in general terms university educations are far, far more common and far, far more accessible than they were a generation or two ago.

This isn't a debate about whether this is right, wrong, wise or unwise. As a simple statement of fact, at least five times more parents of children today will have degrees than was the case when I was at school (I started school in the late 1960s).

The disparity won't be as great if you ask the question "what proportion of children have at least one graduate parent?" because graduates tend to intermarry, .

But the massive increase in university take up begins with the cohorts born in the early 1960s (who now might have children at university themselves) and really starts to ramp up with cohort born in the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s (who probably form a large proportion of current school parents). The disparity in educational attainment between the people stood outside the school gate in the leafy suburbs of London and outside the school gate in a rustbelt town in the North East is massively, massively greater than it was a generation ago.

Plus your argument, cold is very similar to those which advocating using an individual Statemented children's funds for other children with SEN. Can of worms.

Integrity is what is needed, cold.

So in reality schools do not spend funds targeted at particular groups on those children anyway....they just want more funds.

So why bother with the stereotypes, the labels, the prejudice? Spending this money in the name of these children just perpetuates the stereotype, reduces these children's status to cash cows.