AIBU to say they should NOT teach it in schools

[Calvinlookingforhobbs]

‘It’ being any problem that appears in our society... budgeting for adults, healthy eating, parenting skills, contraception, gardening, etc surely education and parenting are different?

The hog I think it’s more a case of making the curriculum in these subjects more suitable for the modern word.

Food tech for me would actually be a prime one to be changed and could (and should) include things like budgeting, meal planning, feeding a family on a budget - key skills for anyone going into adult life but lacking by so many.

From PPs:

"And this stuff doesn't 'crowd the curriculum', it's generally all covered in a subject called PSHE, for one lesson a week, or even in form time which happens every day anyway."

"Those bits that aren't already covered elsewhere in the curriculum, you tweak a PSHE session, job done. A lot of the time it is already covered somewhere in essence so it's more of a tweak to how it's delivered. For example cookery (ahem, sorry, food tech) and biology contained a lot of material relevant to healthy eating, PSHE and maths and business studies a lot relevant to budgeting etc."

"Don't most schools have a half hour per week on 'social' type things where they cover contraception and drugs and stuff? Surely teaching basics about managing a few life skills can be thrown in there."

Exactly. It's not like any of the skills mentioned above would take much time to teach, given that the children have several years of that weekly lesson in which they can be fitted in.

If you're keen on "very big government" - whether from a left- or right-wing perspective - and on keeping a much closer eye on parents over more than abuse, and sending them to classes themselves so that they can teach their children these things, then checking to see if they have, and penalising them if they haven't...

You can advocate for that. I'm not sure I'd agree with it.

But until there's some way of making absolutely sure parents cover these things, we have to have something in place to pick up the slack. The only alternative is to seriously let children down.

YANBU

If parents passed on this learning then teachers would have more time to teach. Teachers shouldn't filling the gaps left by poor parenting. There is NO TIME.

k2p And how are you going to enforce parents to do these things?

Parenting classes. That way, one parent can teach all their children those lifeskills. Then we might reach the £60 a month on gel nails and manicures, but feeds the child crap and lets them come to school in clothes a size too small parent. Or the designer trainers and iphone10 on credit with no time to read with their child because they have to go to the gym parent.
Some seem to spend less time on their children than their dogs. Parents need educating on how to raise the children they have.

Shatter, link it to the money they have.

I do think that functional maths, followed by further maths, would be beneficial. If you want to study maths at a further level, you take further maths and learn trigonometry, quadratic equations, algebra etc. If not, functional maths teaches the mathematics you need in day-to-day life - quick addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, fractions etc as well as things like budgeting and taxes.

The same for English - English literature is for those who want to do critical analysis, literary techniques etc, to be sat as an optional extra in addition to English language, which could include writing CVs and cover letters.

First aid should absolutely be taught in schools. There's no excuse on that one; it's criminal that it isn't. Every 5-year-old should know when to call 999 and they should know their full address (this should be the parent's role, but it's important that the school checks to make sure). Every 11-year-old should know how to dress minor wounds, how to treat burns and scalds and how to do CPR. Every 15-year-old should be taught how to perform effective CPR, how to find and use a defibrillator and what to do if someone is choking.

If nothing else on the curriculum changes it's vital that we start teaching good quality first aid in schools as standard.

Every child’s address used to be next to their name in the register. Safeguarding rules removed it, and we were warned in local geography that we were not to get the child to draw a map of their route to school. Maybe thst’s changed, but teaching 999 calls might be tricky.

Realistically though - there are plenty of parents with very poor life skills. Plenty of neglectful parents. Plentybof abusive parents. Plenty of parents trying their absolute hardest but who don’t have these skills themselves to pass on.

By not teaching certain things in school we blame the kids for this and it’s not their fault. Social mobility and life chances are surely enhanced by kids having these basics - cooking, budgeting, just how the world works. To me it’s an essential to turn out balanced young adults at the end of the process. The kind of parents who dgaf are not going to turn up to parenting classes and suddenly see the light. You’re going to attract the parents who do it anyway and maybe the ones trying hard but who don’t have the skills (who are likely to be working and unable to attend .)

We can’t punish kids who have parents who fail them. They’re at a disadvantage as it is.

Budgeting - something is going VERY wrong if a child gets to school leaving age and doesn't realise that you can't spend more than you earn.

But there's more to it than that. Some kids will come from families where they've never had to even consider budgeting; it hits them like a brick wall to a face when they get to uni (I remember my flatmates coming to me for budgeting help because they'd spent their student finance in a matter of weeks by only buying branded products at Sainsburys and never pre-drinking).

Some kids come from families where the budget is skewed by how much debt they're in, or they don't have to consider NI etc because the parents aren't working or can't work. They may not understand that the salary you see on the job application isn't what you'll be taking home. I came from a household where both parents were unable to work because of disability; I was excellent at budgeting but when I started work, I had no idea what was going on with putting money into a pension because it wasn't something my parents had the option of doing. Talking about pensions, savings, interest, debt etc could all be included in budgeting lessons alongside simply "don't spend what you don't have".

Every child will come from a different background where their parents will only really give them an idea of budgeting from their own experience. Having a standardised lesson - even if it was just one or two lessons per year group - would massively benefit those kids.

November What money? There are plenty of parents unlike the ones you mention who don't have spare change! My parents were incredibly incredibly poor, people often don't believe it when I tell them how poor we were in the 1980s.

How will you enforce their attendance at these classes and who is paying for them?

That's a good point, November. Just a general point about "they will ask you for your address first of all so make sure you know it", and a letter going home to parents saying the same thing, would probably be the only way around that.

I disagree shatner allowing all dc the same opportunity to pursue maths beyond gcse, regardless of background, is just as important as the chance to discover music, or art. Regardless of my personal interest, or yours.

sirzy but until such time as various careers don't need qualifications or that knowledge, preventing access to them is needlessly curtailing aspirations.

I do however agree on home ec/ food tech. I'd prefer it to be the basic science behind nutrition, basic cooking skills, meal planning on a budget etc.

What I don't like is the implication of a back door 11+. We already have that with religion and selection by postcode. I just know it would be yet another way of offering inferior education in deprived areas. Or even in genuinely good, mixed schools, the idea of limiting dc because they have been deemed to need life skills.

Or you dumb the nc down for everyone, unfair for individuals and bad for the population as a whole.

We need to be teaching it to adults at community level.

november what money? An attachment of earnings on your wage slip? Or are you leaping to the conclusion that everyone lacking life skills is on benefits?

But if we physically can't cover everything at school, thehog how do you expect everything to be covered? Would these community adulting lessons of yours be compulsory? At what age? Who would pay for them? I'd say contraception and a good understanding of finance needs to come in WAY before adulthood.

The hours a lot of parents I know have to work these days, it's no wonder they don't have time to instil things into their own kids. They SHOULD of course, although there will always be plenty of parents who don't, but it's a far bigger picture we're talking about.

No idea how to run it or fund it, but the trickle down model of wealth distribution isn’t working. Forget mortgage advice in the SE being useful btw. No hope for the next few generations. Maybe they should put it all into post-16 education. Lots of room in their timetables.

Hogfather, some of those that lack most lifeskills are well off and always outsourced them. Cleaning, cooking, child raising...

I teach English and constantly have to answer why we still study Shakespeare etc.

There are many aspects of what we learn at school that don't appear obvious why we need them, but they do teach some really important things. e.g. Great literature addresses issues to do with real life and presents characters and plots to engage our brains and emotions. Those experiences help to build neural pathways that are useful throughout life. If we never developed empathy, or explored emotional maturity, it would be a great loss.

There's lots more to say but I really believe that presenting a variety of academic learning, even if it's not immediately useful, is one of the greatest parts of education. It's actually pretty subversive to teach poetry to the poorest kids. They get to think in new, critical ways that could lead them to question the life they live. They may even one day be moved to write poetry or songs that help them to make sense of the world around them. It gets rid of the elitism of 'the arts' and gives everyone access to ideals that used to be reserved for the upper classes.

I also really believe that education should include some practical application. There's no such thing as enough time or money to educate someone - it's an endless task. But we should ensure that education doesn't drop some of the more esoteric aspects in favour of day-to-day usefulness.

Budgeting - something is going VERY wrong if a child gets to school leaving age and doesn't realise that you can't spend more than you earn.
Except that budgeting is much more than just looking at what you spend vs what you earn.
As shown by numerous threads in here or on other sites such as moneysavingexpert.

shatner a lot of the people I work with lack life skills. Sometimes basic general life skills. Sometimes things most of us don't know, but for that individual are required. Sometimes it could be something like literacy or basic numeracy they need to access.

The problem isn't just that you can't always just magic up the course they need, free at the point of use. But that loads of people aren't considered in need enough to meet criteria for any support.

Eg mother and baby units. In theory a young mum that might not have been raised to have those basic life skills, should in theory be able to be offered a place. In reality, the places are so limited that unless you are already on ss radar, you couldn't just get a place to start you off on the right track. You need to meet criteria.

As to who is paying, simple. At the moment a lot of intervention is nothing but firefighting. Spending the money on adequate early intervention would be cheaper in the long run, and better for everyone involved.

Signing up wouldn't be difficult. The stigma would be removed if a lot of these courses were optional and open to all. And in some cases relevant. Give me the funding to run cooking easy family meals on a tight budget at my local community centre, and I could fill it in an hour, as could anyone.

Besides, not sure why it would be a greater cost to do it at community level than in school.

november exactly, so how do you link attendance to their money?

Also literature is part of our culture and our social history. It is amazing to me that you can read something written in the 1500s and identify with the characters. The world is so different now, in terms of how we live but we can see through literature that people then are like us - still loving (or not ) their spouses, still ambitious, greedy, passionate, jealous, kind. It gives us a link between the past and the present and insight into the lives of people in specific eras.
If you don't introduce children to this when they are young, they will be unlikely to love it and appreciate it when they are older - adult life gets in the way and the language is too difficult to decipher alone. You have to be taught how to read it. If you deny this to children, you are cutting off their opportunities later.

I think there is a problem with shoehorning ever more in.
Also schools here are so keen on teaching life skills etc that they are sending evermore subject homework.
My conversations run a little like this with my son when coming home from school.
Can I play out mum?
Oh no, you went to the woods today at school. So we must now do your maths that's been sent home...

Budgeting - something is going VERY wrong if a child gets to school leaving age and doesn't realise that you can't spend more than you earn

My kids have pocket money - not a lot - but they are learning to prioritize and eek out their money for the month - same as I have too

Lots of kids either get nothing OR everything paid for them

They do need to learn

Speaking as a mathematician- I’d happily ditch trig in favour of some more nuts and bolts practical human biology including first aid. Engineers DH can learn it later, because it’s only rules

Basic algebra OTOH is absolutely vital for all science and practical maths. There’s no way on earth you could start to learn it at age 16 because you need it drummed into you by hours of practice until you internalise the techniques.

@Calvinlookingforhobbs
You don’t want contraception to be taught in schools?
Are you fucking thick?