To think the primary school curriculum in the UK is too advance

[Kerry987]

I think the primary school curriculum in the UK is too advance for the majority of children. I think it it is OK for kids who are very academic and self learners, bright, but I think at least half of the kids struggle to keep up with it and need lots of support at school and home.

What do other parents and teachers think?

I had a meeting with the special needs person at my daughter's school a couple of years ago and she told me that I would be surprised to find out how many kids need help and support. This got me to think there is something wrong with the curriculum if so many kids need extra support.

Why are we overloading with so much information? We have been home schooling and there are things that my husband and I didn't see until secondary school

It's too advanced/covers too much for the under 8s but not advanced/covers too little enough for the over 8s. I would argue for a Kindergarten stage from 3-7 years. Then a middle school for 8-13. Then a senior phase from 14-18.

I've been a primary teacher in Scotland for 21 years.

Is it really too advanced for reception aged children? My son aged 4.5 is in reception and learning how to count to 20 and what sound "G" makes. He could do that before he started.

@Unsure33

I am helping my grandson with English to help parents who are both working . I must admit I was shocked at the depth of the teaching . One minute he is just learning to write and spell and the next it is pronouns , adverbs and conjunctions? I am sure I did not learn those at that age . Plus my husband was feeling the same about the maths .

I always wanted to volunteer to help at a primary school and it sort of put me off to be honest .

I'm 45. This makes no sense to me. Fronted adverbials?

I went to a primary school that was considered old fashioned in the local area and we didn't have to do this. What is it for?

Is it helping anyone? It might seem shocking now, but I went to school on an academic scholarship and was considered academic even up to my post grad.

Tbh I felt lost because it just felt like increasingly made up shite from post grad level.

Yes. The vast majority of under 8s need to focus on fine and gross motor skills, rhythm and rhyme, perseverance and endurance with tasks, independent self care skills, executive function, emotional regulation and interpersonal relationships.

Learning the phonic code (as an example) could be done in a one term aged 8 if the majority had the skills I have outlined.

Laughing at people talking about KS1 maths, I think a lot of schools follow white rose maths and I thought the same but it’s all about ‘depth not breadth’ and ‘mastery’. I have a very mathematically minded Y1 and was told I had to stay within 10 and go ‘deeper’, I did think there is only so deep you can go from 0-10 but actually it has paid dividends.
Most children meet the SATS expectations because the school would be slaughtered if they didn’t, they are trained to produce the required work, which makes sense.
Sucks the living joy out of writing though. Look up Jane Consadine if you want to see the utter snooze fest of the latest craze in getting children to write to meet the expectations. I haven’t met a single child yet who hasn’t found it mind numbingly dull. Gets the results though.

@Catplanter

Do you know what an adverb is? Put it at the front of a sentence. Voila! Fronted adverbial. Fronted because it's at the front of the sentence.

Didn't know what it was called. Have a first in English 🤷‍♀️

Don't take pride in it, just wasn't taught it.

That's fine. But claiming it's too hard ,pointless or inaccessible to children because an adult hasn't been taught it and has no idea what it is isn't.

It does set a culture of low expectations for children. How far should we take that?

Foreign language?
Geography?
History?
Science?
Chemistry?
Physics?
Vocabulary?

A lot of grownups don't know many,many things. Some pretty basic,some quite niche and everything in between. The standard shouldn't be what other people don't know. In fact, everyone should hope their children will end up knowing more than they ever did.

Scrap Maths altogether? After all everyone has a calculator in their pocket now.

Btw I had to look this up

www.theschoolrun.com/what-are-fronted-adverbials

I don't care if it's "At midnight, Pickles the cat goes out" or "Pickles the cat goes out at midnight" but I do wonder what Pickles is up to 😂

Did anyone read "A Sound of Chariots" by Mollie Hunter? It reminds me of the child Bridie being so upset when a teacher changes her description from "green broken glass" to "broken green glass". It is about what the person wants to say.

Was "fronted adverbial" even a term in the past, or has it been invented by academics?

Accidentally "The standard shouldn't be what other people don't know"

I do know what you mean. But things like fronted adverbials are a bit like
Prince 2. Learning the created language for project management, which will be replaced by a new one in a few years, doesn't make you good at project management.

The skills you need don't change, but the fancy crap surrounding it changes.

I also want to add, I know that homeschooling is awfully difficult and sometimes even impossible. I don't blame any parent that feels overwhelmed or out of their depth or mutters "what the actual fuck is this?!?" While helping their child.

No it's not easy, especially if you're not familiar enough with the concepts to explain them in various ways and help your child understand.

That's ok... it's an absolute shitshow.

What really bothers me is that a lot of posters seem a bit(LOT) "didn't do me any harm". I don't know x so there's no need for my child(or worse I don't want my child ) to know it either.

It's limiting children and reducing them to the lowest common denominator.

It's not a race to the bottom!

I am not a teacher. However I think basic grammar (not frontal adjectives which I can only just work out) means you can learn another language more easily eg learning French only has one present tense where we have three. It's just a building block.

A number of countries only start children on formal learning at 6. This seems to help children especially boys who don't tend to have the same fine motor skills for writing that girls tend to have, so they don't get disaffected by failing early. Mind you it's only been 70 years since girls were marked down at 11 plus so they didn't overwhelm the grammar schools.

What I don't understand is the simplistic nature of maths and history. Re the latter - why endless Tudors and WW1 and 2? Re the former - why isn't it more practical eg compound interest?

In the end of the day as a PP has said much of this is up to parents. But with both working long hours and shifts it's difficult.

@AcornAutumn

Accidentally "The standard shouldn't be what other people don't know"

I do know what you mean. But things like fronted adverbials are a bit like
Prince 2. Learning the created language for project management, which will be replaced by a new one in a few years, doesn't make you good at project management.

The skills you need don't change, but the fancy crap surrounding it changes.

The term might be fancy crap , but alongside the fancy crap children learn the skill. What words to use,how,when and why.

A lot of children think of suddenly as a sentence starter, it's one of the most popular ones. Calling it a fronted adverbial and giving it as an example won't suddenly (see what I did there?) make it insurmountable, complicated and headache inducing. They just go oh, and then give other examples that match. Now they're using fronted adverbials. They can answer a question about sentence starters and fronted adverbials.

Exposure to a variety of terms,doesn't necessarily improve the skills ,you're right. However it can make the skills applicable over a varied range of "demand".

Apologies if I stopped making sense halfway through my post. I'm shattered.

I find it hard to defend the teaching of the fronted adverbial! Especially as the most common ones are not ‘classic’ adverbs and can be time phrases as in the example a pp gave above. I found teaching this to pupils with generally low literacy just took away from time we could be doing something that was useful to them.

@callingon

I find it hard to defend the teaching of the fronted adverbial! Especially as the most common ones are not ‘classic’ adverbs and can be time phrases as in the example a pp gave above. I found teaching this to pupils with generally low literacy just took away from time we could be doing something that was useful to them.

Fair enough I guess. Tbh I only picked up on it because it really isn't the big,bad wolf some people make it to be.

However on this thread we had various Maths methods, terminology like verbs/adjectives/nouns and other fairly basic things being critiqued and discussed how pointless they all are . Complaints that there is too much Maths and English. How one hour of foreign language a week it's not just more than enough, but not necessary at all. On the other hand there's the complaint that afternoon subject aren't thorough or developed enough. Oh, but some posters feel it's actually too much and complicated, and they want basics such as Maths and English and reading covered first.

How far should we go removing things from the curriculum? How do we decide which are worthy? Which side do we keep happy?

After living overseas I think our Maths is behind/too simple, and our ability/expectations in foreign languages very low.
My high, ability GCSE child is learning basic conversational Spanish. He wouldn’t be able to hold a meaningful conversation with a Spanish speaking person. Primary school children learn English to a higher degree overseas.

Can safely say I have never done any maths in adult life that a calculator couldn't do for me.

@Catplanter you’ve never measured anything?

I remember all the parents being called in to school to have a lesson on how to add up using some really strange method that the children didn’t understand.
We were all sat there watching the teachers tying themselves in knots trying to add up 2 numbers and getting the answer wrong.
If the teachers couldn’t understand how to do it then how did they expect 6 year olds to get the answer correct or understand how to do it.
I have 2 close in age and by the next year they had gone back to a more normal method of adding up.
I sometimes think that there are some weird educational experiments practiced on certain years of children. My younger one had a strange way of doing a spelling test. Learn 10 words then get tested on a different 10. Eventually all the words would be learned but my youngest was totally put off learning the words as he was really upset each week that he got 0/10
It knocked his confidence and I don’t think he ever recovered

I think the UK primary curriculum focuses on what can be easily measured to the detriment of what is important. In some cases that makes it too advanced in others not enough.

Catplanteryou’ve never measured anything?

Sure but my four year old can do that!

@donewithitalltodayandxmas

Languages we are possibly behind not other things , but then we speak a language that is spoken by a lot of the world Germany / netherlands learn english as it is so widely used around the world , not too many places that speak german/ dutch.

In Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries pupils don't just learn English, but also French and/or Spanish to a high level. My children have recently transferred to the German system and are behind in their French even though they had two years in the English system (8 years of you count primary!) and the German children only had one year. That's quite an achievement...

Learning a language is not just about being able to read and speak that language. It is about understanding another culture. In order to do so, you have to speak their language well.

I agree with your point that the English system is equally good in other subjects. In the PISA studies Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries (with the exception of Finland) and the UK do roughly equally well. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563833

@QuantumQuality

I think there is a period around 4/6 where the expectations of kids in the U.K. are unreasonable. They’re too young to be forced to try and write, sit down etc. My oldest was at school in another country at that age and they start formal learning at 6 and basically cover in a year what British schools cover in 3, because it’s so much easier to learn to read and write at 6. In upper primary the U.K. curriculum is in no way too challenging.

Agree with this. We start to read and write much earlier than most countries, and don't do enough moving about, music or art beyond reception.

Yes, some children read early - I could read before I started school - but it would be easy to provide reading and writing based learning opportunities to those children in a less formal, play based setting.

*Do you know what an adverb is? Put it at the front of a sentence. Voila! Fronted adverbial. Fronted because it's at the front of the sentence.

This wilful ignorance and taking pride in it isn't cute or charming. It's ridiculous. Fortunately , I expect more than that from the children I work with and they deliver.*

Ok, so five minutes ago I didn’t know what a fronted adverbial was and now I do. I went to Cambridge without knowing so I don’t think it held me back.
The knowledge is going to make no difference whatsoever to my life.

Do you really think the children you teach ‘deliver’ better quality work or go on to achieve more because of knowledge of ridiculous grammatical terms? I don’t. All it does is suck the joy out of language and adds nothing whatsoever. Gove did a lot of damage.

My twins are in ks1. I think it's too dense. Homeschooling we don't have any time to spend elaborating on their interests as we have "the work" to get through. Now they're not particularly bright, probably just under average, but I'm not sure it needs to be such a slog at this age.

I think the discussion on reception depends how academically able your kids are - mine weren't ready for school and rebuffed most formal learning most of last year. It's been an uphill struggle since they started school. I find parents who's children are able and motivated (mainly the motivated) are very dismissive of anyone else's struggle.

I don't think it's too much, I just think schools are horribly underfunded and education is not hugely valued in the UK.

Re: fronted adverbial etc. What on earth is wrong with learning the grammar 0f the language you speak? Genuinely don't understand the resistance to this. One of the many barriers to learning other languages is a lack of understanding of grammatical terms and ability to understand language patterns. If you want people to do well in languages it helps if they understand grammar, and this is easiest to learn when applied to your own language.

Every single teacher I know despairs at the English curriculum, certainly at the key stage 1/2 point. The teaching of literacy in particular seems to have been designed to take any kind of joy out of learning about the written or spoken word. They have turned literacy into maths, with far too much emphasis on made up grammar. It’s destroying any semblance of a love of learning.

I also despair at lack of homework - I think this is a major differentiator between state and private. At least with Homeschool I can help my child with what he’s struggling.

I understand it’s another delightful Dominic Cummings gift to the nation as he was in Education with Michael Gove.