Why schools do this!!?

[FedUpOfYetAnotherCold]

AIBU to wonder why children in primary school are taught 'head, shoulders, knees and toes' in French, can tell the difference between metamorphic, sedimentary and ignious rocks, can trace a stone age picture, can create great models of the tower of London, and learn (and promptly forget) all about the Victorians, Romans etc... but...

Quite a few can't swim 25m by end of primary (a skill which could save their life), many barely know what the term 'mental health' means - let alone know how to manage their own or support others with MH difficulties. Most state primary kids are not given access to decent sports provision to support future athletic dreams, better manage in-school behaviour, and promote healthy lifestyle and reduce obesity, and very few kids are supported to learn key life skills. (I'm focussing on primary here - but we also need more life skills like MH and budgeting and cooking etc... taught in secondary)..

Surely we need more teaching in schools on mental health, life skills and better access to sports and teaching which will lead to physically and mentally healthy adults of the future.

When my children finish primary I'd like them to be able to read, write and do basic maths. But in terms of the rest of the teaching - surely we now need to re-evaluate how much emphasis we place on teaching less vital skills such as French (if a language is deemed important why not Chinese, Spanish or Arabic, or something more useful in this current global village) which could be learnt later if desired?

AIBU?

As I said before, I work with offenders. Many can't read or write, have significant mental health difficulties, don't know how to eat healthily or budget or time manage, many have substance use problems. Many can't manage their emotions and have no understanding how to look after themselves or others.

I would say many of these things are likely a direct result of having an unstable home life or undiagnosed neurodivergence and cannot be undone at school.

School can't teach people not to abuse substances, not to be addicts, not to have emotional problems or mental health problems, not to have executive function issues or problems with decision making which may be behind poor budgeting / time keeping / eating.

Schools don't have... is a fairly threadbare excuse. I attended, from 6 to 11 years, a state primary in a very poor agricultural county where many parents were only just able to read and write themselves in the UK in the early 1960s. What we did have were teachers who didn't have mountains of paperwork and SEN data, although there would have been a mountain of statistics available. So they plugged along, letting the bright ones get ahead as fast as they could, while coaxing others into entry level competence. In the day, that was regarded as good enough. Most pupils at my primary school would have left full time education at 15, to do practical, essential jobs, probably as understudies to their uncles and older cousins. It was not very far from a peasant economy.

DaisyDozyDee

Hellocatshome

Being able to swim 25m in a swimming pool in your swimming cossie and goggles will only save your life in a very limited number of circumstances

I'm a school swimming teacher for those posters who said 25 metres isn't necessarily effective our lessons are so much more than that we teach water safety, reach and rescue, treading water, huddle position, swimming in clothes, floating and sculling, swimming on their back, we talk about currents, about cold water shock, it's those life skills that could help prevent ot reduce the risk of being put in a harmful situation. School Swimming is limited by how many times the schools chooses to come and which year groups. Its always great to get children in private lessons where you can as they are at an advantage even if they can't swim 25metres but can swim 10 metres it's something we aim for them to achieve.

@Bananarama21

DaisyDozyDee

Hellocatshome

Being able to swim 25m in a swimming pool in your swimming cossie and goggles will only save your life in a very limited number of circumstances

I'm a school swimming teacher for those posters who said 25 metres isn't necessarily effective our lessons are so much more than that we teach water safety, reach and rescue, treading water, huddle position, swimming in clothes, floating and sculling, swimming on their back, we talk about currents, about cold water shock, it's those life skills that could help prevent ot reduce the risk of being put in a harmful situation. School Swimming is limited by how many times the schools chooses to come and which year groups. Its always great to get children in private lessons where you can as they are at an advantage even if they can't swim 25metres but can swim 10 metres it's something we aim for them to achieve.

Do you teach all that in the normal 1 hour whole class swim session?

Yes why teach children anything remotely academic when they can spend all day making up for parents’ short comings.

This reminds me of people who complain that kids don’t learn to do their taxes or how to apply for a mortgage or whatever. This is all really basic stuff that anyone who is computer literate and competent in basic mathematics could handle. I’m a freelancer with dual citizenship, investments, and income in two countries and a reasonably clever and motivated ten year old could do my taxes.

What I wish is that people would use the right to create academies to create nurturing, progressive schools instead of the mini fascist police states with silent single-file hallways that seem to be all the rage now.

@XingMing

Schools don't have... is a fairly threadbare excuse. I attended, from 6 to 11 years, a state primary in a very poor agricultural county where many parents were only just able to read and write themselves in the UK in the early 1960s. What we did have were teachers who didn't have mountains of paperwork and SEN data, although there would have been a mountain of statistics available. So they plugged along, letting the bright ones get ahead as fast as they could, while coaxing others into entry level competence. In the day, that was regarded as good enough. Most pupils at my primary school would have left full time education at 15, to do practical, essential jobs, probably as understudies to their uncles and older cousins. It was not very far from a peasant economy.

That was then, and somewhere else. This is now in the UK.

AccidentallyOnPurpose We do 2 week blocks and have 2 days doing water safety.

My kids go to a small village school with a fab sports teacher who has given them loads of opportunity to try different sports, trips to other schools and after school clubs where it has been possible. They also have done loads of virtual sports and competitions in lockdowns.
Swimming has always been a term a year, or it would dominate all the PE time. And obviously loads missed in lockdowns. Particularly with the lockdowns there's no way kids are going to get far with swimming without additional parental input and mine have weekly lessons outside of lockdowns.
In terms of mental health and healthy eating mine cover quite a bit. And yes, they do a spell of verbal Chinese as well!
I think with all the pressures on packing do much in ours do really well and your gripes should be aimed at your specific school.

No, it was in the UK and the 1960s. I understand that times have changed, and for better for most people, and I am pleased to see it. But there are still families near me (I know some) who are still living a life not much changed from then.

@XingMing
I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make. Are you arguing that the school didn't support you? Or that they did because of the lack of paperwork?

The people you work with were unable to learn reading, writing and basic maths at school - it is highly unlikely they would have engaged any better in healthy eating lessons. What is actually needed is support for parents and home life so that the children are more able to learn at school. But that means tackling poverty, and unfortunately the general public don’t want to do that.

School can't teach people not to abuse substances, not to be addicts, not to have emotional problems or mental health problems, not to have executive function issues or problems with decision making which may be behind poor budgeting / time keeping / eating.

Exactly. Even in the specialist school that I taught at, which ONLY had these deprived teenagers with mild learning difficulties and emotional problems to focus on, and a bit of freedom from the NC, we couldn't solve those problems. We could make school manageable for them, we could facilitate their learning, and yes, we worked REALLY hard on them managing their emotional and behavioural issues. But at the end of the day, they went back to their chaotic homes and their gangs.

It broke my heart when I'd see their names in the papers once they'd left, for whatever crime they'd ended up committing. Many of them had such a lot going for them, but you can rarely fight family influence.

So yes, you can't deprive the rest of the school community of the academic learning they need, because a minority need something different (that probably won't even make a difference in the end)

Did anyone else do D.A.R.E. at school?

This also seems quite anti-intellectual and like crabs pulling other crabs down into the boiling pot. Like- what a waste of time for these children to develop a love of reading and of art and architecture! Why are they wasting time on French or algebra, they won’t use that nonsense! They should be learning how to make a budget and cook shepherds pie and stop wasting time!

When, of course, a solid mathematical foundation and reading skills are what you need to budget and cook. You can’t skip the first and teach the second, at least not in the way that many people think we should.

Over the last 30 years, The devaluation of a thorough education in favour of a hodgepodge of vocational skills for some and teaching-to-the-test to shove the rest into university has, I think, led to the kind of people who are easily led into conspiracy theories and have an extremely limited grasp of basic comprehension and logic- just look at Brexit, Trump, and COVID vaccine deniers to see where this has taken us.

@Starpleck

Did anyone else do D.A.R.E. at school?

YES what a shitshow that was. I was “ironically” wearing my D.A.R.E t-shirt the first time I smoked weed 😅 shows you how well it worked.

My Ds learnt Mandarin in Yr 7. It was optional after that, though.

Personally, I'd quite like it if all British children were taught proper English as most of the teachers I've encountered over the last 20 years so far can't speak proper English, so there's little wonder why the children they teach believe that they fink about a mafs problem and do their omework if their movver elps em.

The time wasted after gcses are taken has always bugged me.

Time in education is never wasted. Even if they are learning stuff they will never be tested on, it is still important. For example, in History after our exams which were partly based on the first world war, we did about Britain between the wars, before doing WW2 in higher history. We learned a lot about what was a pretty important time socially and gives an understanding about how some things are today. It was never part of a test but is probably one of the bits of history that I know best.

50% of people who drown can swim.

And a significant number drown in water shallow enough to stand up in. In fact, over confidence and risk taking by stronger swimmers is far more likely to lead to drowning than a non swimmer who accidentally falls in to water. And 80% are boys/men. So, one might argue that teaching boys to swim is a bad idea.

I work with offenders, many of whom can't read and write, have extremely poor mental health and none were taught mental health, life skills or given access to ways to manage these things in school.

If adults are leaving school unable to read and write, presumably that’s what they should be focussing on rather than all those other things you want?

Which is good - but very middle class.

Sure. Working class kids have no need to learn about mortgages and credit cards 😆

@Solo what you’ve described is an accent and I REALLY thought we were past denigrating accents. In spite of your rather wobbly attempt at phonetic reproduction of what I can only assume is some kind of cockney or working-class southern accent, there is actually nothing grammatically incorrect in the sentence you’ve constructed.

Even if you talk like the queen, if I were to perfectly reproduce your accent phonetically I can guarantee that the spelling would not match those in the dictionary for the words you use. No one’s would.

@saraclara - Essex

@CovoidOfAllHumanity - surely mindfulness is a pretty basic thing that could be taught to ds alongside being able to name their emotions. It doesn't take a lot of time (my DD's school do it). I think it would have been great if I'd learned this at Primary school rather that an inpatient unit!

I think there are a lot of life skills that need to be taught by parents (I do understand that not all parents are able to undertake this for a variety of acceptable reasons but the majority can I believe). We can’t keep dumping stuff on schools. Ideally in a paradise world there would be a separate institution that could provide such services to families where the parents are unable to do so themselves but as it stands most schools do what they were created to do with limited resources, when you have children you accept that certain skills are your responsibility to teach.

@Abraxan - I'm not sure what it is about our area but we are on the seaside. My DD's school pool is outside. It has a cover and is heated so can be used for half the year.

learning skills and strategies to manage low mood, anxiety and regulate emotion would be helpful not just for those at risk of offending, but for all kids so we can reduce the numbers of adults struggling with their mental health.

These things are available in schools, listening services, social services, student welfare officers, teachers, play therapists,
OT, speech therapists, eduction psychologists, you name it - it’s there.

Kids having catch-up lessons, kids withdrawn from languages, challenges to do with budgets and start up businesses, banks talking budgets etc - it’s there

Unfortunate most offenders have switched off or left school before these can make an impact because they don’t value education … which is down to parents.

One kid local to me hasn’t been to school in year 10/11 and his mother tried to get him into college because she’ll lose benefits if he doesn’t attend … yet they couldn’t get him into the local PRU - which was only available to him one day a week for a morning

Tell me what else you think schools should do? Because without parents engaging or pupils engaging it won’t work.

Plus, these kids hear X and school and live Y at home, what they are taught doesn’t make sense to them, because it doesn’t represent their life at hime.