To think things weren’t better in education before the NC?

[Summerdresses]

I’m in a Facebook group for teachers and there’s a lot of lamenting about the old days, when teachers ‘could teach what they wanted.’

I absolutely agree teaching is way too prescriptive now but I remember going to school in the 80s when teachers just taught what they felt like, and while I’m sure some people were taught well by teachers following their passions we just had to work from textbooks. Tasks were completed but with no understanding. My maths has always been shocking and while my writing is good, everything I know about SPAG is what I’ve picked up through reading.

Interested in what others think or what their experiences were.

I don't think there has ever been a time when people could "just teach what they felt like"

Are you imagining this happened in Primary, or Secondary ?

The pendulum has maybe swung too far the other way but broadly I agree with you. I was the victim of a hell of a lot of mediocre/downright poor teaching between the ages of 7 and 13.

So pre 1989?
Not sure that many teacher who taught pre 1989 would have a valid comparison to today. To have any experience they would be 57 plus and to have extensive experience pre NC they would be post retirement age

I’m a school governor, and am in awe of how much better teaching is now compared to when I was a child. Teaching has also got an incredibly heavy workload and there is a huge effort to track progress and bring every child up to a good standard that just didn’t happen when I was at primary (80s). A failing kid could just get passed on to the next teacher with nobody taking any responsibility. Really bright kids just got left to be bored. And it wasn’t like the average kid was doing amazing either. And I went to several decent and one very high performing outstanding primary school, so they weren’t bad schools by any means.

I estimate that from what I’ve seen as curriculum lead, that the average child is learning content up to two years ahead of what was taught to me in school as a child - sometimes more than two years ahead. And there’s a lot more range and variety and the academic standards are higher in general. The curriculum coverage really tries to make sure that pupils don’t have big gaps in their skills and that subjects are taught from a range of different angles and methods (esp in maths which is light years better taught these days than when I was young).

It’s not perfect by any means, but I really hate the knee-jerk way that older people especially, indulge in blinkered nostalgia about things that are objectively actually pretty much drastically improved these days! Educational standards for the pensioners and boomers were actually really low in objective terms, and with a very high level of long tail illiteracy — it’s a huge boomer myth that everyone could spell and do mental arithmetic and has wonderful grammar.

I work in education myself (not primary) but have done some research on past educational standards. When you look back at exam papers from previous eras the questions were very much memory-based and often relied on recounting memorised facts, but there was much less testing of conceptual skills and argument. Contemporary exam questions are often more structured and take the form of problems rather than instructions, but they largely require a much higher level of conceptual skill to answer, with less emphasis on memorised information. Which is unsurprising really given how our world and access to information has changed.

There’s also often syllabus content that simply didn’t exist pre national curriculum, especially in science of course, where school kids even at primary are now encountering content that wouldn’t have been taught until secondary a few decades ago. My year 4 kid is drawing diagrams of the interiors of cell structures, doing plate tectonics and had a lesson recently on the Fibonacci sequence. I didn’t encounter any of those until GCSE!