To think education wasn’t actually any better in the past?

[educationnow]

I keep saying this, but no one seems to believe me so it might well just be my perceptions!

I started school in 1985, so I did start in the glory days (apparently) when there was no national curriculum.

Teaching was TERRIBLE! We learned nothing about SPAG, Maths was ‘work through a textbook’, teachers were sarcastic and cutting, bullying was rife. I’m sure there were many decent ones, but safeguarding wasn’t a thing and some of the things the teachers said and did in primary school were awful.

I started secondary in 1992, and bullying was still a huge issue, as was behaviour. We had SATs in Year 9 and a lot of our GCSEs had a heavy coursework weighting, so there was a lot of cheating.

I then started teaching myself in 2003. Behaviour was dire and I joined the TES forums where teachers kept commenting how much better behaviour had been ten/twenty years ago. My subject had coursework - cheating went on.

Then controlled assessments came in in 2010/11 (I think!) endless stress getting them in and up to standard and marking the things.

Now … very content heavy curriculum. Behaviour still an issue. Endless systems relating to technology - show my homework, Frog, ClassCharts. I wish we just used one.

I don’t think there’s ever been a golden age. I think every age has had problems, some unique to that time but some like poor behaviour has just always been an issue.

Me either. I’ve often commented that my children’s teachers do a much better job than mine did. They are definitely more ‘on it’ and the teaching is better differentiated and thought through. Much improved from the 1980s.

comprehensive in th 70's - near impossible for females not to have typing and office practice as examination subjects.

I always thought they said it was better in the 1960s and 70s before they introduced GCSEs. I started primary and secondary the same years as you and I remember everyone going on about the GCSEs and A-levels being dumbed down from the good old days of O-Levels. It was probably true too, I barely went into in years 10 & 11 and I got 7 A-C grades.

This. I’m a primary governor and continually amazed at how much better the curriculum and the teaching are than when I was at primary school. My 9 y o is doing content I didn’t cover until secondary school and the quality of teaching and both academic and pastoral support for every ability level is much much better — light years away really.

I’m also in awe of how hard primary teachers work these days and the level of prep, paperwork and admin on top o the contact time (and they really didn’t have that kind of workload in my day!)

Educational standards are much much better than they used to be. It’s a total boomer fantasy that education was better in the past. Huge numbers of kids were left with functional illiteracy and very low-skilled. It’s actually a good thing that kids are staying in education longer and more jobs require degrees - almost all jobs have changed beyond all recognition in the last sixty years. When many kids left school at 15 with very low skill levels we had an economy with lots of jobs that were very low-skilled too. These days not so much. And our international competitors are sending many more kids to university and higher level qualifications than we are. It makes no sense to try to return to those days as if there are tons of low-skilled jobs out there - there aren’t.

I think it may have been more variable in the past.

I started school in 1967 and went to secondary in 1973. There wasn't a National Curriculum, but obviously when you got towards the end of secondary there was a curriculum for each subject if you were taking exams. I think individual teachers had a lot more freedom in what and how they taught and head teachers had much more autonomy. This could be good or bad.

On the whole I was lucky and had some very good teachers. The head teacher I had at primary was a very competent lady - firm but fair. We all had a very good grasp of the basics by the time we went to secondary. However, she left when I did to teach at a bigger school and the replacement head was a disaster by all accounts. A "trendy" head who let the children call him by his first name or a nickname, insisted on jeans and T-shirts rather than smarter school clothes and didn't seem to bother with much formal learning. The children a couple of years or so younger than me were going to secondary still writing in pencil and with no idea about times tables.

At secondary I was again lucky that the majority of the staff were good and dedicated teachers, even though most of them didn't have degrees. In those days it was possible to go to teacher training college straight after A-levels. There were one or two bad apples though. I can think of one truly appalling maths teacher and also nobody ever passed Chemistry because the teacher was so bad and scary in to the bargain!

Based on this I think that having a National Curriculum and some sort of inspection system is a very good idea in principle. However, I wonder if these days it is just too controlling. It seems to me these days that teachers must be overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork and box ticking and that they get very little leeway over what to teach and how.

Also when I was at secondary there was still a two-tier exam system. O-levels for the more academic and CSEs which were pitched at an easier level. I went to the local comprehensive which had only just stopped being a secondary modern. It was possible to do well there - I came away with 10 O-levels and di my A-levels at the local VI form college. At the same time there would be a lump of people who came out with absolutely nothing. In the middle I think most people came away with a reasonable handful of CSE/O ready for A-levels or vocational qualifications or even a job!

I was at primary school in the 70s and high school in early 80s. My education was pretty terrible, looking back it was outdated even for then! I was taught in imperial measurements ffs! We had actually gone metric by then!
@MissyB1 I am really surprised. I started school in 1967 and I don't really remember being taught in imperial at all. I have a very, very vague memory of having to measure something in inches when I was still in the infants. But by the time I got to the age of doing anything meaningful, i.e. in the juniors (I suppose Key Stage 2 in today's money) it was always metric. I suppose the teachers thought what's the point of teaching these imperial measurements when they are about to disappear! I assumed that would be the same with everybody which is why it always surprises me when I hear people my age (60) and younger saying they prefer imperial to metric. WTAF

I know from my own first hand experience that children now - even the 'good' ones do not respect adults or authority the way my peers and I did at school.

I mean simple low level things, if a teacher spoke to give an instruction 20/30 years ago they only had to do it once. Now to give an instruction to children you may have to ask them to be quiet 3-4 times. Some children continue to talk to a friend until they are personally addressed to listen to the teacher.

It had been creeping in for years, but post covid I have found children need instant gratification and if they need something they cannot wait, no matter what the teacher is doing or how trivial it is. E.g. in the middle of teaching a lesson being asked to tie a shoelace. I have also found children (I'm talking about those not with SEN) to have become very ego-centric. However, this is something that is becoming prevalent in all walks of life.

With comparison to years ago, many classrooms now reward children for good behaviour that I feel should be expected as a given.

My kids comprehensive education is better than mine was in the late 80’s, and we live in the same town.

Class teaching is better differentiated. There is more support (TA’s) which didn’t exist in my day. Disruptive children are removed from the class, so everyone else can actually learn something (teachers now have support with achieving this), and appropriate procedures are then followed depending on the child and the reason they were disruptive.

High achievers have some provision and opportunities (in my 80’s school being academic and clever I was looked down on as being elite and condescending to others by the teachers). The relationship between teachers and pupils seems better now as well, less “us and them”.

In short, there does seem to be other routes open for non academic children that would otherwise mess around in class as it’s just not their bag. Alternative provision etc.

There is also a huge improvement in educating children with additional needs, which either weren’t recognised, or the child was placed in an “institution” and left to their own devices.

Educational standards are much much better than they used to be. It’s a total boomer fantasy that education was better in the past. Huge numbers of kids were left with functional illiteracy and very low-skilled. It’s actually a good thing that kids are staying in education longer and more jobs require degrees - almost all jobs have changed beyond all recognition in the last sixty years. When many kids left school at 15 with very low skill levels we had an economy with lots of jobs that were very low-skilled too. These days not so much. And our international competitors are sending many more kids to university and higher level qualifications than we are. It makes no sense to try to return to those days as if there are tons of low-skilled jobs out there - there aren’t

But yet they still lack such vital skills. Disagreement is a personal attack. They lack the ability to form an argument of any kind. Organisation is poor. I see it in.my own kids too. So used to everything being available instantly that when it isn't they have no idea what to do.

I see it at work. Many younger people don't even seem.to bother turning up to the interviews. They are entitled, think they are better than everyone else..they think they are above remedial tasks such as cleaning the toilet or hoovering the floor even though even the manager does it. They are never happy with the shifts they are given always something wrong. And they never have the maturity to actually talk to anyone about it they just whinge. Us slightly older ones that are there, many worked up from the bottom, well we'd never have dreamed of the attitudes.

No ones perfect obviously and we all have our faults. But its truly bizarre to see the difference.

Teaching and assessment is better now, but an unfortunate side effect of more rigorous assessment and teaching is more anxiety and poorer mental health in our teenagers. There is so much more pressure nowadays. Also, even though teaching standards and assessment are better now, behaviour is worse which then negatively impacts the learning so it cancels out some of the gains. So overall I feel in some ways it's better but in some ways it's worse!

I definitely had a better education than my DC have here in the UK.
It feels like everything they know, has been taught by me or DH - especially at primary level.

But then, I didn't grow up here and I don't know how the education system has changed in my home country.

It totally depends on the school - we moved around a lot when I was a child and I went to four different primaries (one overseas).

DS’s current outstanding state primary is significantly better than two of the UK schools were, about the same as one, and less rigorous academically but better for extracurriculars, sport, art and music than the overseas private school. I don’t see any difference in behaviour, though of course that might change at secondary.

@arrogantorwhat37
The 80s were hardly the glory days. Schools in the 60s and 70s taught a national curriculum, had standards, and the teachers could string a grammatically correct, correctly punctuated sentence.

There was no national curriculum till about 88 with the start of GCSEs.
There is little or no official record of what went on in schools at that point in time.
SEND was not recognised, pupils where excluded from education let alone school.
Discipline was the cane, and anyone that didn't meet the standard that the school set were pretty much abandoned.

There isn’t a chance in hell that a child who was ‘average’ in the 80s and 90s would now pass a SATs paper. I work in a school and I got respectable ‘level 4s’ in the early 2000s when I did my year 6 sats. I have no doubt that wouldn’t reach the pass mark now. The goal posts have massively changed, there are things that used to be taught in Year 6 that are now taught in Year 4 and 5. Anyone who thinks their education was better in the 80s or they knew more in 80s than kids do now is completely out of touch.

At my school we were hit or caned for bad behaviour. This was in the 70s.

I wonder if having to use a library and look things up in books, use book dictionaries etc may have helped research skills and critical thinking in the past. There is a wonderful amount of free information on the net, but it being instantaneous cuts out a lot of the research process. It's also difficult to know if it's accurate. For instance, many young people seem to use wiki and not realise there may be bias and inaccuracies.

I loathed my typing class. I even had to go to remedial typing classes over the summer holidays once. And that’s on top of the home ec/domestic science classes that taught cooking, sewing, how to manage a household budget. My parents even sent me to get Red Cross certified in baby sitting, infant care and infant CPR. All preparing me for being a secretary until the much vaunted marriage to my boss or other senior male at the workplace and my ultimate purpose as a female- motherhood.

Also we have a fantastic SEND resource base within our school, children with complex needs are based there in the morning and join their year group classes for the afternoons. The resource base teacher has worked there since 1998 - when she took over the resource base it was basically a shed at the other end of the school field… not sure what kind of chance these children would have had in the 80s.

In my first year teaching, it wasn’t uncommon for kids to just get up and walk out of your lesson. They refused to take their coats off. They openly chewed gum. In my first half term I was cornered and verbally abused by a year 11 when I was on break duty. Loads of fights, kids smoked openly.

This was definitely going on in the 80s - I remember my parents decided not to send me to the village secondary school but to the one in town five miles away, because on their tour of the school a group of boys got up, opened the window, climbed out and ran away, and the teacher just shrugged and carried on like that happened a lot. That was a leafy, non-deprived village in Sussex (we knew the kids and their parents).

DH was knocked unconscious mid-lesson by somebody throwing a chair around in the classroom “for fun”, and it was normal for basketballs and shoes to be thrown around. Oh, and racist beatings weren’t uncommon. That was a “nice” school near Wimbledon.

I was at school until early 1980

immediate action for unruly kids in classroom were” lighthearted” threats 🤔such as teacher throwing board-rubbers or pieces of chalk, shouting, slamming rulers down in front of your hands on desk, making you stand at back of classroom. They also would physically restrain kids by holding an arm, push them back etc.

Long and disruptive detentions were metted out with ease. But in those days teachers goodwill meant they’d stay behind for 2 hours if needed. It was your problem if you missed the school buses. This was before Tories pissed teachers off so much that first strikes happened.

formal punishments were the dreaded slips you were given to take to head or deputy ( think red card). You’d get a warning and threat. 2 slips and it was slipper for girls and cane for boys. Across the hand

behaviours in our school were good but we were generally middle class kids where teachers had parenteral support for behaviour issues. I should think it probably still didn’t work that well in other schools

I think the biggest difference was that kids knew they had pretty tight boundaries on behaviour and that teachers could do pretty much anything to exert power to maintain them. Kids were in effect pretty powerless unless they were prepared to run risk of being physically hurt. There was no kids stating “ you can’t touch me “ type stuff to teachers or the threats teachers have now that a pupil could make complaint that could lead to suspension etc . Teachers could touch kids ( but bear in mind this also included supportive touching like hugging infants, arm around distressed child, hand hold etc which is a shame to have lost), whether that was putting out hand to stop a child or full time on physical corporal punishment aka assault.

Those are my thoughts too.

You learnt at quite the young age to think ahead about your week and your homework. You'd have to work out what bus to get there and back. Make sure you had your bus fare. In the cases of any reference library you'd have to stay there and do the work.

We could only have dreamed of sitting on.our bed in.our pyjamas eating a bag of crisps face timing a mate while doing maths watch.

The work gets done and it may be more complex but there's no longer the learning that would take place around the homework.

Not forgetting that we have now gone from making sure we understood the homework before we even left the class, to utter panic that the teacher hasn't responded to the message you sent at 9pm asking a question

Well there was the strap or the slipper in morning assembly....

I was at secondary school from 1976 to 1983.

I’d also add suspensions were rare though. Kids didn’t get excluded unless they were found guilty in law court and sent to Borstal schools.

An example. In my year group a small group of lads stole a video recorder during a Saturday morning extra curricular thingy. They were found out. They had corporal punishment and we all knew it was pretty bad for them. I don’t know how many strokes of cane they got, or where on body it was given, but they were sent home that day to “recover” and back in next day. No one knew exactly what had happened as the lads don’t ever speak about it at school.. There was a genuine sense of real shock at what they’d done and punishment they’d got.

In the past some people were only educated to 14 or 15, then went out to work & earn a wage to support themselves and their families.

The state education age has steadily increased.

There are more opportunities now, compared to the past.

In other countries there is a clear link with education & females to help with a better standard of life

Re behaviour. My DM was a teacher in the late 1960s to early 1980s. Then she did Teacher Training.

The difference she could see was that in the 60s and 70s,when there was bad behaviour in school and parents were called in, the parents supported the teacher and there were consequences at home.

Just before retirement when she was supporting PGCEs in schools, parents came in arguing that their DC had done nothing wrong and had a go at the teacher.