To expect schools aim for higher than average?

[Couldntthinkofadecentname]

Obviously I know how averages work and there’ll be those above and below but my point is that rather than aim for national average, surely they should be aiming for higher?

The reason this is currently bugging me is due to my two daughters school. The one daughter is just above average so spends most lessons waiting for those less able. The other daughter is below average, not quite EHCP level but enough that last year she had a TA next to her. They’ve removed this because she’s made ‘exponential progress compared to all others in the class and is NEARLY average’

So my question is surely we shouldn’t be facing glass ceilings already?! (They’re 7&8)

This is where parents come in I think. I felt my children could be pushed further, I've found that teachers are really supportive if you open a dialogue with them and ask about gaps and what support you can be doing at home, the more you do at home the more it supports what they're doing at school.

Although I will add this is something I did more from high school age, primary school is more about building confidence with learning in my view, you don't want to stifle them.

Times change and with the increase in teachers workload from pastoral concerns, the insanity of 20 different worksheets has thankfully ended.

I think you missed the very obvious word AIM

And yes I do think every child should aim high, in fact I think we all should AIM high.
Have you never heard of the phrase “shoot for the moon and you may fall among the stars?”

Like I said in my previous post we were expected to plan accordingly for our classes and yes that included aiming as high as possible for all abilities.

The curriculum is different now. Aiming higher in topics doesn't always give the depth needed for developing good understanding.

You said earlier the school had concerns and worked with your dc2. Now you're saying they did nothing and you did it all at home. What's the truth?

When I started teaching 15 years ago we did differentiate lessons so more able children were challenged. When the curriculum changed in 2014, the focus was on ‘mastery’ and keeping the class together so no one was left behind, and pushing capable children was frowned upon. Instead they should be stretched ‘sideways’ and given ‘rich problems’ to solve.

This. It's extremely noticeable. It's actually very sad and punishes the brighter poorer child who does not get the opportunity to achieve their true potential.

The well off bright child with well educated parents gets taken to chess club, learns piano, is given challenge at home.

I think mastery is done poorly, though it's hard to know what the intention is with it and whether it can really be everything for the most capable children. If they have fully grasped a concept, there must be a point when they could move on. In maths it often seems to be throwing some wordy questions at children and asking for explanations. My super mathsy DD2 wasn't great with this as she struggles with writing. She could do it all pretty easily aloud, but you'd be hard pressed to get her to actually do it in her book.

And often there doesn't seem to be much planned beyond those wordy questions. For DD1 that wasn't a problem, she would go and help other children, which really deepens your understanding. DD2 would probably just chat and distract other children. For her, an open ended nrich task might be more suitable. What really works for her is smaller classes with a teacher specifically planning her work and having time to discuss it with her. She's getting that at an independent school now, but sadly that isn't available to most children.

And how do you know what they're AIMING for?

You only know the outcomes and that's largely down to individual kids' performance in certain assessments.

Doesn't mean they're not teaching to the top and supporting those who won't get there to get as high as they can / as much progress from where they started.

It's quite ignorant to assume she's waiting for the less able during most of her lesson time. Learning isn't linear and she will need to practise to actually retain things and develop.

Not always true. Some children have simply mastered a concept, thoroughly, much faster than peers, and do not need practise to retain that concept. It is boring for them redoing things they find easy.

I think mastery is done poorly, though it's hard to know what the intention is with it and whether it can really be everything for the most capable children. If they have fully grasped a concept, there must be a point when they could move on. In maths it often seems to be throwing some wordy questions at children and asking for explanations

often there doesn't seem to be much planned beyond those wordy questions

This. My DS has found absolutely everything in maths piss easy from the day he began. The head rang me unprompted to say they knew he needed something different & that they had a plan to provide it involving a small group. They have not done anything since.

There might be intentions to do better for more able kids but ofsted, government policy and current pedagogy means a desire to keep whole classes at roughly the same level - which is simply not possible without limiting the progress of more able.

In a large class with limited resources, where every child is equally important, it is better for the whole class to reach an acceptable standard than for a few individuals to excel while others stay below the line of acceptable.

It’s not better for the children who could achieve more, but parents are free to supplement their children’s education.

I'm not a teacher but I can see that this is how it goes. The aim is to get them up to the 'expected standard', in a decent school most of them will be there and a few will be working below and at greater depth. None of it really means much as the difference between a child working at the top end of expected and a child working at the bottom end of it is huge....but there is no time for differentiating. A lot of it is box ticking nonsense. My daughter is an excellent writer using vocabulary and language well above her age, yet she got marked as expected last year simply because she wasn't consistent with her use of speech marks.

At 7&8 there is plenty of time yet, brain development is still happening and they may well come into their own later on. But if you want a personalised service then you'll have to pay for private. I was tempted to do that but then decided she's young, she likes school, is learning enough....and at the end of the day it's only primary school. For secondary I want more.

Both. They recognised a need and had her on a table with a TA. Meanwhile she has done a LOT more at home. These are not mutually exclusive. I don’t personally rate schools efforts but I can’t deny they were there initially.

A good teacher will never have a student doing nothing.
They should've prepared to differentiate for all pupils of all abilities.
That includes relevant extention work.

And everyone should be stretched.

Because DD is the top. By their own admission not some parental guess. She used to work with the year above and this is no longer available.

Im not basing this on any assumptions only through annoyingly detailed discussions with the school.

I have 2 daughters on opposite ends of the scale, with only a year between. I am very aware of the scale and its top/middle/bottom.

If every school was ‘above average’ the average would just move. It’s not possible for everywhere to be above average.

I completely agree and I don't think we should just accept mediocrity in education. That's just the path to civilisational ruin. BUT it is a pervasive problem, particularly in parts of the country where aspiration is culturally low. We live in such a place and my YR DS's teacher only recently realised (when I told her) that he can read. He's been doing the standard basic phonics since starting school, which I support because it's helpful to learn even if you are already free-reading. But I was pretty staggered to realise that they hadn't even twigged he could read already.

I am doing everything I can to support the school but have accepted that they will only provide a basic level and that I have to provide a lot myself if I want my kids to have a reasonable standard of education.

Dream on

There's plenty of rich tasks out there and resources to use. I get the frustration from some children, but at secondary we were getting kids that had brilliant numerical skills and no understanding of how to apply anything. Or kids that could do "algebra" but they had no understanding of what they were doing.

It's impossible to stretch every Child every lesson. You'd be planning for hours.

We aimed for higher than average that way children who struggled were more likely to hit the average and those above weren’t held back.

I think that is wrong.

What agony it must be for a child whose academic ability is below the average to be constantly striving for something that is clearly out of their reach and feeling pressured and ground down.

These are children, small people, and they need to given space to grow at their own pace and in areas other than academic. They are learning about getting along with with others, being kind, having fun. All this constant pressure and competition is dangerous and iniquitous.

In a class of 30 children your brainy child cannot be singled out - the poor teacher has enough to do. It will do her no harm to muck in with everyone else and learn other valuable skills and understanding of her fellows.

This really isn't considered best practice in any state school I've worked in. In a mastery curriculum the more able should have activities to stretch them. I might occasionally ask a child to explain to another child for five minutes but that wouldn't be the first thing they did upon finishing a the main task.

It is really hard with 30 children and one adult though to be moving them all along at an appropriate pace.

There were some ‘stretch’ activities but they weren’t challenging enough. Mostly because the kids at the top could already do the objective inside out, upside down, back to front and standing on their heads. They needed to be taught something new, not given variations on the same too easy work.

to be fair, I was just the supply teacher so the normal teacher may have handled things differently. I don’t think so though cos when they’d finished they asked if they should go round and help others as that’s what they usually did.

1. Because by streaming whole classes you are capping their learning and telling 30/90 that they are the stupid ones.
2. Because even if they can't speak English they are still accessing maths, science, art etc. Just because your English is poor doesn't mean you're stupid.

You wouldnt be capping their learning or telling them that they are stupid. You would be teaching them appropriately for their current level. What is stupid is pretending to teach the same material at the same pace in the same class to kids who can't read and write alongside kids taking SATs and the whole range in-between. It is trying to look inclusive for the sake of it and doesn't suit any of them.

What a ridiculous response.
This is a standard expectation.
Something current PGCE students can't progress without.

Also something that's requested for in book looks.

I imagine it depends to some extent on where you live. Our primary school has 12% of kids on free school meals, but also some much wealthier families too, almost like the two extremes. Realise that 12% is not particularly high, but it's much higher than the other schools around here. The schools SATs results are the lowest in the immediate area, presumably correlated to the fact that they have by far the highest number of disadvantaged kids. The capable ones though definitely get given more challenging extension work, but there doesn't seem to massive pressure on the more average ones to overachieve. To me it feels like aiming high where it's achievable. They did stream for a while when my daughter was in Year 6, but this was found to only really be benefiting the top set and they went back to teaching everyone together. Anyway my oldest did really well at the school, she was very happy there most importantly but in the end her academic results were great too, but she does now go to a selective high school which is 11 miles away, rather than the local high school.