AIBU to want more from the school system academically than getting children 'where they need to get to'?

[Cortina]

It seems to me that there is no concept in the state system that the child is the client with an entitlement to an education that will enable them to 'be the best that they can be'.

Rather the client is the state and this means that all curricula are geared towards a common set of standards too demanding for some and too easy for others.

I've been reading a lot recently that seems to chime with the above.

A good teacher can work within the system to ensure that children work at their own pace and make steady progress. It's got to be tough though with large class sizes and low level disruption (in our experience).

I keep hearing that I should be reassured my children will get to where 'they need to get to'. They will meet the average goal for the end of the key stages so not to worry and all is fine and dandy. Of course the teachers would like them to do better than this but are reluctant to take steps that would increase the likelihood of this happening IME (not through negligence but by their belief their way is the safest way.) We, the parents, try to do that at home ourselves it seems.

Thing is, I want them to do better than reach an expected target, I want them to absolutely fly, I want any latent talent to be discovered, I want them to be the absolute best that they can be. It is as if some teachers have forgotten the bigger picture? Or are too scared of negative consequences of stretching children? The danger is many children have a habit of delivering exactly what is expected of them, mine certainly seem to.

Is it too much to expect this to happen at a state school, should I be grateful with average academic results going forward? Do teachers ever under estimate children? In some cases they might not realise what they are capable of and perhaps under estimate their potential for fear of putting them off learning or lowering their self esteem if things go wrong? I believe children should be stretched, do I have this all wrong? (I read over in the primary section about this sort of thing with reading etc and children demonstrating they are capable of much more at home etc.)

I hate the thought that continuous assessment means that a child can be marked down if they do surprisingly well at Maths or English (KS1). I hate the thought a teacher has the power to 'decide' whether or not a child is below average, average, or above average and potentially the power to make an ability label stick. Of course this shouldn't happen because of continuous assessment etc, most teachers are good and dedicated I am sure, but this doesn't mean to say that there are not flaws in the system?

Do any teachers find the NC limiting? Is there a way to teach creatively around it in a state school without being reprimanded? I am beginning to wonder. I know that many here say they use it as a rough guide which is very encouraging. Is it wrong to want your child to be the best that they can be?

Good points, bonsoir. So much of the hist/geog.stuff can be painlessly dealt with home. (Says she as we bore our DD senseless - Ooh, look! a roche moutonee!)

She thanks us for it now as she knows so much than her Aussie schoolmates.

I recently bought DD a relief map of France - she really enjoys looking at the mountains she has ski-ed on, the islands she has cycled on, the valleys we have driven through and looked at the rivers etc; she also adores a puzzle of Europe, as well as the map of Europe and the map of the world we have on the kitchen wall, that we look at and discuss which of her friends and family come from where - there are fantastic tools out there that cost very little that children love to play with for hours on end - they can spend far more time on these things at home than they ever can at school.

In fact - does anyone know where I can get hold of a small relief map of the UK? I bought my France one at the Institut Géographique Nationale, which only does relief maps of France.

I loathe the idea of pupils being 'clients'

They're not clients. If you really think your child should be a client, don't send them to a state school, send them to a private one.

The state IS the client though. The pupils are the products. It is up to the state to set metrics appropriately.

I dislike the use of the word 'client' in relation to teaching. FFS they are 'pupils'. Why not just go the whole hog and call them 'customers'?

School is there to provide a sound footing for as many children as possible to be productive constructive members of society. Anything more is a bonus. You as the parent are there to provide more. If you want the school to do all of it, pay to go private.

I've just been to the wedding of two talented ambitious wonderful young people. One of who was the president of the NUS and is now hugely successful in her career. The product of a state education and a very involved, enthusiastic and intelligent mother,

Xposted with mcsnail.

Am thrilled with state ed my sons get, but they are bright boys with no other issues and one is in a grammar. Primary fantastic too. Think con spending cuts will hit hard.

"The state IS the client though. The pupils are the products. It is up to the state to set metrics appropriately."

Lord above .

The state exists to serve the people, not the other way round.

Aye, but the client is the one paying the bills. The people are the clients of the state, the state the client of the schools. So if we want schools to behave differently we need to hold the state to account.

The state is not the final customer - the taxpayer is.

That doesn't matter from the point of view of the school though. Their job is to serve their immediate client. Where I work we provide services to other companies. These companies are owned by the shareholders. We might think about the customers shareholders interests, but only to the point of making suggestion, saying if we think ideas won't work etc. Our job is to carry out the customers instructions, even if we were to think they are wrong.

TheCoalition - your understanding of capitalist economics within a democracy is just wrong. I suggest you read a few textbooks!

The point I'm trying to make is that for a purely rational manager of a school, the only consideration that matters is delivering what the state requires.

In practice, they will (hopefully) have broader goals, and are going to have to respond to other pressures. But the requirements of the state even for the most independant minded Head are bound to be amongst, if not THE most important consideration.

So any significant change will need to be supported from the center.

Bonsoir - feel free to recommend some, or even better summarise....

This article is worth a read:

"The chief inspector is wrong to call pupils customers. For a start, they are not always right', writes Chris Bridge

LISTEN to the language they use, my English teacher used to say. It will tell you all you need to know. He was talking about poets but have you listened to the language politicians and newspapers use about schools? It is both revealing and disquieting.

Schools are described as "service-providers". That makes us like plumbers, responding to need. Parents have long been encouraged to think of themselves as having inalienable "rights". Even someone as sane as the chief inspector Mike Tomlinson describes pupils as "clients" and is considering having their views considered as part of inspections.

When politicians seek middle-class votes they talk as if schools were like branches of Marks and Spencer, meeting customer needs; this suggests schools are part of a world in which the customer is never wrong.

This is nonsense. If M&S were responsible for the sartorial elegance of its clients, in the same way I am responsible for the results of mine, it would behave very differently.

Furthermore, behind the language, the message schools are getting is contradictory.

Schools have always been castigated for their inability to control students and been blamed for social ills. Why else was citizenship shoehorned into an overcrowded curriculum? Why else did inclusion feature so strongly in the early Blair years? Why was there so much concern about cutting truancy and exclusions? Why do the results of "clients" who decide not to go to school matter so much in inspections at so-called failing schools?

Because, while schools are told to respond to parents' and pupils' wishes, they are simultaneously charged with changing society, changing the world of their clients.

Trying to reconcile the demands of "clients" with the demands of society presents an everyday practical problem for schools. A rising number of parents, who chose the school for its high standards, challenge those standards. It can now take an hour to give a 30-minute detention: 30 minutes to supervise and 30 minutes to field a phone call from the parents.

Isn't it time to re-assert the essential nature of schools? To function well a school must be a community that is, in the proper sense of the word, disciplined. That means it must create an atmosphere in which pupils feel safe and in which learning can take place. Only then can teachers inspire and the fascination of learning be encouraged.

If society was well-ordered this might happen automatically. As it is not, well-ordered schools must use sanctions. To make those effective every school needs a strong pastoral figure who commands and who is partly feared.

Remember that we are uniquely responsible for those we work with. That means we have to continue to work with a student who has, say, stubbed a cigarette out on a girl's face. We must get this boy good results and the rest of his class too.

In a world in which the police are stretched, in which the social services are demoralised, in which it takes longer and longer to get troubled pupils a psychiatric appointment, I have to continue both to police and to educate. This is made harder by increasingly litigious parents.

If you must see schools as service-providers then at least recognise that we are not just providing a service to individual parents but to society at large and to the society of the future.

If the Government really wants us to achieve its ambitious goals, it must give us more authority. What I would like is for the Government to re-define parents' and pupils' responsibilities. This is necessary and urgent.

Teachers will not be surprised to hear that I recently received a psychiatric report on a student, which listed eight things the school must do for him, while the parents or student himself were asked to contribute nothing to the process.

A good re-definition of responsibilities would itself take us away from the language of clients and service-providers and re-establish schools in their true role. It could even help the Government to hit its own targets."

There are positives to this as well though - the idea that the state is the client rather than the pupil could allow us to take more inclusive view. We don't pay taxes to have OUR children educated, we pay them to have everyones children educated. The net outcome of this is (meant to be) better for all.

NB - 'this' doesn't refer to the post above my 10:40 post.

McSnail - that's a really interesting article.

Phew. What a thread. And I am late to the party, as always.

"Parents who use private education do not "not bother to take time to do the extra stuff with them ourselves"
If anything when you pay you make damn sure they are getting the best out of school because to do otherwise would be wasting £20,000 a year."

It is dangerous to attempt to emulate private education without examining extraneous factors which contribute to the 'success' of its pupils.

Put bluntly, children at private school have parents who value their education highly enough to pay for it. Not all children in state schools have this level of support- many do, but a school will rarely be made up of children with exclusively this type of parent in the way that private schools are. Any (misguided IMO) comparison or attempt to copy a private school model must take this into account.

Bonsoir, you identified the need for a partnership with the parent in response to EvilTwins' assertion that a partnership with the child was appropriate- can I ask how you see that relationship functioning when the parent is reluctant or refuses to engage? It often happens, and a relationship must be established which does not punish the child.

To those advocating the use of the word 'client'; doesn't the use of this word imply a measurable service or product? What do you think this should be? How should it be measured? Is this in any way feasible in conjunction with the child-centred educational model also being advocated?

"Bonsoir, you identified the need for a partnership with the parent in response to EvilTwins' assertion that a partnership with the child was appropriate- can I ask how you see that relationship functioning when the parent is reluctant or refuses to engage? It often happens, and a relationship must be established which does not punish the child."

I don't think that it easy to do so - but I do believe that the principle is the correct one.

FWIW, I live in a country where school keeps parents firmly at the gate. Many parents are desperate to engage more with school.

Thanks Bonsoir- I'm afraid I still see the partnership agreement as being with the child.

To give a very trite example, if you taught a pupil who desperately wanted to study medicine (and was academically able to), yet her parents wanted her to study childcare/literature/business or leave school and get married- where would you loyalties lie?

At some point in a child's education (not just later on), there may well be a conflict of interests- your job as a teacher is to act as an advocate for the child, not the parent IYSWIM.

*you=your

I'm not advocating the use of the word client - I'm saying a client relationship exists between the state and the school, whether we like it or not.

The problem with measuring it is that we need to know what we want to measure. Which requires deciding what the purpose of education is.

Is it to boost GDP? Is it to improve the wellbeing of individuals? Is it to improve societies over all wellbeing? Is it to provide warm bodies to industry? Is it to promote social cohesion? Is it to promote social mobility? Is it to socialise children?

Lets take the fairly common liberal view that the purpose of education is to allow 'each child to reach their full potential'. Clearly this is impossible to measure. For a start you would need to look at the whole life of the child, so you aren't getting results for 70-80 years. So we need to measure proxies. Exams are one. University entrance could be another. But whatever we choose WILL distort the system as we will force schools to work to the proxies.

The alternative is not to measure. That seems worse as if you can't tell which schools are doing a poor job how can you improve them? So you need to find the best proxies you can. But remember that they are proxies.

I wasn't aiming that at you, TheCoalitionNeedsYou, but you raise some interesting points.

"The alternative is not to measure. That seems worse as if you can't tell which schools are doing a poor job how can you improve them? So you need to find the best proxies you can. But remember that they are proxies."

By your own admission, what is measurable are proxies- do they then really provide an accurate reflection of which schools are doing a 'poor job?'

"Lets take the fairly common liberal view that the purpose of education is to allow 'each child to reach their full potential'. Clearly this is impossible to measure."

You would think so. But no, it is being 'measured' as we speak. Of course, the data gathered is meaningless when examined in isolation, taking no account of external factors in a child's life, but because it is seen as a tangible measure of a school's efficacy, it is pounced upon and held aloft as the way forward. I don't believe the data holds up to scrutiny- however, it is rarely scrutinised.

Would it be so terrible not to measure at all?