how would you feel about year round schooling in order to reduce numbers?

[elmouno]

I see a lot of people bring up part time schooling, with a couple days on or reduced time, but I haven't seen any threads about shifting holiday.

Basically in a year round system, there are Tracks. Each student is assigned a Track (and families can choose to stay on the same Track). The Tracks are divided (Track A, B, C, D) so that the students and teachers assigned to that specific Track are allocated holiday. It's two months off, one month off continually with the one month off shifting according to the Track.

For example

Track A goes to school January, February and is off in March, then goes back April, May, and is off in June, then goes again July, August, then off in September, and back in October, November and off in December.

Track B, C, D is the same but the month off shifts throughout the year so that it reduces the number of students. Holidays for Easter, Christmas, and New Year's are still given, but are shorter.

This might help with the space in buildings.

Who would teach my subject whilst I get a break? I am the only one who does it.

I think it is good that people are actively thinking about alternatives to the current system.
No/one designing an education system now from scratch would design the one we have. Is just a throwback to the days when school followed the legal 'terms' and was designed to educate administrators for the Empire. Even the subjects are arbitrary,
We should definitely have blue/sky thinking instead of simply 'that won't work because..,'
We should slow be looking at what works in other countries, critically though /Finland is always trotted our despite being culturally opposite to the UK with no diversity or speakers of other languages to be accommodated.
But no Gvt would ever have the calls to be radical. Tony Blair had a stonking majority and bottled it /the Conservative have had Corona.
So we are stuck with an out of date system with the unions overly deferred to / tail wagging the dog.

No

Yeah, it's totally the unions that have campaigned for increased class sized and schools fit to burst 🙄

One of my friends is very adamant about repeating the school year for everyone, and in theory it sounds ideal. But in reality, everyone would be a year behind forever! So children meant to start in reception this year would have to stay at nursery meaning no new children could come in, Year 13s still at school would mean no one would be starting university for a year and I can’t imagine having a 19, nearly 20 year old following school rules personally.

So then we discussed that no, year 13s would still leave with their grades but everyone else would repeat. But again that means no one leaves school next year.....so no A levels next year, no one entering uni. And to prevent a never ending bump reception could still start. But then you would have two of that year group for 13 years as they made their way through and only then would everyone be back in the correct year group. And all schools would have to whack on new classroom to fit them in. So great for the mobile classroom business’s. I don’t know what the solution is I really don’t.

but where are you getting all the extra teachers from to teach the second "track"? You'd need double the number of teachers

Thing is, some children have progressed during lockdown so repeating a year is unnecessary and unfair. Im not in the UK but my 8 year old worked bloody hard and progressed and learnt new concepts. His teacher confirmed that he is ready for the next class (and he kept up working at least 30 minutes every day during the 9 week school holiday so we know it wont be forgotten).

For the moment our schools will be going back without SD but with PPE for all staff and pupils over the age of 11. Plus they installed more handwashing facilities etc.

@lifeafter50 I like your thinking - I have often wondered how I would draw up a new school year and system.

Thing is looking to other countries our school year isn’t the worst in my view. America has an extremely long summer break (which, gathering from threads on here, most people would hate as 6 weeks is hard enough) a two week Christmas, one week spring break and then just scattered days (even Thanksgiving is generally a half week break). Most Europe also have long summers and not much else (Spanish friend of mine complains about such a long year then suddenly 3 months off to find childcare for). Likewise a lot of European countries do 2 month summers or longer, with the odd week and long weekends across the rest. I’m interested how the Scandinavian countries do their school year as they are often held up as exemplary.
This is why, when people call for a much more spread out school year, I often think ours IS spread out - I think we have one of the shortest summers of all.

The actual education system is a totally different story. And I think the fact that the teacher assessments providing the final grade has helped many students and proves that we shouldn’t just be reliant on a final exam. I struggled with exams. Many do.

I quite liked what someone said above about averaging out the grades from across all subjects into a secondary school certificate. It could encourage better effort across the board. Though as a really good maths student and terrible science one I would have been upset to see my science grade pull everything down!

No/one designing an education system now from scratch would design the one we have. Is just a throwback to the days when school followed the legal 'terms' and was designed to educate administrators for the Empire. Even the subjects are arbitrary

Fully agree with that. We have a kind of scatter gun approach where random aspects are taught in different formal subjects, but there's virtually no integration or looking at things holistically.

Say, a country or continent. We may teach the language, we may include some aspects within history, other aspects within Geography, maybe also partially in RE, economics or philosophy, may even be touched upon in English Lit. But we don't teach a full picture, and pupils could go through school learning absolutely nothing about some countries/continents, even local ones! If a pupil struggles and doesn't engage with "history" then they may end up knowing nothing about an important country's past.

How about we do the opposite? Have a subject, say, France, which includes basic language learning (bare minimum such as basic vocab, numbers, colours, common words etc), includes a rough history timeline, includes summary geographic/economic/political/social/religious/tourism/industry information, etc. Look at a country as a whole. How and why it became what it is today.

Do it for the major local countries that surround us (Northern Europe etc), then also do it more superficially for more distant continents such as Russia, Africa, North Am, South Am, Australia, Middle East, Far East, etc. Not all obviously, but maybe a couple of Northen European countries and then a couple of continents.

If you could go down the module route, you could break each country/continent down into term-length modules - say Levels 1, 2 and 3. Maybe level 1 compulsory and then levels 2 and 3 are optional.

I quite liked what someone said above about averaging out the grades from across all subjects into a secondary school certificate. It could encourage better effort across the board. Though as a really good maths student and terrible science one I would have been upset to see my science grade pull everything down!

That assumes the science would be compulsory and have a high weighting. How about the flexibility for students to do less science (or whatever they aren't good at) and more of the subjects they are good at, such as Maths in your case. You have the usual compulsory subjects at core level but but more optional subjects so a particularly weak subject (say a science or a humanity or a language) will reduce overall score but you can pick it up by doing well in other subjects. So a really bad score, in say science, will reduce your overall mark, but not by a hugely detrimental amount as it's impact is weakened by better scores elsewhere.

No thanks I like my week or so off every 6 or 6 weeks. It's the only thing that makes work bearable at times. Counting down to the next holiday the day we go back

primary
I think working weekends could work.
You would need more staff though.
Or could do
Mon-wed
Thurs-sat.
Or
Mon-thurs with maybe extra pe
Fri-sun
The benefit of making places like zoos etc more consistently busy than at weekends.
Could have more ballet or gym classes during the week.
Slightly longer days so people arent paying for before/after clubs.

Interesting and more thought should go into our academic year. Along with a lot of things the government doesn’t consider it. I think with the children basically “missing” 6months of education all pupils should have returned to their old year group. The autumn term could have been used for catch-up or greater depth learning, depending on how much home learning had been achieved. The A’Levels and GCSEs could have been sat if student unhappy with grade, in Oct/Nov or if government actually had people actively considering options, not cancelled at all but postponed to Oct/Nov with grades adjusted accordingly. Other countries have managed this. All students start the spring term in their new year/setting. The academic year then runs Jan-Dec as follows:
Term 1= 4/1/21 until 26/2/21
1 week off
Term 2= 8/3/21-1/5/21
2 weeks off plus good fri & Easter mon
Term 3= 17/5/21-9/7/21
6 weeks off
Term 4= 23/8/21-15/10/21
2weeks off
Term 5= 1/11/21-17/12/21
2 weeks off
This could also help the Yr R intake. The cut off date should be the last day of term 4. This would mean the youngest children would be at least 4 and 3 months before starting school.

I think with the children basically “missing” 6months of education all pupils should have returned to their old year group.

Children didn't miss 6 months of education.
They certainly didn't miss 6 months of school - it was just over 1 term (1/3 of the academic year.)

At my school most children missed 14 weeks of school time. The rest of the time has been school holidays.

During this time we also provided a remote home learning education package with 5 subjects every week day in term time, as well as additional activities at weekends and in holidays. Most of these lessons were developed by our own class teachers and included a video of one of our teachers going through the lesson, with activities attached. So they were also provided with some form of education during this time away from school.

Not all children did nothing during the closures.
Some children have even progressed in some areas of the curriculum.

6 weeks off in the middle of the academic term would not be ideal. It makes way more sense for the longer holiday to be at the end of an academic term.

No thanks, happy for things to remain as they are but think there needs to be more guidance and published plans for school and/ or local outbreaks so parents know what to expect should this happen.

[quote elmouno]@Artesia

Teachers would be off according to the Track they are on. They would be tied to their students.[/quote]
How does that work in Secondary?

Science for example requires specialists at GCSE, due to a shortage of chemistry and physics teachers students are taught on a rotation basis.

So physics teacher A will teach classes 1,2,3 and four on a rotation basis throughout the year.

Is this the government's way of finding out how we feel about an idea they are considering?

It wouldn't work. As well as all the reasons mentioned above, most schools only have a small team of support staff. Cleaners, office staff, middays, caretakers etc. They would be needed in school all the time as there wouldn't be enough of them to go on a rota.

'it wouldn't work' should be the first line of a new verse for the national anthem .

It solves the space problem, but not the staffing one?

Anything that assumes 'there would be more teachers' starts of on pretty iffy ground given the shortage of certain specialisms.

You could try some staggering of the school year to get more value out of the buildings, but it would be logistical difficult for all the reasons mentioned, and it would cost money to extend the contracts of staff on term-time only contracts, hire more teachers, heat the buildings, etc.

I would like to see a undoing of the focus on 'rigorous academic GCSEs' for all pupils and more options for those whose talents lie elsewhere.

I'd still want all pupils to study maths, science, and English, but maybe they could do something less academic than the GCSE and have more focus on their strengths.

Spending their entire lives leading up to GCSEs to come out with a bunch of meaningless 2s and 3s that will get them nowhere is really demoralising for them, and they might be amazing at more practical things that they don't get the chance to do.

Progress 8 has made this situation even worse than it already was imo.

After this year’s exam results debacle and the outrage from some sections of society that young people might have ended up with better grades than if they had sat the exams, I would love to do away with GCSEs altogether. Surely the point of an education system is to educate, not just rank children according to their ability in arbitrary areas.
A basic standard of literacy and numeracy is essential for all but why are some subjects considered more useful to your average person than others?
The public’s obsession with Ofsted rankings has poisoned our education system in my opinion and the ridiculous sums spent on unnecessary exam entries could be far better spent elsewhere in education.