Read this.

[teejay100000]

www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/why%20can%27t%20they%20read.pdf

hmm I do agree with the over-praising thing, it's a bit wishy-washy - though of course I do agree praise is important. but maybe it's contributed to a school environment where teachers can't even put constructive criticism on a report for fear of Little Freddie's mum complaining at them?

5candles - most education researchers are not current teachers and many have never been teachers. The CPS report is interesting for not being 'leftist' - Most education research tends to be 'progressive'

The normal research process is:
The researcher has an opinion
The researcher undertakes or finds research to back up this opinion.
The researcher publishes the research (often with a controversial angle).
Ministers/parents/teachers ignore all research which doesn't chime with their own opinion.

IMO

'It sounded like a very politically-driven report to me, to whip up an uninformed public opinion that education is currently dreadful and we need the tories to sort it out good and proper.' Yes, Ponceydog. I think we have to be careful of knee-jerk reactions.

Our experiences of education are always so narrow and subjective, even those of us who have several children. I've had kids in full-time education for the last 30 years, but I still don't feel in a position to generalise.

However, I will say this: although methods have changed a lot and so has society, I still see so many lovely things going on in schools - so much imagination, time and energy from the teachers; happy, enthusiastic children respecting each other and adults - I just don't recognise the picture that is painted by the national media (and I've been into some very under-privileged inner-city schools - some of which are amazingly imaginative and resourceful in the way they deal with people with a huge variety of needs).

I have a mixed view on the state of education TBH. We were actually thinking of home ed but (a) DD loves preschool and wants to go to school in 2011 and (b) are local schools are very good.

but then, we have also seen DH's other children go through a horrendous state education. their school was just absolutely, horribly rubbish.

Agree, Rolla and Poncey.

jackstar, but the weird thing about this particular research is that the only really useful bit that I can see - synthetic phonics - was done years ago by other researchers and is already well established in schools.

that's what struck me too, five. synthetic phonics is huge in scotland

Rollacoasta wrote: ?Breton, your posts confirm that you favour didactic methods. They are instructional and give the impression that you know best and do not like being argued with.?

I don?t favour them over any other method of teaching but teacher-led and knowledge based education is a necessary part of learning and I am tired of trendies in education using ?didactic? and ?knowledge-based? as pejoratives. And yes, I do know a great deal more than a teenager. I?m several decades older, I?ve read a great deal more, and I?ve had far more experience of life.

Rollacoasta wrote : ?Of course we all learn differently! You obviously learn well if 'instructed', but that does not mean that everyone else is the same as you.?

Since when has instruction been any different from teaching? The word we are discussing (didactic) means to educate, teach, instruct. However, some in education also adopt a disparaging tone when referring to ?instruction? except, of course, when it comes to sport!

Rollacoasta wrote: Believe me, the level 3 readers and writers could function in society.

At what level? How precisely will they function in a literate society? They will never be able to get anything beyond the most basic of employment and any attempt at further education will be hampered by their inability to read and understand, or express themselves adequately.

Rollacoasta wrote: If they are 'functionally illiterate' and unable to follow a secondary school curriculum, perhaps the secondary school curriculum is inappropriate and needs differentiating to suit the lower achievers?

So we dumb down the curriculum even further, do we? I?m sorry but this is exactly what is wrong with modern education today. This notion that the curriculum must be lowered to accommodate the candidate rather than the candidate having to meet the requirements of the curriculum is the bane of education. Everyone must be a winner ? no one must fail because failure makes people feel bad. The only area in school where healthy competition is actively encouraged is in sport. As our American cousins might say "Go figure"!

Several people on this thread have mentioned teachers leaving work uncorrected and grannieonabike has confirmed that too much red/green/purple ink may discourage a pupil. She?s right. This is what teachers are told. Don?t discourage them ? make them feel good about themselves. Too much correction is demoralising. Just mark the piece using one criterion, e.g. spelling or punctuation. This has now being applied at secondary school where pieces of work are assessed (i.e. marked) purely on one particular AF. So a child might write a load of nonsense but if they?ve managed to use some punctuation correctly and the AF for that piece is punctuation they?ll get a reasonable mark! As I wrote a few days ago, school is Looking-glass World where nothing has any possible bearing on reality.

Rollacoasta wrote: I can teach how to use commas by sending children out to find things, writing a list and then annotating with commas.?

I don't see anything wrong with that, providing they are then taught how to use this punctuation in their writing, and why it is important. They then need to sit down and demonstrate that they've learned this.

Grannieonabike mentioned knee jerk reactions to events. Critical thinking, acquired through wide and varied reading and the gaining knowledge, allows an individual to apply those skills and then ask themselves the question, ?Is it likely?? However, too many people overseeing education today regard a broad, intellectually-based, education as elitist and worthless.

Oh, and one other thing regarding the decision to change the colour of the ink used to mark pupils' work. Psychobabble was applied to this as well. The wisdom handed down being that "red" is a colour associated with anger and danger but "green" is tranquil and calm.

Think happy thoughts and don't forget the group hug!

We mark throughout the school from EY to Y6 with red, so don't generalise

Breton, where is your evidence?

It is pointless to correct every single mistake in work where a student has particular spelling difficulties or in a 5 year old. Completely counterproductive.

Imagine learning a language say French. You go to France and decide to try out your skills so you try to chat about the weather or order some things in a restaurant. Would it be helpful if the person you were speaking to pointed out every single error? Or it would be more helpful for them to encourage you by chatting along clearly and helpfully and possibly repeating back a corrected version of what you had said? Or prioritising the most significant error and saying 'Ah, you mean x'?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with focusing on a particular assessment objective or target for a particular piece of work i.e. paragraphs. This is actually incredibly helpful. As long as other pieces of work are marked 'as a whole'.

Maybe there are some teachers who have taken some 'trends' or advice about 'child centred learning' or 'improving self-esteem' to such an extreme that they do not actually teach or correct or guide.

I have to say that if they exist I have never met one although I have taught in many different schools etc for over 10 years and my children have now been in school for a while.

However, if they exist these are stupid people and stupid people will exist in every field.

Most teachers and schools are highly skilled in doing what works and achieve amazing results in often very challenging circumstances and with very challenging and challenged kids. And what works is a mixture of teacher led work, chalk and talk, modelling and group work, individual work, practise,assessment etc.

'So we dumb down the curriculum even further, do we?'

Breton - you didn't read my post carefully: I suggested that the secondary curriculum should be differentiated to suit the lower achievers, not dumbed down. There will always be a percentage of children who find learning difficult. In the past they have been able to get jobs because, for a start, they didn't have to fill in application forms! Today, many jobs could be filled by people reading at level 3 (about the level of The Sun). Not all jobs require inference and deduction!

You are all for correcting mistakes, but ignore the fact that these areas need to be taught in order to rectify the errors. What good is a red mark going to do if the child doesn't understand what it means?
When marking literacy, the teacher notes any problems and raises these during the daily phonics lessons or as starter activities.

In their writing, the average Y2 child is required to use fullstops, capital letters, connectives other than 'then' and 'and', adjectives, exciting verbs, commas in lists, question marks and to start to introduce complex sentences. At the same time, we expect them to remember what they have learnt in phonics and to spell phonetically (at least).

I think we're expecting little children to take too much on board, particularly the less able (unsurprisingly) and less 'motivated to write'. IMHO we are making these demands before the skills of sentence formation have been fully absorbed, and have not been practised enough.

Rollacosta,

" - surprisingly, KS1 children are very realistic about their own abilities. They know what they are good at and what they're not so good at. They are cogent little people and are able to compare themselves to their peers. It took me a while to realise that when I was an NQT!"

To me that makes the job of a KS1 teacher all the harder. The 12 month age range and the very varied maturity rates at this stage mean the ability range must be huge. Yet, it's very important that individual children are not 'turned off' education because they aren't as 'able' as their peers.

Many KS1 teachers seem to deal with the range by ability setting. But I'm not convinced that the whole 'top table' thing is good for the self esteem of the younger children and later developers.

I know there are teachers who handle it well with fluid setting and best practice mixed ability teaching methods - but I'm sure there are many teachers who don't.

Having observed an excellent year 1 teacher in action - I must say it did look exhausting!

Personally, I don't like this 'top table' thing either (particularly having witnessed the comment of competitive mummies on MN ). I generally sit gbgbgb in a horseshoe and move them around when I need to!

I agree that KS1 children should not be turned off at an early age and I like all areas of the curriculum to include a certain amount of 'make and do'! However, as mentioned in my last post, we do have high literacy hoops to jump through at the end of Y2 and this is where we really need to address the self-esteem of the lower achievers - even if they can't meet the government targets, we must set them achievable individual targets so that they remain motivated.

Rollacosta,

"we do have high literacy hoops to jump through at the end of Y2"

I guess that ties in with what the report says about children needing to be able to read by age 5 or 6.

But, both comments are based on artificial assumptions. We (or the DoE) set up the hoops and there is no reason I can think of (outside of school) that makes it essential for a 6 year old to be able to read!

My 5 year old dn, showed me his year 1, science exercise book yesterday. It was filled with worksheets (glued in by his teacher /Ta). I doubt there is another country in the world that would teach a 5 year old science 'by worksheet'. Whilst I'm sure that he 'learnt' in other ways too - it did strike me as a strange way to educate such a young child.

jackstarbright please don't think that all schools use worksheets to teach science (for any subject) because it isn't true

I agree - artificial assumptions ('All children will.....).

It's like Breton is saying that level 4 readers are 'functionally literate' and will be ready to read Shakespeare in KS3. The level 3 readers (now, we assume, labelled 'functionally illiterate' on leaving primary school) won't be able to access that type of text. Well, really? Do they NEED to?

Artificial assumptions. Artificial benchmarks. Artificial comparisons.

Does a 7 year old need to write using all those skills? All at the same time? No wonder they're muddled and we're tearing our hair out trying to meet age-related standards.

(I'm sad about all those worksheets.)

My concern with a national curriculum is that such things are generally only found in totalitarian societies. Once schools are told what to teach and how, we are, in my opinion, entering very dangerous waters. However, a syllabus set by Universities is another matter.

RollaCoasta: Re your comments on red ink and my apparent generalisation. I didn't generalise I was referring to the view expressed by the grandees of education about the amount of corrections that should be made to a piece of work.

Of course plenty of teachers still use red. I use whatever colour pen comes out of my case, but the ruling elite recommended green for the reasons I cited. This is just another example of the nonsense my other post was addressing.

RollaCoasta wrote: Breton - you didn't read my post carefully: I suggested that the secondary curriculum should be differentiated to suit the lower achievers, not dumbed down.?

Re differentiation, this is simply making the work easier for the less able. In other words it is dumbed down so that they can manage to do it and teachers are exhorted to employ different techniques to achieve this.

In recent years the GCSEs have been restructured to allow those less able individuals to achieve some sort of basic grade and therefore ?prove? government claims that more and more young people are better educated than ever before! This C grade is now the bench-mark for moving on to FE and this greatly reduced pass mark is, quite simply, not of the required standard. This means that many individuals who continue into FE are not academically competent to do so. Hence we get A level students and undergraduates who can't write grammatical sentences, have no idea how to construct an essay, and don't know how to take notes or undertake research, despite all this "child-led learning" they've been exposed to in their previous education.

Fivecandles: I think your analogy is flawed. Learning another language is an important skill but it cannot be compared with learning to read and write your mother tongue correctly. However, I wholeheartedly concur with your final sentence.

RollaCoasta wrote: ?You are all for correcting mistakes, but ignore the fact that these areas need to be taught in order to rectify the errors."

I?m afraid that responsibility for that problem must be laid at the door of Primary education. In Y7 we get what we are sent. Hence one of the first things that a secondary school usually does is re-test for English and Maths because it is not unusual for a child to arrive with a high Level 4 or even a Level 5 for their KS2 SATs but when re-tested, using yet another government approved test, comes out at a mid Level 3. One government test clearly cancels out the other and if anyone could explain this secondary school teachers would be eternally grateful; as many a Y7 parents? evening invariably ends up with teachers having to deal with anxious/annoyed mothers and fathers wanting to know why little Johnny or Mary, who did so well at Primary school, has been placed in Set 5 at Secondary school.

"Re differentiation, this is simply making the work easier for the less able. "

differentiation isn't simply making work easier...

Breton, learning a language, learning anything. If my driving instructor had pointed out EVERYTHING that I did wrong every time I got in the car I would never have learned to drive and would certainly have given up. We can't all be good at everything and we all need to be motivated and supported to do the things we don't find easy and don't enjoy but need.

It would be ridiculous and completely conterproductive and totally demotivatating to point out every mistake in a piece of work where there are many. A good teacher of anything will prioritise, target and segment as well as keeping an eye and as a way of achieving the whole picture.

So, today we are going to focus on roundabouts or indicating or overtaking or today we are going to focus on the verb to be or today we are going to focus on the paragraph. Not today we are going to drive on the motorway at night in the snow or today we are going to write a novel.

Breton, 'In recent years the GCSEs have been restructured to allow those less able individuals to achieve some sort of basic grade and therefore ?prove? government claims that more and more young people are better educated than ever before! This C grade is now the bench-mark for moving on to FE and this greatly reduced pass mark is, quite simply, not of the required standard'

At least 2 things here:

1.) C is not a pass grade. GCSE goes to F and A/S level goes to E. Isn't 55% A-C still the national average for GCSE?? So there are still a significant number of students who are not achieving this. I see nothing whatsoever wrong with giving a student an E grade which means he or she has achieved some very basic skills but which everybody understands is no great shakes academically.

2.) As for 'the required standard', what is that? And required by who? Any standard is arbitrary and everybody - each employee, university, would have different requirements.

Breton1900 as Y6 tests are externally marked I'm not sure how you can lay responsibility for a mismatch between end of KS results and those you mark in Y7 with primary schools.
It would also appear from conversations with ex pupils that much of the work they cover in the first two years they had previously covered in primary I'm not sure how that fits your view.

mrz What is it then?

Oh here's one idea. "The best way to prove understanding of a topic is to teach it. Get able pupils to teach the less able a key learning point."

Ah so more able kids spend time teaching less able ones - what happens to that able kid's opportunity to have their ability stretched?

Wasn't a similar tactic employed in the 19th century with the brighter kids teaching the less able ones? Weren't they known as class monitors?

Here's another: "Use higher-level questioning and direct questions at particular pupils rather than waiting for the hands up approach."

So don't ask less able kids because they won't understand - unless you simplify the language (i.e. dumb it down).

And another "Use an able pupil to quickly recap on the previous lesson?s learning for the other pupils."

So once again, don't ask the less-able because they probably won't know. All this is doing is demonstrating that an able pupil has grasped the concept. You will have no idea if the less able ones have also succeeded in understanding it because you aren't asking them!

All this recourse to utilizing the abilities of the more able is simply reinforcing the belief amongst the less able that they can't do it (unless it's pitched at their level) - i.e. dumbed down!

I'm not nearly as cynical as I appear on this reply - honest

'This means that many individuals who continue into FE are not academically competent to do so.'

Well I've taught many, many students who have achieved C grade who are perfectly academically competent to progress to FE and HE. There are so many points here. One is that I teach a lot of students who have achieved C or D in English at GCSE but much better grades in Maths and Science many of whom want to be medics or pharmacists. They're often perfectly competent in these areas and have good reasons for being less successful in English. Should we tell them they're not allowed to progress to study science at A Level because they got C in English. Likewise should I not have been allowed to become an English teacher because I got a C in Maths?

Those students who got Cs and are not very 'academically competent' in the subjects they take for A Level will simply not do very well in them. Universities are now so fiercely competitive that the top universities will start only accepting A* which means achieving 90% in both modules on the A2 syllabus an incredible demand.

So even if it has become easier to get a C grade the goalposts have moved so C grade is no longer enough to get into many universities.

Also I really must take issue with this

'despite all this "child-led learning" they've been exposed to in their previous education.'

WHERE? Who is doing all of this 'child-led learning'??? Where is this taking place?

Because I have been in some of the best and worst performing schools int he country and I've never seen it.

I have never been into a school or classroom where students were basically told to do what they want or set their own objectives or not actually taught at all. So what and where does 'child-led learning' take place>

I'm also finding it bizarre that you seem to criticise the existence of a National Curriculum at the same time as criticising this apparent 'child-led learning'. Education has never been more prescpritive. Primary teachers have lists of things they have to teach and ways of teaching. Synthetic phonics, national literacy strategly, literacy hour and so on and so on.

How, in this climate could it be possible to walk into a classroom and say just do what you want folks???

If students are struggling to read and write it is certainly not the fault of primary school teachers and certainly not down to the lack or prescriptive teaching. In fact what has been happening in education in this country is the verty oppposite of child-centred lerning. We have the most prescriptive education system of anywhere in thw eorld.