OECD Study puts England at bottom for Maths and Literacy

[missinglalaland]

A major study by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development puts England's 16 to 24 year olds at 22nd for Literacy and 21st for Numeracy out of 24 developed countries. Ouch!

What can we do to fix this? More money? Less permissiveness? Sorting by ability? Different teacher training? Longer school years? Different methods?

Im sure most families can cook and budget.

It just depends is they want to cook the right stuff or budget for the right things.

If you go to a dysfunctional family home and talk to them. They will always say after Ive bought my fags and beer there is nothing left.

Go to another house who are poor as well but are functional they seen to be ok. It may not be the best of times for them but they will survive.

Sometimes its not about the parents but as wether they are dysfunctional.

Education will help their children. If they cant learn to cook in school where are they gonna learn it

You have a point.

I come from a well off academic family, with a mother who is an ace cook and both parents know how to budget. Did I learn a thing about either? Did I heck

And a small word re gridding and chunking....they have their place, for a lot of kids, in helping understand decimal place thoroughly and in demystifying numbers for those that aren't naturally mathematically inclined.

I can think of several of my family members, and good friends, who would have welcomed a bit of chunking and gridding in their school days - instead of being left baffled and feeling inadequate. And I'm not talking dunces here, just non-maths-brain-types.

dds' Head explained it as giving the children a full set of tools and then letting them choose the ones they're most comfortable with - for some (my dd1) it is clearly columns. She doesn't see the point of grids at all, and fair enough. But for others in her class, chunking and gridding makes maths accessible.

I think a lot of the problems come when schools (or individuals ) become inflexible, black-and-white, and we-know-best-one-rule-fits-all. Whether that's applied to maths techniques, cooking, art or just life.

ok then, a big word

But if you keep asking schools to cover the failings of parents, you stretch the curriculum ever thinner. You ask more and more of teaching staff and you dilute the time and energy spent on academics.

State schools are being asked to do ever more year on year to make up for the poor parenting of a minority.

"State schools are being asked to do ever more year on year to make up for the poor parenting of a minority."

I agree, and this is unfair on parents who are doing a conscientious job themselves, as it dilutes the teaching effect in school for all - and distorts perception of what school ought to be about.

State schools are being asked to do ever more year on year to make up for the poor parenting of a minority

I agree. And coming from a poor and disadvantaged family myself, I would say that the biggest positive impact in my life was the excellent education I received at school (different country). I wasn't taught to cook and we mostly had bread and milk or bread and butter at home due to lack of money. However, accessing education gave me all the tools to go and learn to cook myself as an adult, as well as budget sensibly and all the rest.

I know many don't disagree, but I firmly believe that giving all children the best possible education in schools is what gives them more choices and more aspiration later on.

Sorry, but I fail to see how anyone can think including a bit of HE in the curriculum is distorting perception of what school ought to be about. It used to be in the curriculum in a lot of schools, was excluded for a while and then everyone realised how silly it was to squeeze it out. It is not some novel thing introduced to the curriculum in recent years by weirdy do-gooders... Same applies to singing and music in general. If you really want state schools to go back to reading, writing and arithmetic and nothing else, then I'm off out of the state sector to get my children a more rounded education, thank you very much. My children are worth more than hours of rote learning of really quite basic facts they had already grasped by the end of KS1 every day - that's going back to the days when people left school by the age of 14 to enter a workplace which actually had jobs for them.

By the way, some of you appear to be talking about a good education for people of above average intelligence who could go away once they had learned to read and write and teach themselves everything else... so you aren't talking about catering for everyone, just for people like yourselves, anyway.

rabbit IME it's about balance.

There's a definite tipping point where school becomes about something other than a decent academic education. Instead it becomes a tapestry of non-core experiences.

Good sound academics need time. As does cooking, music, art etc. Doing a tad of this and rushed hour of that, is doing no one any favours.

An example on MN; a child being asked to make a trifle out of pre-prepared jelly, a tin of custard and a banana! First, making a trifle is very low on my list of school based priorities, Second if you're gonna make trifle, that surely aint it!

If kids from ordinary families want to compete with their counterparts from private schools, selective schools and kids from abroad, we have to ensure they've received a competing education. And trifle making isn't going to do it!

Well, exactly, wordfactory, dumbed down "cooking" as I have already said is just as bad as dumbed down maths and English. Spending more time doing dumbed down maths and English does not improve the experience - you need to improve the quality of a lot of it, not just scrap half of it because you, personally, could teach yourself how to run your own market garden and gourmet cafe once someone taught you where to put your apostrophes...

Anyway, jelly, custard and a banana does not a trifle make.

Well all I can add to this is my DD...really enjoys her home economic class at school...she made Chicken chow mein....the other week...She claims it was quite good.....

I don't think it is the business of schools to teach children to cook. I do, however, think it is the business of schools to feed children properly at lunch time, to ensure that children stay well hydrated (with water) and that snacking doesn't occur on their premises! If children attend breakfast and after school club, it is also the business of schools to ensure that whomever runs those facilities ensures decent and appropriate nourishment of DC. Oh - and it is also the business of schools to ensure proper table manners.

kenlee my DD enjoyed her cooking classes too!

However, the school has a long day, so can afford to play around with their time.

And that said, I don't think it really taught her how to cook. You get that from watching your parents cook day in day out. Then you stride out on your own.

I think wasting an hour to play house is great for the kids. I also think a whole afternoon of sports is great too...I also know the kids swim every night after prep. I have always said healthy children are more balanced.

All kids need to have a break from the academia...Its nice to break the day up....

Again I do agree that because the school day is long..It can be done...Although I do suspect a bit of teacher activity....

I agree that balance is hugely important.

Hence an hour a week of cooking, every other term (or whatever), can play a very positive part. dd has learned an awful lot from her turns at school cooking (all fresh ingredients, teaching kitchen, fab) and the teaching Chefs make sure the children use their maths and literacy in the process.

Cooking isn't necessarily vital - I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that creative curriculum can work, when applied as it should be. If our school didn't have an allotment and a teaching kitchen, then maybe it would have to spend that hour doing something else - but I would hope it wouldn't be more times tables or spellings (they are adequately covered).

Balance, yes. Academics, yes. No cooking/music/art/sport/sewing/gardening/playing? Definitely not.

wordfactory - I could maintain that just watching your parents read and being read to every day will TEACH you how to read, because it worked for my kids. However, that would make me a big smug. Personally, I think the same thing applies to cooking.

Watching me cook would not teach them anything beyond five recipes and a baked potato

Also, re 'the business of schools':

If a six or eight year old is at school from 9-3.15 every day, I think its a lot healthier for those 6+ hours to include a variety of stimuli. As opposed to 6 hours of academics, followed by a few hours of creativity/play at home. It just fits normal childhood development and a child's natural rhythms better.

I have to say, I also find it a bit bizarre that, apparently, it is well within a parent's capabilities and finances to ensure their children have good skills in the kitchen, can plan and budget for a nutritious meal, are aware of kitchen hygiene rules and don't waste precious, expensive food, but beyond their abilities to help their kids learn their times tables. To my mind, the times tables are the far more basic skill...

I am happy for kids to cook in school. Cooking involves maths, physics, chemistry, sequencing, nutrition.
Proper cooking that is. Not smearing a bottled sauce onto a ready pizza base or taking little bags of ingredients from home to mix together.
That is food assembly and a bloody insult.

That's your experience rabbitstew. I had a grandparent who was fantastic at practical things and had a good career in catering but had been notoriously bad at school work and couldn't help their children.

The whole point I was making, fairisleknitter, is that you can't decree that great swathes of the curriculum should be taken out because YOUR parents could have taught you that stuff better at home. MY parents "taught" me to read without any need for school to get involved. However, I am not arguing as a consequence that, therefore, it is no business of schools to be teaching children to read...

ps Unless your grandparent couldn't read numbers, they could have looked through an 8X table provided by the school to see whether their child was chanting out the right numbers when they practised at home, and could have tested them by asking them tables out of order (using the print out to help them if they didn't know their own times tables), and could have sat them down and timed their children when they did speed tables tests - it's not as if they would have had to mark the homework.