"I learnt to teach in the 1980s when all that mattered was the child"

[fridayohfriday]

Just saw that quote on Twitter, attributed to the Guardian teacher network (but link didn't work so don't know who said it).

Well, like many parents of school-age kids, I went to school in the 1980s and want better for my children than I experienced ..... a mixed bag of good and bad teachers, many uninspiring lessons, incompetence in following the exam syllabus, casual humiliation and many of my peers leaving school with no qualifications or skills into a world of sky high unemployment (north east, post miners' strike).

:)

Yes. It totally depends whether you believe pushing children to achieve is good or bad.

Oh, and no extra curricular activities either. Teachers were "working to rule" if I remember rightly.

Hmm. I think it totally depends on whether you believe teaching can be entirely different from any other career. In my experience, whatever the walk of life, you find a mixed bag.

Even nowadays much depends on the quality of teaching.

I've recently worked in 2 schools, a couple of miles apart. One was a small village school with 3 teachers - tiny classes, crap teachers, poor discipline and general "coasting along" attitude by the staff.

The other was a big town school - no comparison - huge classes, excellent teaching and discipline and a great atmosphere among the staff.

I was also at school in the 80's and don't remember education being child centred. I do remember missing out on days, school trips etc due to strike action.

I also remember being hit across the hand with a ruler for talking in class. They're not bringing that little gem back.

The 1980s saw the introduction of the National Curriculum, SATs, league tables and GCSEs.

It's rare to see someone harking back to the Thatcher government as the Good Old Days.

I was at primary in the 80s

Copying off the board
Copying out of a text book
Filling in work sheets
Working in silence
No discussion just rote learning

No thanks

I can't think of any of the teachers that I had in the 80s that would be able to teach in the conditions that teachers have to put up with today.

My mum trained as a primary school teacher in the 1950s and retired in the mid 80s before the National Curriculum came in (very end of the 80s), SATS (very early 90s), Ofsted (about 1993 in secondary schools, 1994 in primary schools) and performance management (late 1990s).

She was delighted to have avoided all the above. I'm not so sure. She was trained in the days when teaching was largely chalk and talk. She survived the big change to child-centred learning that came in in the 60s and all the idiocy around the initial teaching alphabet, endless projects instead of proper teaching etc etc. I think she was a good teacher who worked hard with the children and always managed to get on with the basics in spite of whatever faddish approach she was being encouraged to use that year.

In the late 90s when I was a school governor/parent it was clear that many teachers were really struggling with the big changes that had come in over the previous decade. However, as a parent I have to say I was on balance pleased that things were a bit less hit and miss than they had been.

My mum had a colleague (let's call her Mrs X) who put more effort into maximising her income from teaching for minimum effort than into anything else she did at school. She arrived in the morning shortly before the children did and often left before all the children and their parents had straggled out of the playground. She claimed a responsibility allowance for watering the school plants. Mrs X and Mrs Y would always have what would now be called the two parallel year 3 classes but when these children moved up to year 4 Mrs X's class would be way behind Mrs Y's class. Mrs Z who inherited Mrs X's class was resigned to having to work very hard with them to try to make up for the year of lazy, unimaginative teaching they'd had with Mrs X. Nowadays Mrs X would have been out on her ear after her first Ofsted inspection and quite right too.

I was incredibly lucky myself to go to a very traditional state primary school in the 1960s where I was taught the 3 Rs very thoroughly in a way that suited me. (I know not everybody got on with chalk and talk, but I did.) I then went to a very academic and again extremely traditional secondary school and that suited me too. I would have been bored rigid with endless project work.

I went to school in the 80's too. It certainly didn't seem child-centred to me the teachers got away with stuff they're never get away with in a million years now.

I work with teachers and I find the vast majority, nowadays, to be child-centred but they do it under increasingly unreasonable circumstances. I think my dd is getting a far better education than I got. Her school is excellent and the teachers are brilliant.

My primary education (1977-1984) -state

Copy and answer questions
Read and answer questions

My secondary education (1984-91) Private girls.

Ditto.

I went to school in the 80s(and 70s).

It was utter shite.

My dc are getting a far better education than I did,even though their school drives me batshit crazy at times.

Well I was at primary in the 80s and I do see what they are saying.

I went to a one form entry standard state primary.

Our teachers did loads of out of school activities-all free, I can remember offhand: ballet, gardening, comics, chess, football, netball, badminton, short tennis, rounders, drama, library, computer. They also used to organise Saturday morning videos for pupils plus siblings and three times a year a disco and evening concerts involving (sometimes) all the children.

We had a lot more flexibility in the time tables. For example through the juniors we did a lot of plays, we'd have one afternoon a week increasing to most afternoons just before we performed.

I remember our form getting excited about a programme that had been on the night before about wildlife abroad, and our teacher listening to the conversation at registration, and saying "Did you know we have lots of wildlife round here? If you promise to work extra hard tomorrow we'll go and look for it now."
And we got up, and spent the morning walking round the area collecting flowers and making notes on wildlife we saw, and the afternoon pressing the flowers and looking up in books what we'd seen. Educational-but would never happen today.

Or the time our teacher phoned the local farm and asked if we could come and watch milking time when we'd watched the cows coming down the lane. And we (infants) trooped across and were allowed to teach the calves how to drink milk from buckets. Totally spur of the moment thing,.

And the day we all walked down as a school to watch the mill chimney bening blown up, or when we found bits of an old plate in a ditch and were convinced we'd found an antique and the teacher allowed us to piece it together during class time.

And the day we spent orienteering on a residential. Set off in groups of 4 with a compass, instruction leaflet and lunch, no teachers, into the wilds of Yorkshire. Told to try and be back by 4pm.

Three of us taken down in the head's car to buy a present from our form (us having done a quick wip round-about 2, which was our money for the tuck shop) for one of the infants, whose mum had just died and we'd found him crying.

Yes, nowadays they do a lot of officially other subjects: History we did a little because one of the teachers was keen, but I never did any geography, science was the headteacher doing (big) experiments-I can remember every one of them, RE was sketchy, music was mostly done in year 4 when you had the music teacher as your class teacher.

I think that's what they meant. Our teachers listened to us, and if there was something we were enthusiastic about they'd take it further, I don't think there is the flexibility in the timetable to do that nowadays.

I'm not saying everything in the 1980s was rosy, but I can see the OPs point of view. Now teachers have so much time taken up with meaningless bureaucracy, children have set curriculum to churn through as if they were identical objects on a conveyor belt and then reduced to just a set of data. So many new initiatives and left alone for enough time to embed one and make it successful before it is thrown out and a new one introduced. Red tape at every turn that actually tries to prevent us providing what know the individual child actually needs. Filling in paperwork doesn't equate to better lessons; having time to reflect on what your class and individual pupils are interested in and need to learn next, plus the time to create imaginative lessons does.

I was also at school in the 80s and I have fantastic memories of school and my teachers. They inspired me - to develop a love of literature, of ancient history, of discovery. My insatiable curiosity was encouraged and there was no ceiling on learning - if one child in a class was interested in something, they encouraged you to find out more about it by using the school library. Looking back at my Y6 age books, I was probably only writing at a level 4, but the breadth of literature I had encountered gave me the skills and the interest to develop my writing from there. I remember activities that had no defined 'learning objective' for each lesson but where we all progressed at our own pace. Some were really inspiring - making our classroom into a papier mache resemblance of a scene from the Hobbit, and learning how to card and spin wool (viking studies!) are particularly good memories.

www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/jun/22/learned-to-teach-child-headteacher-primary-schools?CMP=new_1194&utm_content=buffer5e2c9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

My DCs are getting a better state primary education than I got in mid- late 80s.

My primary day was longer but we had no extra clubs, no smart boards, classes in huts, very textbook based, no learning through play, no French, no specialist music art teachers, no action on bullying, huge (33) classes.

DP says his small rural school was better though- home cooked lunches, grass pitches in playground, tiny classes.

DS's state secondary is much, much better than my private secondary in the 90s.

I went to Primary school in the 60's/70's. The school was fairly newly built and was pretty forward-thinking. I learned to read via Look and Say and Janet and John. Did topics on things like The Tudors and Light in an ad-hoc way. Of the 45 in my year, I think about 7 of us passed the 11+ and I remember quite a few not being able to read/write properly.

Went to Grammar school in the 70's/80's and it was like being back in the 1950's. Not remotely child-centred.

Trained to teach Primary in the 80's. All about being child-centred and the needs of children (all good) and about finding your own best methods - pro's and con's of different styles/ways of teaching reading, etc. Actual practice in schools varied widely according to the HT's ethos and the individual teacher. There was a lot of room for creativity and not doing a lot of basics and following the interests of the child.

For the children who have very supportive families and just seem to learn to read/spell/maths skills by osmosis, the teaching methods don't seem to matter so much. It is the children who struggle/have very little support at home who really need structured teaching and a high level of support and expertise - whole-class lessons/trying to stick to Government rules about what to teach when is not going to do it for them.

My infant school was utterly awful. Large classes terrible bullying and I learnt very little. I spent the whole of year 2 doing binka.

example of Binka

My middle school was lovely with kind teachers, interesting and well taught lessons. I went to two private secondary schools which both had terrible problems with bullying.

Teaching was very variable in the 80s. Bad teachers were rarely sacked. There was more freedom on the curriculum, which improved good of schools. The freedom was bad for schools with low expectations.

I was at secondary school 77-84. The same school that a friend of my Mum's taught at.

She now says "we failed those children, we failed a generation".

yes my mum was a teacher in primary and wasn't impressed with child centred learning and it was difficult to implicate. she started teaching in 60s and saw many changes.

DC1 was born in 82 & started school in 87; we're in Lancashire, it was a good state primary, a happy school with a lot of extra-curricular activity.

When the National Curriculum first came in it made no measurable difference to our school's performance; there's a grammar school here & the same number of children continued to pass the entrance exam.

The amount of extra-curricular stuff did start to diminish - partly because the old head retired & the new head was a complete cow - school continued to get outstanding Ofsteds though