Time for a radical think of education?

[XingMing]

Some interesting ideas in this article, but would be interested in other opinions

Hmm. Try and get the first two past the teaching unions? Lots of children wouldn’t benefit from longer days at school. My DDs had hobbies. Prep schools usually do have longer days but longer holidays.

There are cheaper private schools. Capita were set up to be just that. The charity model is the best one for private schools but they have to cover their expenditure and history tells us cheap schools offer less than the others. So not really sure what the advantage would be. Other than for the usual sharp elbowed brigade. This won’t help the dc that need it most. Neither will forcing longer days and more homework.

Parents whose DC struggle the most often don’t access good pre school education. In fact sometimes none. Their children would be even further behind their peers. If all children had to start pre school education at 3 and leave at 6, fair enough. But who is going to ensure all children get fair access? At least starting school makes some attempt to level the playing field. By the age of 3 it’s already clear some dc are way behind their peers.

Therefore it’s 0-4 education that needs real money and a change. Try and get as many dc as possible up to a good standard. By 3 it’s already clear who the strugglers are.

I can see all the concerns, but have wondered for years why the long summer holiday lives on, and why we examine at 16 when kids aren't really about to leave school until they are 18 unless for work or further training.

You are completely right that it's 0-4 years which would make the real difference. It's so sad that some children arrive at school so far behind others in terms of language and social skills. But how you compensate for inadequate parenting if beyond my limited intelligence.

..is beyond me.. not if... Duh!

As a teacher (Primary school, 13 years) I don’t agree with a longer school day -not from a staff point of view, I’m in school from 7.30am-5.30pm most days anyway; but for the children. There is more to life than school at this age. I do however agree that the summer holidays are far too long and that formal education starts too early. I think l that EYFS approach including play-based and outdoor learning opportunities should be extended to age 7 in line with virtually every other civilised country in the world.

It started off as having the potential to be quite an interesting discussion starter, until it got to this paragraph

We should ignore the predictable objections of the teaching unions, who have hardly covered themselves with glory during the pandemic, and renegotiate the national contract, which holds back innovation and rewards the less committed.

Which completely takes away from the pretence of it being a rational discussion starter.

I don’t agree learning should be play based until 7. We have a different population here from many other countries and what everyone else does isn’t necessarily best here. Asian countries routinely have classes of 60 and very high achievement. To achieve highly children work all hours to succeed and please their parents. So no, we cannot just cherry pick a few things we like snd think we are the same as Finland. We are not.

Some children are more than ready for school at 4 and can read at 4. Others take longer but would it be acceptable to keep them in a play based kindergarten? Others will be seen as racing ahead at school. Undoubtedly private school. The majority of parents won’t agree to it.

Look at all the threads on Oxbridge on MN. Some children do incredibly well. Virtually none will have started school at 7. It’s debatable whether foreign kindergartens are quite as fluffy as we are lead to believe either. Serious learning does take place! Plenty of children here have a fairly slow play based start but don’t all suddenly take off at 7. Generations of under achieving and Intelligence also come into play.

I do think we could do more to ensure some dc have a better start. Most DC are screened as babies. Social services know some families. Sure Start was established but used by parents who didn’t need it. It was too loosely targeted. We need to be more prescriptive about who gets what. If we did development checks every year, we would know who was falling behind. We need to be more accurate with targeted help.

We used to have early nursery places in my authority. Children identified as needing nursery before they were entitled to a place. Some parents wanted this and others refused. Some DC started school with no nursery attendance: were not potty trained and were barely speaking. Certainly not able to play cooperatively. We do have a good idea who these dc are. But we don’t ensure they get much help. They often come from families who don’t want a nursery because family do the childcare.

Teachers struggle to teach any child that’s obviously behind and they often do not catch up like mc DC do. It’s very difficult to get the lowest achieving cohort in a primary school to be nearer to average. It’s not just a money issue. It’s identifying the DC and ensuring they are accessing nursery provision and not being left behind in chaotic homes. Then the schools need to carry on the work started at nursery age. It would mean a huge effort though.

Our school holidays are based on the church and the harvest. Children worked. They don’t now and two weeks of the summer need redistributing to the half terms.

some children arrive at school so far behind others in terms of language and social skills. But how you compensate for inadequate parenting yes because every child who starts school with a speech delay or poor social skills must be neglected by shit parents.

So they what kids to start formal education later, but have longer days and longer terms taught by more people from industry who might know ABOUT X but not necessarily how to impart their knowledge of X to children. Right.

A huge study by the University of Chicago that I read during my PGCE suggested that a very large part of backward social and language skills could be laid directly at parenting styles. In a nutshell, the more words a child heard between 0-3 the closer the correlation, and the more encouraging those words were, the higher the child could be expected to achieve in education. The studied groups were selected from all across the city.

@SleepingStandingUp, I didn't infer any such thing but it clearly touches a nerve.

Haha yeah I took umbrage at your comment, further proof I'm an inadequate parent. The point is some of the kids who turn up at school with poor language and social skills will be because of poor parenting, some deliberately so and some not. And some children will turn up at school with poor language and social skills for other reasons. Approaching every child with poor language and social skills ion the assumption their parents are just shit really isn't helping those kids.

The children who have failed to meet developmental milsestones do so for a variety of reasons. Poor parenting is one of them. Great parents mitigate the effects of SN as far as they can. Other parents fail to engage with schools, do not use nurseries, fail to teach their DC etc etc etc. Chaotic lifetyles do hinder children. Good parents ensure that does not happen. So greater support is needed from the DC wh do not have the great parents. By and large we know who they are.

@PresentingPercy your post unintentionally comes across as very condescending. I’m a school governor and volunteer in the youth justice system as well. Virtually all parents care deeply about their children and want the best for them. Poverty provides a whole host of very real obstacles to certain aspects of parenting and many parents can be intimidated by teachers and schools (and social workers) which is partly responsible for lack of engagement.

Instead of making it sound like parents are the problem a more constructive approach would be to work with parents in a way that works for them to support them manage to very real problems created by poverty while advocating policies to reduce childhood poverty.

Great! But no one does this effectively do they? I also said “poor parenting” is one of the reasons DC struggle. And it certainly is. Other factors contribute too. Poverty isn’t the only issue either. Plenty of people who work are not great at parenting either. However social services, schools, doctors etc do know who needs help. I chaired a panel where dc were accelerated into nursery. All the parents were known to the bodies putting forward the DC. Not all were poor. The children had needs and we tried to address them. But if we want progress, these dc must be helped at an earlier stage. And some parents don’t care that much about their dc! They really don’t.

Poor parenting takes different forms among the affluent but definitely exists.

You can work and be poor...

I think supporting and engaging with parents yields the best outcomes and the vast majority of parents even those you find wanting do care about their children.

You talk about stability as if any person wants instability for themselves or their kids. Ignoring the root cause of problems means fixes are just plasters

But in this scenario, you are not going to fix the cause of the root problems. There are too many of them. Absent parents, Drug taking, prison, insufficient money, over crowded housing, etc etc. What you can do is make more effort with the children. Not that that is easy. Far from it. Homework clubs. Breakfast clubs to be included with free school meals. Ensure teaching is of the highest quality. Mentoring. One to one coaching etc. Raising ambition.

I agree there is work poverty but parents might want the best for dc, but sometimes that’s a fairly low threshold. Children in care are some of the worst attainers at school and have the worst outcomes.

He wants unqualified teachers? Foolishness. Reminds me of schools who will pay extra for a member of staff with a PhD, but ignore if they are actually able to impart that knowledge to children, which isn't guaranteed.

My children being taught by unqualified teachers. No thank you.

Homework is shown to be of no benefit to primary school children so they don’t need longer days to accommodate this. Children need time to play with their friends and be part of family life not to be farmed out to someone else.

The fundamental issue here is not only does the author seem to understand nothing about child development and pedagogy she is rolling out the same old trope that schools should be responsible for fixing society’s problem. It doesn’t get much more Victorian than that.

I think there is an argument for practicing what has been taught to catch up. This needs oversight and help being available when DC need it. It will be expensive and some DC will not take to this easily. They would rather not be working when others are playing. Children with no extra help will get further behind. So there has to be accellerated learning if we can possibly manage it. I fear we cannot.

I largely agree with you about the solutions except demonising the parents. Supporting the parents with the issues they face rather them writing them off as part of the problem is essential. It’s what we do in the youth justice system to get long lasting results regarding re-offending. We should be partnering with and supporting parents! Your attitude is terrible and part of the reason a lot of parents like that don’t engage with the authorities...

But I’m not working in this field. If people don’t engage it’s down to you. A lot of us rarely see improvement. Read the Times today about DC not engaging and tell me they have great parents. I think softly softy simply hasn’t worked. 250,000 DC called you for extra lessons. 125,000 engaging.