why do I read education proposals from our government and want to hurt someone?

[Curmudgeonlett]

"A "root-and-branch" review is planned into what is taught in English primary schools to allow more time for reading, writing and maths, Ed Balls has said.
The children's minister said some set subjects and "clutter" would be cut to allow more flexibility and all primary pupils to be taught a foreign language."

reading, writing, maths and a foreign language

what about arts, music, creativity, social skills, sports skills, cooking, playing, games

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7135078.stm

Oh fgs. There is more to primary education than the three Rs, important as they are.

I'm with you on this. The clutter = happy days at school making stuff, show and telling stuff, singing, playing, cooking, painting.

At DD's school they've already lost their afternoon playtime so they can read instead.

Would be interested to hear teachers' views.

I'd be more interested to hear the news that we've got a chance to vote this bunch of control freaks out of office...

There's a brilliant novel just out, by Jan Fortune-Wood called the Standing Ground which looks at the possible consequences of this sort of control into the electorate's lives...

imo the clutter = sats, prescribed literacy and numeracy all morning. they will only be happy when 6 year olds are taking gcses.
there is so much more to school and life than reading and writing and numeracy.
why don't they stop tinkering and let us get on with our jobs

I have this recurring mental image of a school for newborns. Catch them as soon as they're born.

I read an interesting article about how it doesn't matter how good the early years academic teaching is, if the children are not emotionally ready to receive it it's a complete waste of everyone's time.

My DS2 was at a Steiner school and didn't START learning to read till 7. He'll be 8 in January and is completely fluent.

Art and msic are SOOOOOOO important for young children. They teach social skills better that any PHSE lesson.

DD1 had no music lessons for the last 18 months of her time at junior school (strange how they managed to write a music report for her?) She is really musical- got no recognition for her abilities because they only take notice of kids with an IQ of over 130 for their gifted and talented crap.

She passed grade 1 guitar within 8 months of her first lesson and is about to take grade 2 (another 8 months later-average kids take 18 months just to reach grade 1!)
Realy annoys me that her strongest subject was given no priority or recognition.
YES core subjects are important (she did more than ok in these) but the arts develop so many skills beyond producing splodgy painting or banging on a tambourine.

Obviously she didn't have her guitar lessons at school- we paid for these privately! But what about kids who are musically talented whose parents can't afford lessons? How will they develop their abilities?

Whilst I certainly don't want to see any more testing and rigid curriculum I certainly do want to see the introduction of languages. It is proven that the best time to learn a language is in the early years of education and that waiting until secondary is just too late. The rest of Europe start learning languages in primary and look at how much better they are than the Brits.
Agree with 'smartie' re the music but then I think my dd shows an aptitude for languages and would like this to be catered for whereas she has no aptitude for art which will always be somewhat of a waste of time for her.

phse in secondary is a waste of time.
art lessons teach more social skills than any amount of phse.
cooking, playing itn he playground, particularly unspervised play teaches more social interaction than any amoutn of classroom based activities

"clutter" is what a good school is about.

It has not been proven that the early years are the best for learning a language- simply because noone has taken the care to define what 'best' language learning is. What is easier for most people before the age of 10 is to learn a phonetically accurate rendering of foreign sounds. But this is only a small part of language learning- and would of course be totally dependent on the government being able to provide native speakers for all those primary school kids. Otherwise all that will happen is that the kids will give a phonetically accurate rendering of their teacher's English accent!

When it comes to the other parts of language learning: understanding the structure of the language, analysing books, understanding other cultures etc., it has been shown that older learners have the edge on the little ones.

Having been a language teacher for over 20 years, the government's take on languages sounds totally bonkers to me. They want to introduce it at infants school level (when the kids will only learn a few words per term) and take it away in secondary school, where they'd be able to work a lot faster. What's the good of being able to lisp a few words like a Frenchman if you never get beyond the baby stage? I had constant access to Finnish speakers in early childhood and can count to 6 and say good morning in correctly pronounced Finnish. Fat lot of good that has ever done me! On the other hand, I took up Spanish in 6th Form and can get by quite well in it- I can read a newspaper or a scientific article or hold a reasonable conversation.

It is generally agreed that the people who are best at foreign languages are the Scandinavians and the Dutch. Don't know much about the Dutch, but the Swedes don't even start to read until 6/7 and don't take up English (their first foreign language) until 10/11. The one major difference is that they are not allowed to give it up until they leave school! So the message is that everybody has to learn this, noone can be too dim.

I should add that Swedish education is much more focused on practical stuff in the early years, and that schools tend to be very more positive about non-academic activities that pupils do with their parents (not like here, where my dc's school send us suggestion sheets about what we are to talk about to our children in the summer holidays!). It's the control freak thing that gets me about the government's attitude to education; the assumption is that children have to be protected from their parents, educated away from them, parents have to be told what to do, because nothing any parent could offer could conceivably be as good as what the teacher has to offer. Yes, we all know there are bad parents, but do we really accept that they are the majority? Or that ordinary non-academic people don't have useful life skills to teach?

I was interested to note that Ed Balls also believes that "Childhood is better than it's been ever. It's not toxic, most young people are happy, most young people are doing better at school than they were, most young people are accessing new technologies, making friends... the trends are positive," (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7101976.stm)

I'm so relieved - my children are going to grow up happy because they are meeting educational targets and using IT

If, by "clutter", he means "meaningless paperwork and pointless assessments", I'm with him. However, I strongly suspect he means all the bits my five year old finds interesting

cory - I agree with most of what you write.

One of the huge barriers to language learning in the UK is the absence of proper teaching of English grammar. I'm quite pro early second language teaching (with native-speaker teachers) but there isn't much point IMO teaching children French, German or Spanish until they have a decent understanding of grammar.

Teaching children a language in a classroom situation will never be the same as language learning in a family environment.

Cory, your post makes so much sense and I completely agree with your last paragraph.

I think there should be more sports personally and competitive ones.

I pay for my 6 year old to go to a french group where they play games and sing songs and there is no formalised teaching .. he's been going for 2 years now

if that's what they mean, though I doubt it, I think that's great

my concerns are the clutter .. clutter is what makes children children ..

I was really upset at this report as well. I am pleased at the idea of doing a foreign language - they do Spanish at ds1's school, in a very relaxed way. But am at the 'clutter' being got out of the way.

Imo, what they should do is abolish Y2 SATS, if they HAVE to assess them, have a reading test, where the children go and read to the head for 15 mins.

My cousin's children are in Canada, where they don't do any formal literacy until the equivalent of Y1. Kindergarten is 2-3 hours a day I think, and they play and learn to be together (this is at reception age). Their results are far better than ours by age 11.

I would also introduce another reform, which would be to have schools available but not compulsory till age 6 or 7. Why? Dd was ABSOLUTELY ready to start reception, is loving it, doing fantastically well. But the boys need more time to run around (judging by ds1, who is doing well, but I think would flourish more with more freedom). Writing is SUCH a hard thing for some boys, it feels really hard to judge them all by the same yardstick.

PMSL @ Ed Balls saying "Childhood is better than it's been ever."

Yes Comrade, and our tractor production has increased 5000%.....

You know that surnames go way back in history (another subject I bet they'll erode even further), so that a Smith was a blacksmith, a tanner was a tanner, etc.

So, what's your historic take on the good minister's family name?

don't know, Desiderata, but I think he should be strung up by it...

I think that all children need PHSE lessons. All you have to do is go into a playground and see how nasty children are to each other.

It makes no difference whether the kids are gifted or mentally retarded, they all need help with their social skills.

Where I work, PHSE is taught by a designated teacher and it is taught WELL. It is also allocated a reasonable amount of funding. For example we had the Scary Guy visit the school.

www.thescaryguy.com/

I have no idea what changes are going to be made to the primary school curriculum. I hope there will be more room for personalised learning.

The special school I work at has skills groups every morning. For example a child who has poor gross motor skills is made to do extra PE. There are skills groups for those who can't read or need extra time to learn ICT skills. Admitally there would have to be a lot more funding to provide this in mainstream.

idlingabout- Actually doesn't matter if kids are good or not at art and music- they ENJOY it (or is that not allowed anymore?) can learn social skills through these subjects and should be exposed to it to see if they have an apptitude for it.

Anna 888 agree that good progress in language teaching is having a good grasp of the grammar of your own language. When I was at school I was rubbish at languages as we did no grammar at all.However- don't agree with the absense of grammar teaching today- take a look at the literacy strategy and "grammar for writing" as used by teachers today. If anything it focusses too much on the structure of language and does not allow for enough creativity.