Is it just me that feels this way?

[Melaniefhappy]

Hi Everyone,

Am I the only one to feel utterly disappointed, if not despairing, about the standard of education at my state primary school (in Hampshire)?

We recently changed schools (moved home) and whilst I totally accept that all schools are different, this new one offers little to inspire the children to do well; for example ..they do no spelling tests, do not ever correct spellings on written work, send home work that is appalling to be 'celebrated' by parents. Dare I go on as I don't wish to bore you ..however... they only read once a week with the children at any age (our old school read everyday - I know, as I went in twice a week with another army of mums to help this happen). Our new school refuses to consider this option despite friendly discussions with the teacher, offers of help, letters and meetings with the head.

Hence I feel I am home schooling first and foremost (in a fun way at home) with school doing the rest- harsh but true. In fact, if my children suceed in their primary education it will be despite the school's involvement, not as a result of it. They are very ready to book fun things - school trips, teachers dressing up for fun reward days, in classroom picnics, and lots of watching videos..but the academics seem to be second place at all times unless you are in the gifted and talented group - you lucky people you!!!

Just before you ask ...other parents in our class range from not really bothered about their children's reading and spelling standards through to worried but have been (like me) totally ground down by the 'no no no' attitude of the school. Despite gentle friendly approaches of concern, nothing happens- and I am the class rep!!! Trouble is, I do not wish to have to quite literally argue/fight with the school and force the issues through Governor levels and on to the Department of Education (or whatever it is called now). Am I a coward?

Yes I am on the PTA, and yes I go in to read, and help as much as I can in the school, and funnily enough there was lots of competition to be a Governor so I didn't take this route - rather wish I had now- might have had a real voice!!!.

Hence I am currently playing the lottery to afford to send my two children to private school - both my husband and I went, and without this, neither one of us would have done so well. Not well enough however to afford the fees today!

Sorry ...rant over!!! I just wondered if I was alone in this or if I am mad, unreasonable and expecting too much.
All the best, really sorry again to moan- it is either this or cry!
Melanie
x

Damn! I meant:
Iy went to miy granmuthers little howse.
(All those hyphens!!!)

IamtheEasterBunny,

Having 4 out of 7 words crossed out would certainly be demoralising - but does it really happen that way?
I checked dd (yr3) English book. Her teacher underlines mispelled words and writes the correct spelling in the margin. Dd only makes a few spelling errors - but I think that is because the work level is within her capability.

In class, creative writing often starts with class 'brainstorming' (my word) ideas - so lots of correctly spelt words are available on the white board.

So, although spelling errors are corrected, the corrections are kept to a minimum and this together with plenty of positive feedback (e.g 'good use of describing words') means she doesn't find corrections demoralising.

Spelling test wise - they seem to focus on important lists - days of the week, numbers ect. and other words which don't follow phonetic rules.

No, but Peacocks wants all the spelling mistakes marked! I was just making a point!

I don't think this school is the right one for you Melanie. Look around and see what other options there are and investigate them thoroughly, ask specifically how they tackle the issues which bother you at the current school. Ask for your dd to go for a trial day/week etc if possible. If you are making no headway with either the current teacher or the head, I think the sooner you change , the better.

I don't think the school approach is going to grow on you.

Jackstarbright wrote :" Her teacher underlines mispelled words and writes the correct spelling in the margin."
It seems that the said teacher corrects all the mistakes but there are not too many mistakes to correct because children are working within their capabilities.

smee

"as Bunny keeps saying, they are"

Bunny's children may be learning to spell. Thousands and thousands of others aren't. Thousands and thousands and thousands.

What urgent improvement would you recommend? What would you change? What do you think is going wrong? If you don't know what is going wrong, how do you know it's not the methodology?

Speaking as a university teacher, I actually feel there has been some slight improvement over the last 14 years. I no longer have to start my course by explaining that a verb is a doing word. Every little helps.

Thing is - you're all arguing as though you have the same object/referrent in your heads.

You probably don't.

There exists a wide variety in the quality of state schools. And, actually, by "wide" I mean "chasm".

There are schools that teach brilliantly with modern, liberal methods, and schools (sadly, many of them,) that don't.

The gap between what is on offer in the state system is a huge, unaddressed scandal. I say "unaddressed" because there is no real, mass political discourse on this. Just a large, fuzzy, incoherent conversation at cross-purposes.

Melaniefhappy - Perhaps you will find out that, though unfamiliar, actually your dc's school employs these methods well and it all works out.

However, it is equally likely that what your disquiet is actually about is that your dc's school employs the talk of modern, liberal education to mask serious short-comings. Statistically, this is quite likely.

Cory - I'm glad to hear that things are improving. How bad were they???
I'm being trained for university teaching at the moment - doing a PhD, attending classes to prepare me for university teaching. What we are having drummed into us is that we must expect to do remedial grammar and spelling for undergraduates and graduates. I'm in an English Department. Our department runs courses to help with the problem.
I find it worrying.

peacocks I don't know, I wish I did! Still though, I'll stick to my guns and say there has been real progress. This is on a more global front than spellings, but there were some stats in yesterday's paper:

In 1996/7 there were 1600 schools (almost half of all secondaries) where less than 30% of pupils gained five good (so A-C grade) GCSE's. Last year that was down to 247 schools. The place where schools have improved most is the inner city areas. In schools where over 50% of kids are on free school meals the proportion obtaining 5 good GCSE grades inc.English and Maths has jumped from 10% (in 1997) to almost 40% last year. A decade ago 35% of children left school with 5 good GCSE's, now it's 49.8%.

And yes some argue there's been a dumbing down of exams, but surely not to that extent. I do still agree that the standard of spelling isn't good enough, but as Bunny says the intense teaching methods being used now are so recent that we'll only really know if they've worked as those kids leave school, so in a couple of years time. Should be interesting..

HBfac you said:

I'm being trained for university teaching at the moment - doing a PhD, attending classes to prepare me for university teaching. What we are having drummed into us is that we must expect to do remedial grammar and spelling for undergraduates and graduates. I'm in an English Department. Our department runs courses to help with the problem.

If you are going to university to do an English degree I would imagine you already read quite widely?

Surely if children/young adults read very widely (good quality literature) and have a strong interest then spelling and grammar would 'self correct' over time?

Apparently not - or not always.

As I said, we're being told (and trained) to expect to do remedial work in grammar and spelling. Really. And there are a couple of courses running for under- and grads (native English speakers,) enrolled on Humanities subjects run by the university itself to deal with the issue.

And this is a serious university, so the students are quite well-endowed qualifications-wise. And it's English, not a science subject, where you might understand written-language skills being less proficient.

It really isn't just a myth propagated by the nay-sayers and reactionaries.

Personally, I am of the liberal camp, myself. But again, personally, I think the problem is that, whichever method, too many schools are failing to deliver.

It's very, very strange.

The thing is, some schools DO deliver - and deliver exceptionally well.

And it's not down to one particular style, or even (entirely) the "class" factor (though that is significant).

Smee, for example, has posted previously that, though her school doesn't have a vast middle class intake, it is a good school. And I can vouch for the truth that having a school that has fewer than average "disadvantaged" children does not make for a good school.

If you are lucky enough to have you dc in a "good" school, it is hard to imagine how bad a not v. good school can be. Or the sheer, bewildering variety of ways it can be "not good". and if your dc's school isn't very good - well, how would you ever really know? It's not like all of us parents are taken on a tour of schools, and then embedded in them for a few years, to observe and to get a "feel" for "good" schooling.

Which makes conversations about the education system really, really difficult.

Cortina, I think some people learn by osmosis but many simply don't.
I've been an avid reader all my life and make my living as a writer, yet my spelling is dire. My punctuation etc is not great either.
We simply didn't learn it at school.

One had to learn spellings in French, Spanish and Latin and I can still spell and conjugate them perfectly.

My children are given a spelling list each week...usually pertaining to a rule and have a test each Friday. It includes not only the words on the list but others that use the rule. They have done so since year one and their spelling, in some areas, is already much better than mine at ten.

And it really isn't that boring. It takes five mins a night and uses up half a lesson a week. Not much really.

hbfac- I too have always found it astonishing on MN how many refuse to engage with the idea that some schools are dreadful. That education provision is patchy.

If a poster dare say something bad many a reply will come back along the lines of 'well the school my Dcs attend gets 100%' or 'the school where I teach was voted best schoolin the universe.'

I'm like...well that's lovely isn't it...for you.

A bit like someone pointing out that half the world don't get enough to eat and my response is 'well my fridge is full.'

I looked around a lot of schools, far many than was sensible and saw lessons being taught. It was only a glimpse (although some I returned to more than once) and I got an idea that standards differed hugely. I am no expert.

Some of the 'differences' were the quality of the teaching (first impressions anyway), some of the classrooms were much better equipped than others and had a door which could be closed if needed. This sounds silly but so many seemed to be open plan with a lot of rowdy children running around outside making the whole environment seem chaotic. I don't understand how a maths lesson can be delivered if you have bedlam going on a yard behind you? I was told that children can tune this out? I am sure I would find it very off putting.

Some schools seemed stricter than others. In some schools in was acceptable for children to fidget and run around the classroom other teachers appeared to rule with a rod of iron.

Class sizes seemed to make the biggest difference to the overall feeling of 'quality' as far as I was concerned.

A prep school year one class (of 16) had divided the class up into equal groups of 8 for one lesson I observed. The teaching assistant was taking one half for some sort of literacy lesson (?) vocab of some sort was being reinforced while the the other half were with the teacher grouped around a white board discussing some text.

DS is now in a class of 26 and I wonder whether it is simply not possibly to do such a good job in a large class where the teaching assistant is simply an extra pair of hands?

If you add in a few unruly pupils and a lax atmosphere then it makes it even harder to teach?

Mind you I sound v Victorian and 20 or 30 years ago class sizes were similarly big?

Primary school seemed much stricter though, certainly no running in corridors etc which seems to be ok now (only a small thing but it surprised me). Symptomatic of other behaviour that is now deemed 'ok' but must make it must harder for a teacher to manage a class?

"if your dc's school isn't very good - well, how would you ever really know"

Because I would compare it to when I was at school, where we were encouraged to do our best. We didn't have this concept that kids can either do one thing (describing words) or another (spellings( but are incapable of doing more than one thing at once. Isn't this symptomatic of the low expectations of the education system?

I am at a loss to understand EB's response to the example sentence "Iy went to miy granmuthers little howse". Surely, the word 'I' is one of the most important in the language and it might be useful to point out this misspelling when the sentence is first discussed, not leave it until phonics-time. To not-comment is, effectively, to condone. Leave the rest of the mistakes until later if you must, but not a howler like that.

I would say that even if you have the traditional methods as was my dd's first school of daily individual reading, weekly spelling tests,weekly homework etc that is no guarantee that a child will read and spell better than if a child was in my daughter's current school where there is no individual reading, no spelling tests,and no homework.
On paper the first school should achieve, a class of 21,daily reading,weekly spellings, homework three days a week.
Of that class 10 were y2 and a third hadn't got a grasp of basic phonics nor could recognise the cvc words. The remaining 11 were year 1 and half were in the same position.I know because I used to go in to listen to readers.
What was the point of the weekly whole class spelling test when the words they were expected to spell couldn't be read by more than half the pupils.
In my daughter's current class of 27 I don't know for certain how well they read as there is no call for parents to go in to help out and listen to readers but I know dd isn't the only child who picks books from the highest section so Y6 level and most of her friends seem to pick books that seem at least the expected level for their age.
Dd seems to picking up correct spellings quickly and easily from the phonics sessions and her love of books.
When tested last week as I am sure must be a half termly thing (she has never mentioned it before) she only got one wrong out of fifty even though she hadn't been sent any home to practise.
For me I want her to have confidence to try and a love of learning. Far more important just now that she is happy to put down her ideas on paper than spend time going over lists of words and committing them to memory.

Despite my previous post, I don't think you can compare university teachers' experiences from different decades unless you are actually sure that you are talking about the same intake.

Years ago, going to university was something you only did if you were fairly bright- particularly if you came from a state school.
These days we are supposed to educate about half the population.

So you cannot deduce from the reminiscences of university teachers whether students had been taught better 30 years ago: a sizeable proportion of the students we have to teach never came within their radar. They went into apprenticeships, skilled manual labour etc. The kind of jobs that are now very thin on the ground. They wouldn't have know how much an average plodder would have picked up from his state school regarding language or grammar or any other skills, because average plodders from state schools did not go to university 30 years ago. Now they do.

I had an illustration of the reverse phenomenon this year: for the first time for a long time, a large number of applicants meant that my department has only got students with 3 As in the first year. And it's amazing how pleased all colleagues are and how much students seem to have been taught at school since last year. I don't actually think this is because of the literacy programme per se: I think it is because the students who knew less and thought less and worked less hard didn't have a chance of getting in this year.

Of course, 3 As is no longer the sign of genuine giftedness it was 30 years ago. But ut is still better than Bs and Cs, so the elimination of Bs and Cs will have made a difference.

Litchick - that's one of my Mumsnet pet hates too! The full fridge analogy is very good - I might borrow it sometime if you don't mind.

Thank goodness someone is looking at this historically cory!

It backs up the point I was making (much!) earlier that people just a few decades ago, didn't need to read or write to a high standard. Many didn't have to fill out application forms or attend interviews. It is a completely new world as regards education, and we are still learning how to do it.

Give us a chance everyone! But for goodness sake, PLEASE let us make learning fun!

30 years ago, the Swedish school system (where I was then being educated) had the reputation in being top of the world, in that it got the largest proportion of its population educated to a good standard.

The UK at that time had a relatively poor reputation in educational circles. I remember this well, because both my parents were teachers and had a lot of contact with English teachers and I also spent some time being educated in this country.

It is worth remembering that the poor reputation was not because noone got a good education. It was because the provision was so patchy. The ones at the bottom end often got a very poor education indeed.

But we have little record of the educational achievements of those children who did not do get O-levels and A-levels 30 years ago, because there weren't the tests and targets and records kept. And someone who became a road worker in the 1960s would have very little need to do any writing after leaving school.

For those of you who want to remember what education was like for the lower state school spectrum, Barry Hines' Kes is a good book to read. Hardly the golden age of mass education. And Hines was a schoolteacher. He knew.

Cory, I don't think they even published cse, O and A levels 20/30 years ago and certainly not in any per school 'league table' format.

What was certainly not published was what the children actually wrote in those exam papers. So in hindsight, we can't really know how badly you could write and still get away with it.

I got a B in English language O-level after a total of about 6 months in the country: I certainly didn't have anything resembling native speaker competency.

35 years ago, only grammar school children were allowed to take O levels. Secondary modern children were deemed too dim. They took CSEs. Children at 'tech schools' took either O levels or CSEs,learnt 'technical' stuff and typewriting. At Grammar school, I had the advantage of learning Latin (couldn't do that at sec modern or tech)...

There is no comparison of educational achievement today with achievement 40 years ago as the goalposts, demographic, exam marking parameters, etc have changed. (In fact, if cory and jsb are right, there is no comparison, purely because no records were kept at the time!!)

veni vidi vici