Michael Give and the curriculum review

[Alwaysworthchecking]

Am I right to feel wound up by this man and his ideas? On the news this morning it said that education has concentrated too much on theories of learning and not enough on facts. Surely if you are an educator and understand your theories, you can give children the skills to think and thus create life-long learners. Give them a diet of facts and all you have are parrots who lack the skills to critically evaluate those facts.

Grrr!

Is he for real?

"I think there possibly also needs to be a different debate here between primary and secondary education. However, young children learn best when they are taught in 'topics'. "

This has been the orthodoxy for the last thirty thirty years but seems hard to prove.

Isn't part of being an intelligent thinker being able to make connections between one area of learning and another? Don't topics facilitate that? Hard to prove, I agree, but strikes me as common sense.

Claig, I want progress. When I work with children (my own and others) that is what I am aiming for. I am left-wing. Seems Gove and I have more in common than I thought.

'Claig, I want progress. When I work with children (my own and others) that is what I am aiming for...Seems Gove and I have more in common than I thought.'

We all want progress. That's why we should back Gove and vote for the party that delivers progress, raises standards and reverses dumbing down.

I am so glad Gove is changing education, and the curriculum. I attended an open day at public school the other day, saw classes taught and thought " why was I not given this standard of education, when I attended my shitty comp?" I attended school years ago, but even then they had their own politically correct agenda, and the standard and content on the school curriculum was poor.
A local school near to me used to be a grammar school it taught latin! Now the local older people (who attended it) tell me it's a shite hole, dumbed down by Thatcher and subsequent governments.
Thank god the public schools set their own curriculum. I'ts the reason I shall send my children to public schools. They will not have to suffer, various governments' interfering in their education.

Right- or left-wing I think everyone exists that a shocking waste is occurring. Bright but poor children are not progressing as much as they did forty or fifty years ago. Social mobility has almost halted.

Giving such children soft subjects at senior school is not helping them.

It's bad for all of us if talent is not being encouraged. As a citizen of GB.co.uk I don't want to think of people who might have been engineers or teachers or doctors never getting there because they went to schools where people were afraid to tell them or were too out of touch to know that you need 'rigorous' exam passes to progress.

ABR1DE. I had a far superior education at my primary than secondary. Now many primary chool children leave without being able to read and write.

Has parenting changed? Can we blame parents/parent? Or is it down to the schools.
I feel it's both. Most of my freinds had two parents, many children today are brought up by one person and that is hard. I should know, my father brought us up alone after my mother's death. It was difficult enough for him to look after four children on his own let alone help us with homework. Something has to suffer. As said I don't entirely blame schools.

Or perhaps we better behaved at Primary co's we could get the cane!whaaaaak! By the time I got to the shitty comp, they had outlawed it at that school. Those who wanted to misbehave could with little consequence.

I think it is partly parents, too. I read some research about the effects of reading to your children every night and future academic results. And of listening to them read to you. I have been a volunteer at the village primary for seven years. I see lots of children who receive no help whatever at home. In fact I would go further and say they are actually hindered by feckless parents.

I agree that it is not fair to put all the responsibility on to teachers. They are not social workers. The ones I know seem to work very hard.

Sorry, should have spelled out what I mean by feckless parents (it is not a class or single parent issue): letting them stay up, letting them watch unsuitable material, poor attendance no ability to be the grown-up in the relationship and tell the child that they are going to bed at eight and they are going to learn their spellings.

ABrde. I know one mother who cannot read or write. How can she help her child with the homework? She has asked me to speak to the school that our children attend ( to ask whether he can have further help) As I'm 'in' with the school governors. The school head says the child's getting all the help he needs. We both feel he's not.

What will happen to this child? He only has his mother and she does not read or write? She would take him to a tutor but cannot afford it. Do you know of any organisations that could help? It doesn't help her as she is practically the only single woman in her childs class, it's a wealthy area, and I sure she feels 'out of place'. Any suggestions kindly received.
back later.

I think I may have to leave my own thread to it. Can't afford private, so can't really comment on that. The cane? Seriously? You had a smiley, so maybe not.

Will go to my cosy progressives corner. I can't back the party of the true progressives as I just feel too ideologically distant from them. (At the moment I mean - I'm always open to suggestion and am not so blinkered as to declare I could never support them...as unlikely as it feels right now.)

Thanks for the thought-provoking debate. Feel free to continue without me.

ABR1DE. Research shows that the children of single parents do less well at school. It makes sense that if you have two (responsible) people at home it is far easier than being a lone parent. I know lone parents and they tell me it is very hard. My father was very responsible, but our homework suffered when my mother died, as he did not have the time to do it with four children, all at different stages of primary and secondary education.
Whilst I do dinner DH reads to the children/does homework. In that I must point out that my dinner making skills only last at the most 15 minutes! Jamie Oliver's 30 minute meals have nothing on my 15 minute meals!I should have written the book before him!

I am a school governor. The "creative curriculum" has its good points, but some aspects make you want to grab the educational powers that be and scream "Just what are you on?!!!"

And unfortunately some (I repeat some because I know teachers who groan when a new crackpot method is thrust upon them) teachers lap up every new idea and display absolutely no critical thinking themselves.

They introduced these weird glove puppets at school, meant to represent different aspects of learning. There was much training and many inset days devoted to their promotion. I conducted a (discreet!) survey of dd and her friends and found that not one of them had the faintest clue what these puppets were for. They knew that "Gertie Giraffe" or whoever was flapped in front of them every so often, but that was as far as it went.

What a complete waste of time and resources.

~Agree with Claig and abridge. Except to say: primary teaching in particular didn't used to rely on parents. Not when I was growing up. Six to seven hours of school was enough for handwriting, spellings, maths, history, geography, testing, testing, needlework for chuff's sake. Because there wasn't any faffing around. Current primary curriculum depends on parents and we've created a society where it ain't going to happen at home for too many chidren. THAT'S why social mobility is screwed. Because the "progressives" made your education depend on the social status and commitment of your parents.

faffing around: viz, Gertie (!grammercy) projects, projects, abandonment of rote (for times tables ) too many dress up days, massage (I kid you not) ..I'm sure we all have our own examples.

'Current primary curriculum depends on parents and we've created a society where it ain't going to happen at home for too many chidren. THAT'S why social mobility is screwed. Because the "progressives" made your education depend on the social status and commitment of your parents.'

yes, I am certain that's part of it. As far as I could see, what happened was they read research that said 'Children do better at school if their parents help them at home!' but then they got cause and effect muddled up - so rather than trying to give the children with the non-helping parents the things at school that the kids with the helping parents were getting at home, they decided they would instruct all parents to help (regardless of the fact that some can't and some won't) and increase the importance of parental help in the learning process. Which simply increased the gap. Sheer stupidity.

Yes, I agree, seth.

I was/am my kids' mother, not their teacher.

Thoroughly agree.

I despair when I hear the "school management team" spout forth about not doing this, that or the other "because some children can't access it" I really want to go and get Michael Gove and storm the school. How very dare they decide that children can't cope with - and this is a particular example I raised - classical music. I was met with a mulish expression and the line that "it's elitist and not what children hear at home". GRRRRR - well, that's exactly why you should be introducing the odd bit to them, then.

Gertie Giraffe, they're having a laugh.

Agree with Appletrees and seth. It is a cop out to put a burden on parents. It is a way to excuse teh failure of the system. They even create contracts with parents so that they have an excuse when they don't deliver a quality education. It's not the fault of the teachers, it's the fault of the progressives in charge of the system. The ship is heading for the rocks, but Captain Gove will turn it around and reverse the titanic mess launched by progressive philosophy.

My DD is still reeling from the impact of the last set of changes. She attends a local Academy and the school is supposed to have additional freedom regarding what and how it teaches. I wish that were true!

DD is supposed to select her GCSE options at the end of this year but, due to an increasing number of subjects that the school regards as "core" (i.e. compulsory), and their insistence that students must now study a language and a humanity subject, she will only be allowed to select one solitary additional GCSE. Choice? What choice?

Many of the students are very upset because they have no interest in foreign languages and/or humanities, so feel that they are being prevented from studying subjects that would be more relevant to them. What makes it worse is that a student with, for example, an aptitude for language is actually prevented from studying more than one because the timetable prevents it!

The current system is not about educating children, it is about forcing square pegs into round holes to improve league table results.

And what is worse is that this has been tried before and failed miserably. Have people forgotten when languages were compulsory until Yr11 and it proved a complete waste of time for some students? I fear that this latest emphasis on a "return to facts" may risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater, alienating many young people who do not respond well to "facts and dates" subjects. In the past, those students would have gravitated towards subjects more appropriate for their learning styles but that choice is being removed from them by increased focus on league tables (despite schools insisting that this isn't the case).

I think core subjects are vital, and one foreign language should be part of the core. Every other country in the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa studies English. Why can't our children study at least one foreign language. It is cultural, it helps our economy and it opens our minds to the culture of the world. It may reveal talents that students never thought they had.

Labour, as ever, dumbed down and scrapped compulsory modern languages. Estelle Morris said it was because kids were truanting. What have we come to? Talk about failure and dereliction of duty. Maybe we should just teach football and rap music all day long? then we might have less truants.

Anto-truancy drive removed French

Teaching history chronologically does not mean doing it in one long row. Quite a few people are using the "Trivium" which is where you go through history three times, getting more and more detailed at each stage. History needs to be the centre of the curriculum, not an afterthought.

I'm currently using The Story of the World with my little girl, as a little extra, just to try and give her some chance of understanding history. I am learning an embarrassing amount alongside her.

I agree that some certain subjects should be compulsory but not up to GCSE level. If a student hates a subject then no amount of compulsion will improve that student's results. Some of DD's classmates have been "studying" French since primary school but have very little fluency despite four years of lessons. Any latent talent they had would surely have been revealed by now. Forcing them to fidget through another two years of French lessons will have little effect on their final GSCE results but could be detrimental to those in the class who do want to learn.

I agree that some core subjects should be taken through to GCSE because they have an impact on day-to-day life but I'm afraid I don't see language as one of them. (And I speak as someone who studied and enjoyed French, German and Latin.)

'Some of DD's classmates have been "studying" French since primary school but have very little fluency despite four years of lessons.'

I think we need to improve standards of teaching. It will take time, but it is possible.

What subjects does she want to study instead of languages?

I went to an independent school so the whole secondary debate hs come as a massive shock to the system because I have had no idea about it. At our school we had to do English Language, English Literature, Maths, French, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and then we could chose from either History or Geography, then we picked a further two options of our own (I did Latin and Design & Technology). I didn't know aything about the science/dual science award as an option and I find it so depressing that it's not taught as individual subjects any more.

I think the English Baccalaureate is a common sense idea, and a good way of working out which schools are more academic, which is surely the point of league tables, to work out the kind of results that a school can get and if you would ideally like your DC to go to that kind of school.

As for faddy primary school teaching, I find it equally terrifying. Things do need to change.