State education system, is it broken?

[minimathsmouse]

I believe the wheels have fallen off the state education system. You might not agree but I have read so many posts here from parents who have had and are still having huge problems with their child's school. Many people seem to have worries about standards of teaching, clashes of ideology and problems with making up the deficit with tutors and home study. Horrendous SEN provission, huge class sizes, lack of provision for able pupils, the list goes on. It is truely depressing to think so many children are not receiving the education they deserve.

How many people believe the whole system has failed? Are falling standards only due to poor teaching or wider problems that are not being addressed within the system?

Minimathsmouse - your ideas seem to chime pretty well with the thoughts of the Headteacher at my dss' school.

Rabbitstew, Hi, Do you think children could be set across the yr or even school? I think it could work even within the modern scheme or within the traditional 3Rs to meet the needs of all children working at all levels.

Emy, you were still allowed to hit children with sticks for making a noise in those days. Now battering children is not an option, class sizes have to be smaller.

No real need to set or stream IMO.

Good teachers should be able to tackle kids collectively and deal with their learning needs IF they have enough resources and support from Senior Management and IF they are ambitious for their pupils.

However often things are allowed to limp along, with promising pupils achieving mediocre results in mediocre classrooms with few text books, inadequate marking of work, and teachers who actually don't know how to achieve top quality academic results (possibly because they are even teaching out of their subject areas).

Come on - loads of kids left school being unable to read or write. They were just often very good at hiding it.

Instead of being labeled 'dyslexic' they were labeled 'thick'. But either way they were failed.

However of course, there also used to be a lot more jobs that didn't require you to read or write.... (Or perhaps a lot less foreigners happy to take those jobs?)

Agree Indigo Bell.

20% of children leave primary school without achieving a level 4 in english.

Sounds terrible, but actually, a level 3 reader is a pretty good reader. My dd is at level 3 and she would be able to read The Sun! (although she it too young to be allowed to).

My mother taught in schools in the 1990s and many of the parents could not read. However, all the children she taught left school being able to read.

My dd is in a school with quite a disadvantaged intake but everyone in her class is a reader. They are in year 2. Ok, some are still reading scheme books but a quarter are reading young puffins. The poorest readers get tons of extra support. The best readers are expected to be more and more creative with their writing. How is this system broken?

Schools were terrible in the old days. The primary school my mother attended was brutal. (a family friend had a nervous breakdown in their early teens due to way the school was run) The curriculum was limited. (All they ever did was arithmetic, which they could either do easily or not do at all) and only 20% of the town got to have a proper secondary education. Those who failed the 11+ (80% of the children) stayed on in their primary schools til the age of 14/15.

Boffinmum, your post made me laugh!!!

Yes by the way I am not advocating a return to 50 per class and I think there are lots of fantastic things we have achieved for our children, educationally.

Perhaps though we should take a step back in terms of expectations and insert a little bit of higher expectations in the curriculum so that standards are higher - and I don't just mean in academic things.

For example with drawing - why can't the children be taught how to draw? My DD is not very creative but responds very well to being taught drawing skills - yet at school they are just left to mess around with paints and that's hugely demotivating to her - and other children like her I suspect?!

PS My dad is an artist by profession and is quite annoyed by the concept that art is just something you "mess around" with - hence a great supporter of formal art teaching in schools, which is rather lacking ime so far. (DD in Y1).

Boffin, I have found schools to be very well recourced in terms of books and equiptment (primary anyway)and these resources alone do not "teach" children especially in a noisy and chaotic classroom where children are working on different activities, generating different needs for noise or quiet, movement and access to resources. The teacher has the task of "teaching, supervising, assessing, managing behaviour, delegation to TA and giving feedback to pupils. These activities seldom run smoothly but must be maintained in every class to make differentiation work.

Most parents here probably struggle to multi-task and keep on top of 3 or 4 kids, a teachers job is a hard one, made more difficult because of an idealogical opposition to the whole school management of setting or streaming. IMO

The school where I volunteer is very well resourced, but there is little opportunity to access them effectively.

Often class is like bedlam. The literacy hour is a sight to behold.

Minimathsmouse - they've introduced what they call phase teaching at my dss' two-form entry school - where Years 1 & 2 together are a phase, Years 3 & 4 another phase, etc. This requires an awful lot of co-ordination between the four teachers responsible for each phase and slightly different responsibilities for each teacher (as well as each teacher being responsible for a particular class within the phase with whom they spend the majority of their time), but does allow for a bit more fluidity between, eg, Years 1 and 2, in terms of streaming for ability in literacy and numeracy. A creative curriculum is still followed, but two years of children doing the same topics at the same time at slightly different levels. I think the pooling of expertise and knowledge can work well IF it is managed effectively and every teacher pulls their weight and is willing to work in this manner. It also requires very good methods of tracking children's progress within the phases and still requires more specialist teachers giving more focused attention for children at either extreme of the ability spectrum.

Appletrees - you have a familiar posting style. Have you been on MN a while? Hundreds of times?

Rabbitstew, WOW. This to me seems like the perfect way to manage all abilities within the modern approach to teaching.

It does rely on all teachers knowing their strengths and weaknesses and pulling their weight.(my literacy is weak!) Requires a great deal of planning and management but overcomes the issue of planning differentiated learning that falls apart at class level.

I think this doesn't occur in most primary schools because of the need for teachers to plan together plus some logistical problems and time tables. The first state primary DS1 attended considered this approach but couldn't get the aggreement of all staff.

Acanthus, has she name changed or has she got an agenda? I'm so naive, pls explain.

my dc have only been in the state system 2 years and there have been three major behavioural problems/incidents (and they are only the ones i have actually got to hear about) involving a small caucus of kids - bullying, violence in playground, class disruption. one mother recently withdrew her child because of it. It is very sad, because i think some of the teaching is inspiring, but i've just lost faith.

Wheels - why don't you move school? As you can tell from here state schools are really different from each other.

This kind of behavior at school is not normal. Find a school where they don't tolerate it....

i am wondering about home education. i think inner city primaries probably are very similar.

No agenda - someone I always used to really like! Unless it's not her, of course

Wheels - it is absolutely not true that all inner city primaries are similar.

However, HE is also a good option if you're unhappy....

"Emy, you were still allowed to hit children with sticks for making a noise in those days. Now battering children is not an option, "

While the sanction was there, I cannot remember it ever being used in my 1950s prep school. But we remained quiet and well behaved, with 1 teacher to 30 children. The concept of 'teaching assistants' did not exist.

But then it was a more civilised era.

My mother (prep school) and father (state school) vividly remember the cane being used on a regular basis in their schools. It was always ensured that the other children heard the punishment, albeit they were not made to see it. I remember being smacked on the back of the legs with a ruler or hit on the back of the hand at my State primary. Only one of the teachers at the school gave out these punishments (and, ironically, she was one of my favourite teachers, so really didn't need to do this to get me back into line if I'd been naughty).

"One in every five primary school children leaves without basic literacy and numeracy."

Can someone reference the evidence for this, please?

Many of you are giving a picture I just don't recognise. In ds's school- a Lambeth state primary - they spend hours on literacy and numeracy one way and another, and it is clearly a priority. Most children are achieveing well. And the other topics they are doing (which also involve RRRs) are inspiring to them. Cause and effect, how to test a theory, how to interprete evicence and make decisions, how to see something fom another point of view and learn from that. I think all these things ad to the way in which children solve problems and make decisions about everything - including literacy and numeracy.

I agree that literacy and numeracy are key, and priorities, but not that other subjects are a waste of time. Except dressing up as Victorians / Tudors / Evacuees and fictional characters on World Book day. But our school doesn't bother with that, except world book day - what a relief.

Ditto Blu (sorry, Blu, think I've made a habit of ditto-ing you when pushed for time ).

Appletrees, I can only speak about the children in our Borough, but its clear in dd's class at least that a chaotic home life does make a big difference to a child's ability to learn. Especially to those who are either very anxious, or very tired.

I also think the school can make a difference to a child's ability to learn/motivation by having well organized, and structured, classrooms with low staff turnover and good teaching. And excellent pastoral care. In other words, some stability and positive attention.

I'm not saying that NC and attention to literacy/numeracy aren't hugely important too - I just think that there are other things that make more difference than whether or not you learn about recycling or Victorian toilets.

Yes. Ditto-ing again. I just do not recognise this cliche of huge classes of barely-contained feral children surging about aimlessly.

They mean one in five don't achieve level 4 - which is not quite the same as 'leaving without 'basic' literacy and numeracy'. That figure also includes some SEN children with very complex needs who wouldn't necessarily be able to attain level 4.