What is a skills based curriculum?

[skewiff]

Our primary school says one of its aims is to make the curriculum more skills based?

What does this mean?

To quote Mr Gove

Gove said that the predominant theme in conversations he has had with primary school teachers is the difficulty of dealing with children who arrive in reception class ?totally unprepared to learn?, with teachers reporting of children that ?many cannot sit and listen?many can scarcely communicate orally, let alone frame a question. Many cannot use a knife and fork. Many cannot even go to the lavatory properly.?

?If children arrive in school unable to sit, listen and learn and then disrupt the learning of others, then lives begin already blighted,? he added.

so I would suggest these are skills that need to be learnt before they can acquire knowledge.

Greythorne - yes, my feeling is that French teachers have few teaching skills and little concept of imparting skills; however, they do think they are entitled to evaluate the acquisition of skills! Hence parents filling in a lot of gaps.

magdalene I'd also like to ask what have you been reading if you thought I was saying my son was a child prodigy when in fact I've stated many many times he has Special Educational Needs

"There are primary teachers on this thread that argue that knowledge isn't important and that they emphasise skills."

I hope that you don't include me in that list. What I have said is that I mainly teach through enabling children to use their skills to arrive at knowledge, rather than teaching content all the time in a 'transmission style'.

Time tables by rote - of course. Like teaching the phonic code, times tables are so useful to underpin all sorts of other maths that they are worth learning by rote. But alongside the rote learning I also ensure that children understand what multiplication is - through arrays, through repeated addition - so that when they come to a multiplication which is not in the times tables they have methods to apply in order to approach the problem ('I want to buy 4 presents for my friends, each present costs £2.83, how much will it cost altogether?')

It is my experience that children remember 'knowledge / information' better if they have applied a variety of skills to acquire it - not just 'listening to an adult' skills, not just 'look it up' skills, but practical experimentation, exploration of sources, exploration through drama, direct or simulated experience etc, and that is why I teach in the way i do.

Well said teacherwith2kids. You have managed to make the point much better than I have because I became irate and lost the plot.

"It is my experience that children remember 'knowledge / information' better if they have applied a variety of skills to acquire it."

Thank you for that very neat and useful résumé! I shall use it myself!

Mrz - this is why I've said you need skills AND knowledge in the curriculum. In reality though how can reception teachers devote the time to teaching life skills when they have endless other targets (including reading and writing etc) to get through. Perhaps that's an even bigger reason to extend nursery provision until children have to start full time school. Perhaps that's why the focus shouldn't be on reading and writing AT ALL. Your son was reading at two, wasn't he? How come he was labelled SEN? Although that is in its way a special need. And 'flittling from one activity to the next' isn't helped by an education system that teaches a smattering of knowledge of different subjects (cross curricular instead of single subjects). But you blame it ALL on the parents because it's much easier that way.

teacherwithtwokids - nothing wrong with listening to an adult. After all, adults might have something they can teach the children. That is the whole point, isn't it?

However you dress it up, the education system is still failing a lot of children. And that isn't just the fault of the parents!!! Or SEN, single parent families, television, computer games etc etc. Crikey the list is endless.

teacherwithtwokids - what does 'transmission style' mean? Glad you teach times tables by rote!

There is nothing wrong with listening to an adult SOME OF THE TIME.

'Transmission style' means just that - teacher tells children all the facts that they need to know, passive students listen. Perhaps do a worksheet at the end of the lesson to check that they've listened carefully. As a small part of teaching, again it has its place.

BUT - and it is a big BUT - it is a tiny minority of children who learn best through this method only (Weirdly, my son is one of them. He only needs to hear something once, and it is stuck like glue forever. Though even he finds rehearsal of the skills of reading - yes, reading is a SKILL, not knowledge - maths - much of maths is skills-based and writing - again a skill - useful).

So IN ADDITION TO teacher talk, children learn best from direct experience, from drama, from experimentation, through finding things out for themselves, through observation, from rehearsal (e.g. applying a new maths skill to a set of problems) ...all of those carefully guided by a skilled and knowledgable adult so that by doing so they arrive at an appropriate body of knowledge and also acquire re-useable skills.

Magdelene, my son is very able. He is also on the autistic spectrum - SEN and 'academic ability' are separate characteristics of a child and they are not necessarily linked in any way. SENs can get in the way of a child developing their academic ability to the full, though.

Magdelene, perhaps I am wrong but I have an image of your 'perfect' educational system in which silent children sit in rows. A teacher (all powerful, all knowing) stands at the front and talks. Children (if they have acquired the skills of writing through careful rote-learning of letters) take notes. Once the teacher stops talking, they set a 'closed' written task for the children to complete in silence to check that they have 'learned the right facts today'...

Yours is an educational model that served some children - probably your ancestors and some of mine - well in the past...in a past where the majority of children went on to vocational apprenticeships for manual jobs, while those who were 'good at learning facts' went on to learn more facts at a very few universities..

You may tell me that 'when I was young every child learned to read' - as I teach a class where many of the parents - educated in English schools a generation ago - can neither read nor write, I would suggest that in fact 'when I was young every child FROM FAMILIES LIKE MINE learned to read ...and then only if they had no SEN, as chuldren with SEN were sent to separate institutions'.

The world we are educating our children for is very different from that we emerged from school into. There are very few of the jobs that previously absorbed vast numbers of manual labourers and skilled craftsmen. I am not saying that we are doing a perfect job of educating children for the new 'knowledge based economy' - but there is no golden age in which we DID give all children a perfect education, either.

(I am not THAT old, but the majority of my primary school classmates were the 3rd or 4th generation of their families to enter the local factories on the factory floor. A few went into the army or the police force. A couple, like me, went on to university. I went through my old home town a couple of years ago. All the factories are closed. I am not in touch with enough of my old classmates to judge what they are doing now - but I know that their academic skills and qualifications, which were fine for 'the way it had always been' will not be sufficient for 'the way it is now'.)

magdalene and perhaps if you had read the replies you would be aware that is exactly what is meant by a skills based curriculum (in England can't comment on CfE).

It may be 2012 teacherwithtwokids but don't children still need to learn to read and write? Times haven't changed that much. We still need people to a wide variety of jobs. In fact, we are a nation just producing people who work in the city or call centres.

Crikey, magdalene, I hadn't realised we no longer train doctors, research scientists, lawyers or business leaders.

My son was reading before his second birthday because he has SEN he has ASD and hyperlexia. He also achieve level 6 for science and maths in his KS2 SATs.

Early years? initiatives, such as Sure Start, are failing the poor, eight-year study shows

"But it ain't pasting and gluing every day and letting the children decide what to learn."

But if you had read the posts I have made - along with other teachers - further up this thread, that is not what happens in a skills-based curriculum ... because it doesn't cover the necessary skills, nor move the children towards the required body of knowledge.

"There should be a mixture between the teacher teaching and the children being creative etc."

Which is eaxctly what happens. Another way of describing EXACTLY THE SAME THING is that sometimes the children use the skill of listening to an expert talk and make notes of the main points, and sometimes they use other skills such as interpreting picture sources, designing and carrying out scientific experiments, using drama strategies to explore dilemmas in stories etc etc. You have set up a 'straw man' in tbhis argument, as we are simply describing the same educational experience for children, just looked at in different ways.

"don't children still need to learn to read and write"

Yes. Both of these are skills, and children learn them....

Magadelene
Sorry, but you are really barking up the wrong tree there.

Mrz is the last person on this board to be smug. She is in fact incredibly helpful and willing to share her knowledge and experience.

And it's out of order to use her son as a debating pawn.

It's not relevant to this thread at what age he was reading or why.

I didn't use her son as a debating pawn at all. She was the one to mention him.

Mrz - I never mentioned surestart.

Bonsoir - you'll find we have to rely on recruiting people from abroad to do many jobs in hospitals.

No but I did

www.cypnow.co.uk/news/1115574/Government-urged-address-disparate-uptake-free-childcare/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8754823/Hospitals-cut-jobs-but-still-hire-abroad.html
"It is incomprehensible and unacceptable to have these sorts of recruitment trawls abroad when so many staff are being laid off, and so many newly qualified nurses can't find work," he said.
it seems we are training people but they don't come with a free jaunt to far away places and a cheap price tag

Magdelene,

If you are recruiting to fill jobs in hospitals now, say for 18 - 30 year olds, you are recruiting from a pool of people who were taught using a knowledge-based curriculum.

So what your experience would suggest is that we need something different, not a return to the previous knowledge-based curriculum. We need people with the right skills and knowledge to fill those jobs, and if the old education system was not producing them then the children who are going through school now need to experience something different.

As an ex-research scientist - exactly the type of person who might, had things turned out a little different, made a career in hospital roles - I know that what hooked me on science was not 'chalk and talk', was not 'here are the facts', but was 'I shall teach you the skills to carry out scientific investigations, and then you will find things out'.

Could it be that young adults are not coming out of school with science qualifications because of the content-driven way it has been taught in the recent past??