Does your state primary have specialist staff

[AChickenCalledKorma]

Arising out of a discussion at a committee I am on at school, I'm curious to know what is "normal" in terms of specialist staff at a state primary. If your child is at a state primary, does it have specialist teachers? And if so, in what subject? E.g. languages, PE, music etc. I have the impression that ours is reasonably well resourced in this respect, but am not sure what is "normal".

We (small first school in 3 tier system) have

• Specialist PE teachers and a Forest school expert who cover PPA time.
• Specialist music teacher who gives the oldest class a whole class instrumental lesson every week.
• 1 specialist swimming teacher (and 2 staff who have had the relevant training) to teach swimming for 6 months of the year.

See, I think he was

I asked the children what they thought would be different about their science lessons in secondary school, and they said that they would have some!!

It makes me mightily about the levels they come to us with...

FallenMadonna, maybe they just don't identify the lessons as 'science'? DD's school does 'topic work' in the afternoons, and science is taught through the term's topic.

(Made me PMSL when we were called in for a solemn explanation of the changeover to this style of teaching - first question asked was 'is this topics like we did at school in the 70s', HT answer, 'Yes, exactly the same - but don't say that too loudly as its all new and exciting to Miss X' (very sweet and very young NQT)

But the teacher would recognise it surely? And he told me they didn't do it. Anyway. Even without that, I am pretty keen to work more closely with our primaries. I'm especially interested in assessment and how we can make that more joined up, but also in the literacy side of things. We have to teach literacy now, and we are not equipped for it. We are pretty good at science though! I see it as a potential win win, but our feeders are reluctant to engage beyond the traditional transition programme. We are on it though. It's why we were interested in recruiting a KS2/3 trained teacher.

Ah, sorry, I thought it was the pupils who said they didn't do science, not the teacher!