primary education

[SJKenyon]

This is first time I have been on Mumsnet. My children are older than primary age but I am a primary teacher. I wanted to post this to make as many parents aware as possible of the draft primary curriculum which came out for consultation on Thursday. It is available at directgov.uk. It is 221 pages long but parents need to see it asap, not just teachers. Take a good look at the history and geography sections and then the lack of interest in Art in particular. If you want your very young children to be subjected to this kind of statutory curriculum from next year, then look no further. But if having your 6 year old learning about the importance of nation, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel along with Isaac Newton and Christina Rosetti (all KS1), is of concern to you, or the inclusion of the Crusades in KS2 worries you as a Muslim parent, then perhaps you should take a very close look at this. If parents and teachers unite to say no to this, we have until April 16th to prevent it. As a teacher, I am deeply concerned by it. So should all of you be as parents.

[mrz]

Some areas are slimmed down and the move seems to be from knowing how to knowing facts ...

[Pyrrah]

Pyrrah - had you considered that teachers are allowed a life outside of school? If we finished at 5pm, I would be at school from 7.45am to about 6pm. Then I travel home and make dinner for my own family. Then most evenings I spend about two hours, sometimes more depending on marking load, working and preparing for next day. Saturday school? Are you even considering that teachers would have to be paid for that? Again, I already spend around ten hours of my weekends working. I currently work around 60 hours a week and have two children of my own. Please don't suggest that teachers should work longer hours to cover childcare for others. I find that very insulting.


Childcare - I made that point to cover those who would suggest that those hours were too long for a child to be at school not to suggest teachers should cover childcare.

However I don't see why children shouldn't be taught for more hours in the day.

The hours you quote are no different from those worked by millions of other people - they don't have much of a life during the working week either - nor do they get such generous holidays.

Given the hours that my own family and friends work and the amount they earn, I don't think teachers are exactly hard done by.

[exoticfruits]

I gave up teaching because I wanted a life- there are no extra hours to give!

[exoticfruits]

Any more and you might as well sleep at school and go home for one day at weekends............and don't start me on the holidays that teachers are perceived to have.

[BackforGood]

Marking place

[GooseyLoosey]

It's too much, but current teaching is woefully inadequate. I would like my children to know more about the history of their country and not in generic terms like there was a tudor period, there were Vikings and there were Romans. I would like them to know to details. I would like them to know key events. Change is a good idea, but perhaps it should be better considered.

[haggisaggis]

OK, it may be too much but under the Scottish system, there is no prescribed list - my 2 dc (one 13, one 10) have done NOTHING on Vikings, Romans, Ancient Greece. Their topic work over the years has covered such things as "Fairy Tales", "Plastic Bags", "Bridges", "Shoes". Under Curriculum for Excellence, teachers are expected to teach skills - not facts - so consequently it is quite possible for a child to go through primary school learning little history or geography.

[Hulababy]

Pyrrah - you've fallen for the biggest misconception surrounding teaching ever. Do you believe teachers only work for the hours that children are present? Ever single lesson has to be planned for and then assessed afterwards. This cannot occur when children are in school. There are also meetings to be had within schools, with parents and with outside agencies. These cannot take place where children are present.

So whilst the child's school day is 8:50-3:20 or whatever, the teachers working day is not this. The teachers must be in before then, and they will then have work to do afterwards to, this bringing them to what you might call a normal working day. The holidays are not 13 weeks of free time. They are non contact time in many ways - as lessons still need planning. classrooms preparing, work assessing, etc. Every teacher I know has always worked for many of the days in their holidays. Also bear in mind that teachers are not actually paid for those holidays too.

So okay - make school days longer for children - but then pay teachers more to cover this and cover the extra from the holidays - oh, and don't forget you expect a lower quality of lesson plans because they'll be no time left to do that!

Not to mention that the children will end up shattered too - so by 4pm they'll be learning very little anyway. They'll be hungry, tired and grumpy. Some of these children are only 4 and 5 after all.

What about chance for extra curricular, non school based activities too = swimming, drama club, ballet, football, music lessons..... or simply just the chance to relax and play with friends and family.

After all school is not childcare is it? And as for parents needing childcare - well, school has existed in a similar form for years - the idea that parents need to have childcare organised is not a new one. You know that when you chose to begin a family!

[Toadinthehole]

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread: we are contemplating a return to the UK after a number of years in NZ, I have been watching the reforms in the English education system closely, and some of the contributions have been very enlightening for me.

To me, the history curriculum sounds like one I would have absolutely loved when I was at school. I don't see any individual item that strikes me as being impossible to teach at an age-appropriate level.

My DD1 is in her fourth year at a New Zealand (Roman Catholic) school. She has done precisely no history at all. Nada, zilch. Nothing? Well, she has done a little bit on the Treaty of Waitangi 1840, but she hasn't been taught it as history but more as a moral platitude. She didn't even know who Captain Cook was until I told her. I think this is wrong. She has no opportunity to explore any historical interest she might have in school - in fact, the fact that the only thing close to history she is getting comes with a heavy dose of morals strikes me as starting off on completely the wrong foot. So, I am pretty jealous of the proposed reforms in England.

BTW I hope this thread won't get distracted onto the topic of teachers' hours. Mr Google says that UK teachers work on average 50 hours per week, and he also says that a 50-hour average is more than just about every other trade and profession out there. I think the inevitable anecdotes of people working 23904839053485348440 hours per week needs to be set against that.

[learnandsay]

I would have thought it would take some doing to disinterest children in British history. But by putting The Glorious Revolution in the curriculum somebody is clearly having a go. To finish the job off nicely and make sure very young children never want to study history again I'd just add The Corn Laws, The Reformation and the Hansiatic League.

[RiversideMum]

I think this is another case of Gove throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When he first started moaning about the history curriculum, I did feel that he had a point that huge periods of history were left out. However, this is more due to duplication at GCSE and A Level and overlaps with the KS2 curriculum (the second world war is the most obvious example). What he is proposing at primary (esp KS2) is what I did in my first 2 years at grammar school and is precisely why I gave up history as soon as I could.

It is quite clear that nobody writing this proposed currciulum has stepped into a primary school. Most schools I know teach a creative curriculum based on integrated topics so that learning can be set in context. I don't see many opportunities for that in this new proposal.

[cumbrialass]

Of course there are lots of lovely topics in the "new" history curriculum, what there isn't is the time to teach each and every one of them in more than a superficial "this is what happened, when, write it down " kind of way. We estimate that each of the "topics" in KS2 will have just under an hour available to teach it, so Henry VIII- an hour, Crusades- an hour, Commonwealth-an hour etc. So how on earth can we infuse children with a love of history when everything will need to be taught in a "Wham Bamm, thank you Ma'am" manner!

[learnandsay]

If you race through history at a million miles an hour you're never going to create a love of history but you can make lots and lots of interesting points (I think as someone upthread has pointed out ala Horrible Histories.) My fouryear old already knows the Greeks did the Olympics naked, Vespasian died before he finished the Colosseum, the Romans wiped their bottoms with a sponge and so on. And then it's for later years to build on. It's useful in the fact that when someone later says the Greeks, or the Roman's or Richard III they've got some idea what you're talking about. The speaker can then go on to make their point. I think also if you give them a smattering of history they can then create their own links. My daughter has been to Benjamin Disraeli's house and a Queen Victoria coronation anniversary. She's happy with the notion that Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli were good friends. And she knows that Benjamin Disraeli came after Oliver Cromwell and before us. (Although she doesn't know anything else about Oliver Cromwell.)

[bruffin]

But some children have only just clicked with reading and writing by yr 2. And a year later they have to start with all that????

That is totally irrelevant, being able to read has no connection with intelligence and the ability to understand.

In year 2 my dcs 15 and 17 were doing the crimean war and florence nightingale as well as the reasons for poppy day. My dd was petrified of war because of it, but thankfully my mum told her about her wartime childhood and she was ok.

They were doing forces and gravity in Year 1.

[Toadinthehole]

If it is true that schools are only required to cover a topic without being required to cover them in any specific way or to any specific extent, it is presumably possible to cover one topic about half an hour to make room for others.

[Wheresmycaffeinedrip]

Course it has no baring in intelligence I never said that but there's still alot of reading and writing involved when learning about these subjects. Assuming they may have to look stuff up or design posters or make tea stained maps , copy off board etc.

Just seems so formal which isn't a bad thing just it seems an awful lot of stuff to learn. Obviously that's what they r there for just when u lookst it all written down .....

[bruffin]

But no more reading than they would have done for what they were doing before in year 2 ie crimea and poppy day etc

[Wheresmycaffeinedrip]

The point was that they have possibly only just grasped the basics by then and it seems a massive jump. My dd is in yr one still bringing home pictures and salt dough Xmas decs I just right now can't picture her doing all that stuff. I'm surprised that's all it's just weird seeing it all written down

[Wheresmycaffeinedrip]

I'm sure she will learn like all kids but up till now the learnings seemed do subtle I was merely expressing surprise at the sheer volume it appeared to be.

[Kelloggs36]

I looked at the proposed History curriculum last night and almost cried! How dull! At the moment, children LOVE learning about WW2 and the Victorians and this is to be thrown out in favour of learning about the spread of Christianity, and iron and bronze age - dull, dull, dull and boring! All that was interesting and fun in History learning has been chucked out for some political idiot's ideology.

[LaBelleDameSansPatience]

Pyrrah has confused education with free childcare.

That is by the way, though.

Far worse is the fact that people are actually supporting a curriculum that allocates an hour to Henry VIII and presumably another hour to the crusades.

There will be far more children coming home convinced that Guy Fawkes was trying to inflate King James under the new curriculum; if you have an hour (less time for sharpening pencils, changing out of PE kit, handing out books, going to the toilet and all the other ittle things that eat into my history lessons) to cover each topic from that list, there will be no time to check the comprehension of each of 30+ children.

I am even more upset by the geography; the fact that there will be no study of Africa or Asia, although in many schools a large minority if the children will have backgrounds in those parts of the world. My school has valuable links with schools in both Nigeria and Pakistan, which teach our children so much about the experience of children in other parts of the world and also provide useful funds for the partner schools. Will all these now have to be dropped? And how will we afford a new library of books?

I do like the KS2 MFL, but why does everyone forget that it has been a curriculum entitlement for several years, introduced by Labour?

[PolkadotCircus]

I'd be livid if the day was longer.

My dc are 9,9 and 8-they're knackered when I pick them up which is why I don't do homework midweek.We do it all at the weekend.And what about Brownies,Cubs,swimming,music lessons,ballet and just playing outside with their mates like kids should be doing at 4pm?

[DewDr0p]

I dislike a lot of Mr Gove's meddling with the education system and this is probably yet another example. It all seems so regressive.

But OP I do think you have rather undermined yourself with the reference to gravity. Ds1 learned all about it in Yr1 and was very keen to hang out of the window explaining it to the decorator painting the windows "so what it means is that if I lean too far I'll go splat on the ground" The poor guy was terrified that ds was about to give a full demonstration I think!

[choccyp1g]

LaBelleDameSansPatienceWed 13-Feb-13 22:27:51 Pyrrah has confused education with free childcare.

Please don't put the idea into their heads...or next they will be charging us for "the childcare element" of school.

[completely off topic I know]