can't be 'polite' and good any longer....

[swallowedAfly]

ds goes to a village primary with all the subsequent over-reliance on parents wealth, education, time, etc. re: assuming sahms are the norm, money is plentiful for fanciful trips and activities, we all know how to sew up costumes at the drop of a hat etc.

that's fine. i chose to live here. however....

homework is way over the top in terms of quantity and right from day one of school. one part of homework (there is loads) is the 'learning log' which is pretended to be something children could do indepndently and consolidates learning. except in reality it is not, by a long shot.

i've put up with it and put up with and felt enslaven to doing it until today when i've had enough. this week for ds (6yo and one of the most able in his year) it says, "show me what you've learned about number bonds up to 20 and what patterns you can see". then there's a blank page.

i don't know why (because this is far from the worst that's come home) but today i've had enough and found myself writing on the page that i have no idea what the learning objective is, what outcomes they're hoping for or how the hell they see this as differentiated. i've also asked how they think a parent with numeracy or literacy problems would tackle this task and whether they would actually set this as a task in class to 6yos and expect a meaningful outcome.

there is no context, no structure, no literacy support, no prompts nothing. same as ever. sometimes the tasks don't even relate to anything they've been learning.

am i totally unreasonable or would you after a year or so be fed up too? i am (if it's not obvious) an ex teacher and i know what education is supposed to be about and this is not it. homework should be meaningful. how could a 6yo read that question and face a blank page and do something a teacher could look at and assess to see what they've learnt? they couldn't.

on top of this learning log (given on a friday and expected in by tuesday) daily reading and signing of reading book is expected plus other bits and bobs. he's 6! he's been getting this since 5 at a point where some kids couldn't even write let alone face a blank page and an open ended task and produce something yet they'd get in trouble if they didn't. this is just a test of parents surely? and an unfair one given it assumes knowledge and literacy that some parents won't have?

sorry for long random rant but help! i'm not playing this game anymore and i'm ready to speak up. it's a joke.

Are the parents of the children you don't believe are academically able to complete the work complaining or is it only you?

Wow seriously all this over a bit of homework!

even in the face of a level 3 inspection result it was flagrantly portrayed as ofsted tightening up their procedures

If they've done that in writing, then they have signed their own death warrant at the next inspection. Capacity to Improve, Mr/Ms Head and Mr/Ms Chair of Governors? Oh, I see that your response to a 3' three years ago was to publish a prospectus saying everything was OK and the 3' was purely an artefact of assessment. Could you describe what else you did to respond? Nothing? I seeeeeee....

exactly friday - oh and we see you finally did get round to writing an equalities action plan and yet your alleged aims are directly contradicted by your actual practices and you seem to be under the impression that 'discrimination' is limited to bullying by children without any understanding or addressing of systematic discrimination or indirect discrimination by things like err... setting homework that relies upon the input of a native english speaking, middle class, educated parent in order for it to have any meaningful outcome...

for those going 'oh it's just a bit of homework' i suggest you broaden your view or consider the idea that if education or equality and diversity or even sociology 101 are not specialist subjects of yours you may just possibly not understand the context and implications of what you're scoffing at.

yes friday - in writing - in the prospectus and brushed over with, given they've upped the bar and are now just basing everything on ks2 outcomes (the schools are relatively actually due to their intake) we're really pleased that ofsted have said lots of positive things about us. total failure to acknowledge and address where they 'need improvement' (real meaning of a level 3).

the end is nigh i'm guessing unless ofsted colludes in brushing village school complacency and discrimination under the carpet.

oh and according to heads my boss spoke to and gave the context and outline to they'll be screwed next ofsted.

I agree, OP, that number bond question is totally crap homework.

thanks bonsoir. it's disconcerting when you get the 'my 8wo embryo could do that homework and accompany it with an interactive power point presentation' shite from the deluded.

Learning number facts is slightly dull but at least has the merit of offering up awfully obvious homework in the form of different sorts of repetition. Making it into some kind of open ended creative activity is wildly off the mark.

Well when my eldest was 6 I had no idea what number bonds were. I know what they are now, but mainly because a good friend whose DC was struggling mentioned it.

So I would not have been able to help with that homework.

I agree that it is so much for the parents that parents with extremely busy jobs/ lots of children/ a new baby / something heavy going on in their lives would not be able to cope with it. When my Dad was dying and I was driving 3 hours almost every day to see him, something like that would have sent me over the edge.

Education should be on a level playing field, with everyone having the same advantages. Getting parents to do teaching at home makes a mockery of that.

"from the deluded."

It is really interesting, the different value that you and I put on different types of homework - possibly due to our different children, possibly because for you it is a symptom of a deeper issue with a school (which i entirely understand - when I was unhappy with DS's first school, the one that turned him into a selective mute, I too reached the irrational point of 'I hate the way you sleep lying down', where everything they do is intensely irritating / upsetting.)

I would never help DS with spellings - spelling tests are a wholly useless process when it comes to actually learning to spell in context. He (and incidentally I, but that's not the point, because it's his homework and he does it) would hate the '10 sums' type of homework because it is 'capped' in terms of attainment and thus is wholly useless for the very able.

He would enjoy the 'research together' type homework, but that is much more meaningful when they are a bit older and can read and assess everything that they find. He would have loved, loved, loved the homework that your school set - you see it as undifferentiated, he would see it as 'uncapped', and that is rare in Maths at primary.

I still haven't seen you answer my basic 'from the teacher's point of view' question - did your child read the homework and have a bash at it, and what did he do unaided before you stepped in?

"you see it as undifferentiated, he would see it as 'uncapped', and that is rare in Maths at primary"

And maybe there is a good reason for that?

And I still don't understand why this homework had a greater element of 'teaching at home' than e.g. spellings, or sums, or research.

Could your son access it (ie read the instructions)? Did HE know what a number bond was? Does HE often do maths on a plain sheet / small whiteboard? As I suspect that the answers to all of those was 'yes', then there was no necessity for ANY teaching at home, just an amount of time set aside and a 'well done' when something was completed.

I have experience of setting homework for very SEN children (my last class before I moved school had 2 statemented children and 8 more on the SEN register) and for children who have no literate adult in the family. I also have experience of how schools disceetly assist those children (which wouldn't be visible to you, and i am sure that you would see the homework as undifferentiated).

One of the homeworks I always used to get 100% returns for was 'show as many ways as you can think of to make 12' - I think I mentioned that above. I got drawings of 12 objects or dots in different piles from the least able, and more sophisticated calculations from the more able.

I appreciate that the main issue here is in fact the school's general attitude and perhaps lack of ambition to improve. I also appreciate that this homework is the 'straw that broke' the proverbial camel. However i am not deluded when i state that my DS really would have flown with such homework, and not when I say that very open-ended homework can be completed very satisfactorily by the least able, even without parental support, when teaching is good.

Bonsoir,

More able writers in primary can show their ability daily - most writing tasks are 'uncapped' so a child can attempt them at different levels and e.g. write using complex senrences, sophisticated vocabulary etc, thuys showing everything that you can do.

Able mathematicians have a very different experience. If you only ever ask a child questions about addition to 20, you will never discover that, in fact, they could add and subtract into 34 digits, or decimals, or negative numbers. A more able mathematician only set closed tasks has no way of demonstrating their true ability - what right do teachers have to deny an opportunity to a subset of children that they give daily to another subset?

Sorry, I meant 3 or 4 , but 34 makes the point equally well!

DS's first parents' evening report said that he could count to 20 well and knew his number bonds to 10. When I pointed out that he could count up and down as high as you wanted him to, in 10s, 5s, 2s, including down into negative numbers, and could add and subtract 3 digit numbers mentally, they said 'oh well, we wouldn't know that because we would never ask questions like that'.

(You may believe me or not that DS could do that at rising 5. He could, and i have the EYFS report that says so, too....)

A primary school teacher shouldn't be spending her time in mathematics ensuring DC have the opportunity to show her the learning they have gleaned outside the classroom, but rather getting them to move ahead with the curriculum, ensuring all concepts are firmly embedded.

(Because once I had pointed out what DS could do, his teacher joined in the 'challenge DS' game with gusto and really enjoyed finding out the further borders of his knowledge)

Bonsoir, so you are saying that all able mathematicians should be bored witless, while all able writers are allowed challenge. Surely not. And I thought that you were in support of challenge for the more able?

She shouldn't be spending her time on that. No wonder teachers complain they are overworked if they spend their time testing the frontiers of the DCs' achievements.

No of course not. Schools' business is to teach the curriculum and English schools allow teachers to move children ahead at their own pace on the curriculum. That's what they need to concentrate on.

DS did move ahead with the curriculum. It just wasn't the normal EYFS curriculum. Like other good teachers, his reception teacher found out what he could do, what he needed to do next - for example, his number was always good but his symmetry weak - and showed him how to get there. He didn't 'glean' the information outside the classroom, he was a voracious explorer of all things numerical - he discovered negative numbers through an obsession with football scores. A year or so before he started school we had to read VERY number we passed on ANY walk...sadly i can still remember the number of our 5 nbearest telegraph poles in our old village!

Teachers assess the 'frontiers of DC's achievements' every day. What else os formative assessment for, if not to work out what a child knows, and what they need to know next?

They don't. They test DC versus the curriculum, which is entirely different.

Since we are talking about our own DC, my DD knows masses of things that go beyond the curriculum. That is none of the school's business and I don't expect her teacher to waste time bothering to look. I know what the curriculum is and I expect the teacher to teach it.

Apologies for typing. 'Move children ahead at their own pace' means 'find where they are, allow them to progress'. If they have, very much under their own steam - you will have noted that I don't 'do' homework with my DCs, nor teach them at home - got somewhere, then the teacher's job is to take them forward from that point.

If I had 'crammed' DS with these things, that would be different.

DS's question 'What are the blue numbers [numbers were coloured for him for several years], the ones with a takeaway in front of them on the football tables? Do they mean that other sides have scored more goals than they have?' is very different from me siutting down with him and saying 'well, if you count down from 0, you get negative numbers' with some ill-conceived idea of 'getting him ahead'

So you are genuinely suggesting that because the curriculum says 'in Reception children should be able to count to 20', that no child should be assessed against any more ambitious target? What a narrow and joyless existence that would be (sadly, it's what Gove wants us to do, but I know of no RL teachers who think like him).

Negative numbers ARE in the curriculum. assessing DS against the maths curriculum for years ahead of his age made perfect sense - in the same way as assessing DD, an able writer, against the NC levels for Year 2 in reception made perfect sense. Their attainment was well beyond the 'age related' descriptors, so their teachers simply looked at the curriculum for later years.

i realise that in other subjects e.g, history we do not go out to find out how much a child knows about the Tudors if we are doing the Vikings - but we WOULD look to see what higher-level history SKILLS they were showing, and that might come from e.g. an excellent understanding of chronology gained from the knowledge of another period.

i appreciate that the French system isvery different.