Ks2 sats week 2015

[Catbat77]

I have a very nervous dd this morning, wanted to hear other parents thoughts or experiences this week!

Mrz, I am not saying that. I am saying that we are trying to balance two things here:

• The benefit to a child of playing a musical instrument to a good standard.

• The disbenefit of them missing half an hour of curriculum time for eaxch music lesson.

As a school, we see and believe in the benefits, so we minimise the disbenefits by rotating timetables to minimise the impact on each subject, by allocating 1:1 time when children return from lessons etc. It is the same as for those children who miss some curriculum time for sport, dance etc - as a school we believe ibn the benefits to self eseteem, work eithic, teamnwork etc, and so we minimise the disbenefits.

Yes, we could move all sport to after school, turn down all enrichment opportunities that do not invlve all children and do not fit into our precise timeable, reduce the number of children who have peripatetic music lessons so that we can timetable them only during class music lessons. But we choose not to do any of those things, because we believe in the benefits and the progress data bears these out.

and I'm saying it is possible to do that without the child missing important teacher input if the school looks at how they organise

Or at the least to minimise the negative impact

How on earth do you fit 50 individual lessons into the week without some impact on teaching time! That's 10 a day, presumably for around 20-30 minutes each. If those were held after school time you would still have 3 and a half hours of lessons every day.
All our children learn a musical instrument for the 4 years in KS2 but that is as part of a class lesson, any children who have additional to this have individual lessons from our peripatetic music teachers who don't do after school lessons, so all the individual lessons have to be fitted into the school day. So yes, like teacherwith2kids, we have a rota system to minimise impact on any one lesson. But there is no way we could fit those lessons into the lunch hour!

I didn't say they were individual lessons

Overall, it is horses for courses.

If you have found that timetabling peripatetic music lessons throughout the school day and rotating individuals / small groups through different time slots has an actual impact on pupil progress in your school, then of course I can understand that you have needed to change the system.

We have not found this negative impact on pupil progress, in fact there is a slight positive correlation, so we have not found it necessary to change anything, over and above making common-sense accommodation for children whenever their lessons might fall.

Eqaully you have found it necessary to schedule all matches and tournaments etc after the end of the school day, and turn down other PE opportunities that do not involve the whole year group / fall in PE lessons, because of the impact on your particular cohort. We have not found it necessary to do so.

I can see that there are theoretical disbenefits to each approach. Each school will use its own experience to find a practical way through it, sometimes with a hard and fast 'never', sometimes with a much more flexible accommodation. That's life.

Teachwith2kids I didn't say we have found it necessary to schedule tournaments and competitions after school ... Thus is when they take play ... we can't take credit for it.
Neither did I say that we turn down any opportunities that do not involve all the year group or fall within PE lessons ... I said we organise our day/week so children can take part without missing any of their statutory requirement.

This not thus!

So how much quality do you get from 4/5ths of the service?

It's daft, arrogant perhaps to represent every primary maths lesson as being critical to all the children in a class.

If she was working at her pace and there wasn't a teaching and attainment ceiling then fine, but that doesn't seem to happen very often because of the incursion on secondary territory problem.

DD did not need that 1/5 of maths. It was surplus to requirements and I valued the peri. music lesson a lot, lot more. If DD missing maths once a week made it easier for them to schedule the peri. lesson for another child who did need 5/5 maths then hurrah.

I considered the mutual agreement over this as a genuinely functional "parent-school partnership" in a school that still remembers that it's not supposed to some robotic production line with little besides criteria, quotas and box-ticking.

Here's a question: What kind of outcome at the end of primary (or by now in Y7) do you think would indicate that she has suffered from the 4/5 maths?

Exactly how do YOU determined which lessons are important and which aren't PAB? Are any lessons important or could children happily miss them all and still make good progress?

22:26 The suspect declined to answer the question

Haven't got a clue about "children".

Otherwise by not being thick and knowing both my DD and maths very well. I wouldn't care to have to teach them to 30 children, but the shape of the KS2 and KS3 maths curriculum/tests didn't take long to peruse and assess.

Any lessons? DD could have missed lots of 'core' English. She would have missed most of the others, regardless of their alleged importance.

Why do you send her to school?

Because their peri. music lessons are cheaper than private ones

To be taught and learn things, make things, make friends, run around gleefully squealing etc.

Certainly not to tick a box saying she met a quota of 39 weeks x 5 days x 1 hour = 195 hours in Numeracy lessons.

Maybe, PiqueABoo, you are thinking of how well-adapted school is to your (exceptional) DD's needs, whereas Mrz is thinking of the more typical needs of children who don't master things quite so quickly and who don't have someone at home ready and able to teach them?

Fascinating discussion and maybe evidence that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach doesn't suit all?
I can sort of see both sides... I think var123 has it right - if dc are all bright and supported well at home, then school is only part of their education. But for children who struggle or have difficult family lives, then school becomes the most crucial stable input for them.
I do agree with mrz that children coming and going throughout the day is quite unsettling both for them and the other dc. Also with a dd not chosen for any sports, she was always sad when half the class disappeared for fixtures and she was left behind, it was like wearing a sign saying failure (she felt).
I guess schools having opportunities to discuss with other schools how they approach situations like music lessons/sports/booster classes is crucial, as there may be solutions they haven't thought of themselves?

I'm not a teacher, and I know that many of us have some performance reviews at work nowadays that is based on success criteria outside of our control.

Teachers are heavily evaluated on how well they plan their class. They have an hour everyday to move 30 kids ahead with their knowledge. In the class I help with every quadrant of that hour is planned - to keep the kids engaged - to cover all aspects of the curriculum. When group activities are arranged, students are put into groups to make the structure of the class optimal for everyone. If there is one day that the behavior is not optimal, I think the teacher beats herself up for it.

Then, on one day of the week a few students aren't there until the last 20 minutes or so. I think its madness the parents want that - but then not everyone thinks maths is important.

If the teacher is still expected to move the kids who miss 1 class a week the same progress, it seems to me he/she is being evaluated on unfair success criteria. All the work she did to run an optimal learning class is lost on the music students. And she has to take time away when they return to the class to bring them up to speed.

performance reviews at work nowadays that ARE

I'm not sure that you are correct about people not valuing maths and therefore happily sending them to music lessons instead, Proudmama.

In the case of highly able kids, its more that their learning progression looks like this:-
learn it quickly - half work it out before the teacher has finished her first explanation
practice it. Quickly get the hang of it.
Finish the questions on the worksheet. Ask for another / extension work.
Finish the extension work quickly and accurately.

Next day. Do it all again.

Following day. Listen to an alternative explanation. More repetition.

Two weeks later, finally move onto something new, only to quickly get that and then spend a week or two practising your new skill until your only target is to see if you can do it even quicker than your previous best.

DS2 had 4 years of this. he tried everything to meet the teacher's requirement that he demonstrate that he knew something before moving on. Sometimes there would be competitions in which he'd not only beat the other kids but the teacher too. Everyone (teachers, other parents, TAs, HT, other children) acknowledged his ability but there was just no way the teachers could differentiate enough to keep him even slightly challenged for even half an hour every week.

I didn't arrange for him to go out of class for music lessons etc, but to be honest, if I could have thought of something that would have rescued him from the boredom and the feeling that his needs were unimportant, then I would have done it.

var123, your son sounds quite exceptional. Most of the classes I've seen - or heard about from my kids - have extension activities for students just like your son so they don't get bored and continue to develop and progress.

Yes, DS2 is unusual. He gets the extension stuff but its normal-extension IYSWIM i.e. its stuff that maybe 5 or 6 other children in the class could also do. So, DS can do it in his sleep, and he still finishes it massively early without breaking sweat.

Each teacher has had a different combination of solutions: help the others, read a book, do yet more extension sheets (sometimes 4 in one lesson), just sit quietly, etc. etc. None of them ever gave him maths that would challenge him. He liked the reading solution best and, to be fair, all the reading books during maths class helped enormously with his English. The HT's solution was to give me a book of G&T problems to get him to do at home (i.e. useless).

Anyway, DS2 will be leaving primary school in a few weeks time, so this is over at long last. Luckily, he still enjoys learning something new in maths, even though I was worried a couple of years ago that the boredom would have killed it.

@var123, "Maybe, PiqueABoo, you are thinking of how well-adapted school is to your (exceptional) DD's needs"

In one sense you're right (although it wasn't that well-adapted because a single-form entry with below national average funding doesn't have very much wriggle room), but I'm more interested in the general case of a primary school responding to children's needs in broader terms than progress in a couple of subjects towards end-KS2 SATs. A lot of the earlier posts in this thread around the woes of SATs do suggest some schools have lost the plot.

someone at home ready and able to teach them

"Me do it!": DD has always been very determined to do things by herself and has never let me help with core school stuff. My role is to look at the results and express credible levels of approval.

What we do add at our modest little home is what you might call 'cultural literacy' courtesy of bookshelves, a piano, knowledge and lots serendipitous discussion and debate e.g. TV's Atlantis series has been a gold-mine for that. I think this stuff matters and it's worth attaining some of it instead of some fractional progress in primary maths. Especially when it's music-making skills that I think are very good for the soul, so to speak.

We all seem to have different ideas of what school is for. I certainly got a surprise when I realised how much gets packed into a year at school.

Before my children went to school, I thought the primary purpose was to teach them the 3Rs with a bit of other stuff like history or geography thrown in for good measure.

I knew that they'd also do PE and music and art but I thought those were just the icing on the cake. If a pollster had stopped me in the street sometime in my late 20s or early 30s (i.e. pre-children) and asked why does the taxpayer fund schools, I'd have said that its so that children can learn to read, write and do sums with some social integration as a side benefit.

But I'd have been wrong, wouldn't I? Everyone seems to have their own ideas, but no one - including parents, teachers or politicians - seems to think that these are the main function of school.

"to be taught and learn things" but you said she could have missed most of the core lessons ...

Results released tomorrow.

How's everybody's kids feeling?

My dd has had her report today, does that mean the results given are teacher assessment?