Primary school curriculum asking too much of children

[Ipsos]

Hi,

I wondered if I might ask what others think of the pace of work in the primary school curriculum in England the Wales?

My son has been struggling at school and I went to talk to the senco. I said I felt that they were asking too much of ds.

The senco agrees and says that she doesn't know any teacher who thinks that the current fast paced learning is healthy or appropriate for little kids of their age. She says people are always talking about mental health problems in young children as if it was some kind of mystery where it comes from, when in fact it's obvious that it's caused by the school system.

She said there is little that the school can do to shield him from this as they have to meet targets or they will be marked down in their ofsted assessment.

I feel really sad for ds that he is being put through this in his early years, which should be a time of free play and freedom to think and develop naturally.

I wondered if anyone might have ideas on how to solve this problem? If people generally agree that the curriculum is too fast paced, could we perhaps start a petition or something?

Thanks!

Paperm0ver - The problem is not in teaching grammar per se, it's in the specific nature of the grammar that is being taught.

To summarise, it's bollocks. Happy to go into as much more detail as anyone would like - I'll summarise it that way for now so as not to bore people.

I've got nothing against teaching kids basic grammar - I learnt it myself at that age. But that's not what they are being taught. What they are being taught is a) wrong - ie linguistic gibberish b) age-inappropriate and c) unnecessary at any age, in many cases.

If they cut out about half the test, it would be acceptable. Though far from the best way to test it. As a means to an end ie as a way of producing a generation of children who can write well, or recognise good writing when they see it, it is an abject failure.

There is a reason private schools aren't all rushing to do the SPaG test!

Bolognese - "Why isn't learning fun, why cant doing maths and reading be as enjoyable as 'playing'. I just dont get this negative attitude to learning."

My attitude exactly.

"If a parent is teaching a child that homework is a bad/boring then that is exactly what the child will learn."

But some homework is bad/boring. I'm not 'teaching' him this - it was him who complained to me, not I to him!

"Homework can be one on one time with a parent to read wonderful stories and playing fun number games."

Indeed - and that's exactly what it should be. But preparation for these tests is pushing all that real learning out of the way, as there is no time for it, after learning the nonsense that is the new curriculum! That is exactly my point!!

"If you dont like the curriculum then home school then and move out of the way of children who do want to learn."

My DS desperately wants to learn. Which is why he is so disappointed that he is not allowed to learn anything meaningful - because everything on the curriculum that actually matters is being elbowed out of the way for the things that don't matter but are tested. This is the problem.

ReallyTired - I certainly wasn't slagging off your spelling or grammar! My point was that, on the contrary, your spelling and grammar are perfect without ever having learned this stuff!

Because it's entirely unnecessary.

I'm glad you're dd is not suffering yet - but unless the curriculum is changed before she gets there, I can guarantee she's going to find year 5-6 a real drag. Unless the system has managed to squish all the creativity out of her and her generation by then, which is entirely possible.

So presumably private schools aren't teaching all this nonsense grammar. Are they in any way disadvantaged when they join a mainstream secondary school?

It does seem odd the government making things compulsory for state ed that wont ever affect them.

I have no clue what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I have 2 degrees. I am in my forties and have managed thus far without this knowledge. DS (y4) said they were doing 'creative writing' the other day. But x wanted to put monkeys in her story but was not allowed. Apparently it wasn't in keeping with the 'style' of the story. What's creative about that?

DS2's reception teacher told me some children don't really respond to phonics and learn better by sight reading. Ds2 is one of them. He still has to plough through hours of phonics work.

Considering home ed.

I find schools just aren't academic enough, what is wrong with learning? How have we ended up in a society where a good proportion of school leavers lack so many basic skills?

My DS (15) is bog standard 'average' at school, he is no brain box, but he is never challenged, given any work that will stretch him - he just coasts along. I would almost like to hear him say 'I've got too much homework' . He has moved around a few different schools and none of them seem to actively encourage learning (including Ofsted rated 'outstanding' schools ).

And yes, I have been involved as a parent helper, PTA member and DH as a Governor.

Every day when I ask DS how was his day at school and what he did, he starts telling me about all the craft, art projects, computer designs they did, music, stories the teacher read to them, etc.
Then I ask, what about maths or English? He then proceeds to tell me about what he learnt, the grammar terms, the topic they had to write about, etc.

So as previous posters have said, it's also about balance. They can be taught the maths and the grammar, writing skills, phonics, etc in a way that is still fun, and without being at the expense of other subjects.

Obviously, this is only Year 2, and these children have been with the new curriculum since the start. The current Year 6 children are a different story and the teachers might not have the luxury of time to catch up with all the gaps left there by changing from one curriculum to the other half way through.

"I find schools just aren't academic enough, what is wrong with learning? How have we ended up in a society where a good proportion of school leavers lack so many basic skills?"

The logistics of managing huge numbers of children are mind boggling. Out of a six hour day there is lot of time wasted lining up, doing registration, room changes, dealing with distruptive behaviour. Home educated children often manage to make massive progress on two hours a day of solid study in a one to one or a one to three situation.

I think that parents need to take some responsiblity to make sure children get the basics. The difficulty ofcourse is that some parents do not have a grasp of the basics themselves.

As a parent its easier to give children fun experiences than to teach them the academics. When our local primary went into special measure I was paying £22 a week on a tutor to teach my son the stuff the school should have covered. I dont need to send dd to a tutor as she is doing well at school. She has a violin lesson, a gymnastics class and a swimming lesson each week instead.

Dh is a primary school teacher. Conversation between me and dh this morning: do you think DS1 (year 5) needs English tuition for all the grammar they now have to lean? Dh: what for? So that he can know what a f**ing prepositional adverbial phrase is and give Michael gove what he wants? so that's a no then...

Paperm0ver - I think there have not been such drastic differences to the KS1 curriculum, which is why you'll note that all the parents in this thread who are really worried have kids in years 5 and 6, and all the ones who are saying the changes are fine have kids in KS1!

So hopefully your dd will not notice the SPaG element too much...yet.

To give a bit more detail on why it's bollocks, linguistically speaking:

1. Nobody learns to use their native language grammatically by learning grammar and consciously thinking about the grammar as they speak/write. No-one. You don't teach toddlers to talk by getting them to learn lists of adjectives or nouns, you talk to them. This applies to every child, ever. There is no-one in the world who is not fluent in their own language. When learning foreign languages, particularly the old-fashioned way you or I might have been taught at school, there are some people (a shrinking number these days) who think that the best way to do this is to teach grammar as a framework and lexis, ie vocabulary, to sort of slot into the grammatical framework. According to that theory, you keep practicing enough and eventually your ability to talk about the 'pen of your aunt' in a very stilted way becomes something approximating to real, fluent conversation. Or not. In reality, even in foreign language teaching, that view is hopelessly outdated and most people would recommend attention to 'form' ie grammar only within the context of meaning, ie reading/listening/speaking/writing, never on its own as an abstract activity.

So what the new curriculum has done is it has taken the study of decontextualised grammar teaching from its original - and very outdated - context, ie the study of foreign languages, and attempted to apply it to the study our our native language. And to very young children! Who cannot possible have any use for this knowledge!

To be clear, there is no, zero, research anywhere to suggest that learning decontextualised grammar like this improves writing abilities in one's first language. None.

So the whole basis of the subject is nonsense.

I have a ds in Y2 and on the whole I feel positive about the new curriculum because generally i believe children are sponges and the more you expect from them the more they achieve. My older ds in Y 5 was taught at a much more relaxed pace and it is clear how much better ds2s reading and writing is than ds1s was at the same stage.

Re grammar I think if they can get this now in year 2 they will be set for life. Ds' teachers are working really hard to try to make the grammar digestible and easier to learn with actions and singing.

Ds isn't stressed, but he's definitely stretched. Maths wise I am a bit concerned that he's not getting secure in everything before they move on. I'd prefer homework to be pages of practice questions rather than the project work his school have started doing. I actually think more tests here would help!!

My Y5 ds actually seems much more interested challenged and engaged this year and again I think children rise to what is expected of them.

Buuuut none of my dc have Sen and they are at the upper end of the ability range.... How lower ability/Sen dc are faring I don't know. But then again they fared pretty badly under the old curriculum...

(Deep breath)

Riiight. Well, that's just for starters.

OK, I do agree that learning basic grammar (which to be fair, except for a brief period in the 70s in a few schools, has always been the norm) can be useful. So learning noun, verb, adjectiv etc is useful to allow one to think about one's writing and reading and useful as preparation for learning foreign languages too.

But beyond that, it is pointless. It is always a good guide that if the words you are using to explain something are more complicated than the concepts you are trying to explain, the explanation is unlikely to be very helpful... In fact, on the contrary, all it is likely to do is confuse the matter further.

All the research shows that the best way by far - which by fortunate coincidence also happens to be the most fun! - to improve children's writing is to get them to read widely and write frequently. Anything else will be less successful, less enjoyable, and, therefore, a distraction from what they ought to be doing...!

As to the specific details of the test, it includes questions that are factually inaccurate
eg describing 'struct' as a word 'root' (it isn't).

It includes questions that are age-inappropriate
eg Rewrite the sentence below, adding a subordinate clause. (Useful at some point - but for 8 year olds? Seems like overkill.)

and questions that, IMO, are a waste of time at any age, eg

Tick one box in each row to show if the underlined conjunction is a subordinating conjunction or a co-ordinating conjunction. (Why?????!!)

Anedote does not mean that there are not problems with the new curriculum. I feel that the lack of differentation is very hard on children with special needs. My impression is that there are more behavioural problems in dd's class than there was in ds' class seven years ago.

I feel there is a mistaken assumption that children don't like learning English grammar.

Learning what suffixes and pre fixes means helps with spelling and reading for meaning. A lot of word roots come from latin or greek. If the root "struct" means build then the meaning of the words "construct", "destruct", "structure", "Obstruction" become easier to spell. Knowing all these root words makes learning secondary science easier.

woofles - you mentioned SEN and that is an additional worry. MY DS does not have SEN AFAIK but the authorities have already made it clear that any child who is eg dyslexic WILL fail these tests and will therefore start secondary school being labelled as 'not meeting the expected standards' ie a failure. They will then be forced to spend year 7 and 8 and... repeatedly doing these primary school tests until they pass (quite what happens to kids who can never pass due to their SEN has not been made clear...). So yes, there will be kids - and a large number, as these tests are hard, who will be labelled as failures at the age of 10 or 11. And then repeatedly thereafter.

And let us remind ourselves, that this was never, ever what these tests were supposed to do. They were never intended to measure the ability of particular children on a pass/fail basis. They were designed to measure the success of schools only, to ensure that they were covering the curriculum effectively. So the inferences that are about to drawn based on these tests have no validity AT ALL. (The validity of a test is based on the uses for which it is used, rather than some inherent property of a test.) These uses are not valid. But, nevertheless, they will destroy - and I don't think that's too strong a word - the confidence and futures of a whole generation of children who happen to have SEN.

It is outrageous. It is horrifying. And no, I'm not exaggerating. Wish I was. :(

toootired - "There is no-one in the world who is not fluent in their own language." Umm do you live in a nunnery? I have attempted to speak to dozens of under 25 native Englishmen/women that were educated in the past dozen years and it would be polite to call their language local txtspeak. You actually have to get a translator to be able to understand what they mean. And we are not talking a 'secret' language they use to annoy older people, its their only language.

We need more SPaG at primary school not less!

My child will probably 'fail' the year 2 SATs

It will certainly be interesting to see the pass rates for Y2 and Y6. I've been reading that children who were previously NC Level 5 are failing the Y6 practice SATs. I don't much care what DD1 gets, she has passed the 11+, SATs are just for school league tables- except that if she fails she has to do it again in Y7 which is a right pain.

I don't think I was taught enough grammar at school in the 80s and 90s, however now it seems to have gone too far the other way, at the expense of creativity.

I'm not sure when this golden age of British education was, when everyone came out of primary school knowing everything they were meant to and came out of secondary school with glowing results. Surely education has always failed numerous people, loads in my generation and older went through it without learning to read or write, and the way we used to treat people with 'special needs' was to not really bother to teach them at all but get them to do other stuff or easier work. Kids were written off at 11 and sent to secondary moderns to do CSEs instead of O Levels.

The main issue now is that most jobs, a lot quite unnecessarily in my view, require people to have degrees, and there is hardly anything that is entry level or unskilled.

Bolognese - I don't live in a nunnery, no, though I am slightly at a loss as to the relevance of that. Are nuns famed for speaking super English?

Anyway, I digress. You appear to make the layman's error of confusing Standard English with English (which to be fair, the NC does not - it clearly distinguishes between the two).

You, like Michael Gove, have decided that your version of Standard (British) English is the only 'correct' version of English. Actually, in reality, there are many versions of English, and to each of us, our own version is indisputably superior! I suspect those youthful native Brits whose English you so despise would think that you, too, 'talked funny'. What you are doing is making a value judgement based on class, snobbery, etc that your version of English is of greater intrinsic value than theirs. But that's a subjective opinion.

There are reasons for teaching schoolchildren Standard English, certainly. But it being the 'only' correct version of the English language is certainly not one of them. It is not even true to say that it is the variety spoken by most people in the UK.

Good points, Glinda.

What are we educating our children for and why? Is knowledge of obscure or fictitious parts of speech really going to help future generations in a world when nearly everything can be done by computers or robots and all facts can be revealed in seconds on a screen? Is rote learning really the skill we ought to be encouraging above all others?

I'm always amazed that intelligent people somehow assume being able to write books for children makes MR Rosen an expert in all things relating to schools. He's very good at sensational headlines without checking the facts.

"Is knowledge of obscure or fictitious parts of speech really going to help future generations in a world when nearly everything can be done by computers or robots"

Actually, this is the main argument for

Because understanding the system of grammar and being able to apply it in specific form is seriously good for coding.

^"It includes questions that are age-inappropriate
eg Rewrite the sentence below, adding a subordinate clause. (Useful at some point - but for 8 year olds? Seems like overkill.)"^

What test would this be?