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!

toootired - no I dont think everyone should speak my English but I do think everyone should communicate and be taught in a standardized English, even if that changes over time. I accept you disagree and think children should make the rules up as they go along but I would suspect you are in the minority. Most people want to be able to communicate with everyone else who live in the same country with them.

I would suggest that it is not snobbish to want everyone to have a good enough standard of English to be able to get a job. I was wrong to say you live in a nunnery, my apologies, its obvious you live on benefits street.

mrz - subordinate clauses are to be introduced in Year 3, according to the NC document here (page 4). I'm surprised you are unaware of that, given you're a primary teacher!

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335190/English_Appendix_2_-_Vocabulary_grammar_and_punctuation.pdf

The test is the KS2 SATs.

Re Michael Rosen, you've had a good try at repeated ad hominems but have failed to actually come up with any substantive critiques of any of the points he makes.

As I said, I'm a linguist and an English language expert and agree 100% with everything he says on this (not with all his politics, but with this).

Which specific points do you disagree with?

Tootired you said test and I asked which test?

Michael Rosen critises synthetic phonics without bothering to find out what it really is. Believe it or not, but some children quite like doing phonics or grammar IF its well taught.

"As I said, I'm a linguist and an English language expert and agree 100% with everything he says on this (not with all his politics, but with this)."

Being a linguist and an English language expert does not make you an expert at teaching little children. A primary school teacher is an expert in small children rather than necessarily an expert in linguistics.

I hope that primary school teachers on this thread are not offended by this. I am sure that some primary school teachers have degrees in English, but there are many excellent primary school teachers from all kinds of backgrounds. dd current teacher has a maths degree, but he does a pretty good job at teaching phonics inspite of not being an expert in lingusitics.

bolognese there's no need to make such horrible comments. Especially as it doesn't actually matter where too lives or how she speaks.

Fwiw I speak rp, and I'm capable of swearing fit to shame anyone, using regional phrases, or exaggerating my accent so I sound like a minor royal. I also live on a council estate and mostly work with people who you would disdainfully dismiss as 'benefits street'. I have zero problems communicating with any, or understanding their accent or dialect. Neither does dd. So perhaps it's your knowledge of English that is the problem, not those with accents you deem inferior. And many of those 'benefits street' people I know happen to be articulate and logical enough to debate without resorting to making personal remarks about where someone might live.

Agree. Nasty.

MR Rosen paints a picture of what happens in schools ...which schools? I simply don't recognise anything he says as reflecting reality. unfortunately the truth wouldn't serve his purpose.

Bolognese - er no, I don't live on Benefits Street. What an odd thing to say!

Again, you totally misunderstand the point I was making. I certainly wasn't saying that I thought "children should make the rules up as they go along" - what I was saying was the idea that English is a single, agreed construct, is nonsense, and that actually there are - and always have been - many Englishes. That's why people in Glasgow speak a different type of English to people in Sussex, it's why a group of pensioners and a group of teens might sometimes struggle to understand each other, it's why 'black English' and 'white English' might sound recognisably different.

Of course children don't 'make it up as they go along!' - no-one would understand them if they did!

Do you understand now? It's a value judgement to focus on teaching one particular variety of English in preference to all others.

It's also a fallacy to suggest that there are 'agreed rules of grammar' - even linguists can't agree, because language is an organic thing, it isn't formed artificially in accordance with a set of rules, it came into being naturally and rules since devised have done their best to describe the workings of the language as they see it; but they only imperfectly describe the complexity of the original.

To give you an extended metaphor: teaching kids how to write by teaching them artificial 'rules' of grammar is like teaching birds how to fly by 'teaching' them a set of rules about aerodynamics. It's not going to make them fly any better - particularly if you insist that the eagle is the Standard Bird, and all birds, whether ducks, sparrows or indeed chickens, must 'fly' in exactly the same manner. In reality, birds will fly by picking it up naturally, and the more opportunities they have to practice flying, the better. Tying them down to a stick in a classroom and drilling them on names of flight techniques (preferably derived from the Latin) will make not a jot of difference to the birds' flying technique, but will result in some sriously unhappy birds.

I hope that is now clear.

mrz - Tootired you said test and I asked which test?

I answered - it's in the middle of the answer above. Questions on KS2 SATs, but topic introduced in Year 3.

ReallyTired - I thought we were discussing the changes to the SATs, rather than synthetic phonics, which has been around for yonks?

I love grammar too, actually. I'm a bit of a grammar geek. I've got nothing against grammar being taught well, to people who either want or need to learn it, or both.

I do object to flawed grammar being taught to children in primary school who do not want or need to know it.

Finally, I absolutely agree with you that I am not an expert in teaching English to primary school aged children. Are you? However, I do know plenty of primary teachers and hang out online in places they hang out and it would be an understatement to say they loathe the new SATs far, far more than I do. (Hardly surprising; they've got to teach the sodding things, and then stand to lose their jobs if that doesn't work out!)

The reason I posted here, and the reason I care at all, however, has nothing to do with my job and everything to do with the fact that I am the mother of a 9-year-old DS who will be forced to sit these new exams next year, and who has gone from loving 'English' (the school subject) to hating it, because the SPaG practice is so unbearably tedious. I very strongly object to the fact that he, and a generation of kids like him will be judged as 'failures' or 'acceptable' (there are no 'successes' in this exam!) on the basis of the result in a completely invalid exam.

I noticed and concluded you were deliberately trying to mislead posters into believing eight year olds were being tested on this

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)

As a linguist you will be aware of the differences between formal and functional grammar.

tootired but you originally said that eight-year-olds were being tested on it. Not so if it's the yr6 tests.

I'm also a linguist, and an English Language specialist (though granted I focus on historic language) but the last time I checked we taught children Standardised Written English. And actually children do make it up as they go, this week alone I have heard "stooded", "tooked" and some other really lovely ones.
I can't help but feel that you are suggesting that local dialects of spoken English should be accepted in written forms academically? In which case I shall greatly enjoy telling DP that I can now use a double or triple negative as I choose and that "the dog needs washed" is perfectly acceptable written English too. I know my DDad would have had a much better time at school if "Wot I did on my 'olidayz" was a good homework title.

DD is 9. She actually loves her grammar lessons (less keen on spelling). So some children do actually enjoy this kind of stuff!

mrz - when you say you don't recognise the truth of anything Michael Rosen says about schools, can you give a specific example of something he says that you think is untrue?

Obviously he is not a full-time teacher; but he does visit numerous schools as part of his work, and has a child at primary school now, so is at least as well-qualified to talk about the subject as most of us on this thread, and probably rather more so, as most of us haven't visited hundreds of primary schools. He's also Professor of Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London where he runs an MA in Children's Literature. He studied English at Oxford, and then worked on Schools Programmes at the BBC. He has published huge numbers of bestselling childen's books and poems, won numerous writing awards, honorary degrees, had several visiting professorships, oh, and he was the Children's Laureate from June 2007 to June 2009.

So let's say he's hardly an amateur...

I'm guessing he is reasonably justified in claiming he knows at least as much about English aimed at primary-school children as any current primary school teacher.

I agree he knows nothing about phonics and is quite mischievous in his representation.

He has a ds who is currently in Year 6 though, so probably knows as much about the assessment debacle as we do

I'm guessing you know as much as he does about the day to day classroom activities in a typical primary school. That is very little. Do you honestly think he observes normal lessons when he's in school?

Seryph - "tootired but you originally said that eight-year-olds were being tested on it. Not so if it's the yr6 tests."

No, that's not what I said. You drew inferences from what I wrote that I did not say. I quoted a question from the test that tests subordinate clauses and said that it (ie the concept of subordinate clauses, not the specific test question) was not useful for 8-year-olds - which is the age it is introduced in the NC.

It seems perfectly clear to me.

You also seem to have drawn some rather odd conclusions from some of my other posts, which really don't match anything I've said or believe; nothing to add really, but re-read them, and hope that clarifies matters.

The assessment mess is a whole other thing. The government are making it up as they go along and leaving everything until the last minute isn't helping.
Will they set the thresholds low to prove their educational policy is working or high so they can engage in more teacher bashing and justify universal acadamisation ...anyone's guess!

mrz - er...and you know what precisely about what I do or don't know about primary schools?

I wish you would just answer the question I asked and stop responding with ad hominems - if you think he is wrong about specific aspects of what goes on in primary schools, then tell us. I'm genuinely interested to hear. I agree with him on this issue (have no interest in phonics personally as my dcs are long past that) but I'm open-minded and if he is misrepresenting things, then I'd like to know how.

It's what you suggested which is why I said you were attempting to deceive.

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

If think he's wrong about ALL aspects

mrz - attempting to 'deceive' whom, precisely? Is there some sort of 'cabal' I'm trying to influence or something? I think you over-estimate the influence of MN, I really do!

I could have given you lots of points that are age-inappropriate - as is surely obvious, it's not just the questions in the tests that are age-inappropriate, it's the age at which the topics are introduced into the classroom that is inappropriate.

The problem, as surely you can grasp, is not that questions are included in a specific test sat on one specific date in Year 6 - that would bother no-one. The problem is that the material for these tests is introduced years earlier and children spend the last 4 years of their precious time at primary school being drilled repeatedly on fundamentally unnecessary concepts!

That is the problem. Surely this is obvious??!

That seems rather a grand claim, mrz! I'd love to know more about your background.

That you know more about primary English than the former Children's Laureate and current professor at several universities - you must have a pretty impressive CV!

But never mind that. As you clearly have a really, really long list, could you just pick the most egregious examples please, so that we can all understand? Just one or two will do fine.

No tootired I dont imagine you have any influence on MN but are you pretending that you didn't intend readers to believe that the example of an age inappropriate question you provided was for eight year olds? If not why link the two?

Are you in fact Mr Rosen as you both seem to share this love of half truths