Twinkl-ed Out

[TrojaninTroy]

I'm posting this in the spirit of enquiry rather than clash, hopefully.

DS's independent pre-prep department have re-written their curriculum in order to make lessons more cross-curricular. This seemed all good until the last lock down schooling, where it became evident that his teachers had switched to Twinkl as their almost sole curriculum platform. Everything, everything that they presented to the children was there, bar PE, Art & Music which was taught by subject tutors. It was terribly samey, with Power Points, comprehensions, missing word sheets, fact files all there week after week. No 'live lessons'.

OK, so that time has now passed, and we are now well into the summer term. But school are still following the same Twinkl format. Some of the facts aren't that well presented and there are no actual photos of people & artefacts & neither were there any maps. Some of it is not completely up to date or sufficiently broken down.

I'm not sure how Twinkl have been able to be so bang on for DS's school's new curriculum. Do teachers use Twinkl to make their own worksheets, PPs etc look better presented, or do the teachers ask Twinkl staff to do it for them? Some of it has been rather wishy washy and some of it seems too wordy for the target age group.

I'm not averse to certain of their materials being used by schools if they are genuinely the best thing. I do know that there is some good stuff on Twinkl and I use some of it myself in my work as a tutor. But I wouldn't dream of reverting to it wholesale because no way does it specifically match what my students need, plus I believe good teaching should include a variety of approaches.

DH & I have a meeting with DS's Head Teacher next week to discuss an ongoing issue relating to lack of challenge in maths (I felt we needed to be specific about the territory we have raised concerns about so have not mentioned the wider curriculum before), and the Head knows that we are considering a change of school. We have decided to tell the Head that as DS is going into prep next term we will leave it a year to see if things improve. But thinking as I do at the moment, more of this Twinkl formula might just be too much and I am considering raising this with the Head at our meeting. It would be good to have my thinking challenged by any primary school educators out there, as it will help to clarify what we say to the Head next week.

Thanks in advance :-)

And no-one would get away with that in our state school!

Thanks for reminding me namechangingforthis19586, that was another issue I found on Twinkl, a worksheet that referred to adjacent consonants such as and < dr> as digraphs and yes I fully agree that it isn't the worst site out there but that doesn't make errors acceptable.
TrojanTroy there are also errors on some of the other subject sheets ( I recall the St George power point being slated on Twitter recently) and mentioned phonics purely in response to another poster saying they were useful.

Thank you so much for your continued responses.

It seems to me that when our son's school re-wrote its English/Humanities curriculum, they did not have the teaching materials to support it and so turned to Twinkl as an easy fix.

But I'm still a bit out of the loop here. To those primary school educationalists who have posted their thoughts, what curriculum materials does your school use in support of the humanities subjects?

I really really like the IPC Curriculum. I thought their planning, resources and range of activities were excellent.

Wow our state school does far better than this! I think sometimes in the private sector they reat on having bright children/motivated families and don't put the work in to properly tailor to a class.

Twinkl is fine to dip into as pps have said. As far as humanities go I would look at resources from a variety of different sources and adapt/edit to suit. The snipping tool has been life changing I would look at the objectives on the national curriculum and go from there to create my own lessons/slides/activities. Sometimes schools pay subscriptions for curriculum planning e.g. Collins snap science/ white rose maths etc etc but again these are something to guide not rigidly follow.

I love the snipping tool 😁

@namechangingforthis19586

Hmmm well Twinkl is very strong for phonics and number bonds but to pay for an entirely Twinkl education would annoy me too. Especially when no one in the illustrations seems able to open their eyes, they're a smug bunch.

It really, really isnt!

Some of the KS2 history is simply inaccurate.
Low level language and weak and inappropriate vocabulary.

If I see Twinkle maths in books then I know the school won't have a robust well sequenced programme for mathematics- same with phonics. Twinkle is not a phonics programme.

Oh and Twinkle pay their 'team' less than a newly qualified teacher rate. So they cant be experienced teachers.

Annual Salary: 20,475 per annum
Location: Work from home (must be based in the UK) Hours: 37.5 hours per week.

Youll be joining a team of more than fifty passionate teachers working to edit Twinkls online content for teachers across the UK. The majority of your time will be spent working with Content Writers and engaging with product priorities to facilitate the highest possible quality of teacher content for our customers • checking a broad range of new resources for spelling, punctuation, grammar, curriculum relevance and factual accuracy; • sensitively offering feedback, advice and support to our writers where needed; • running workshops with small groups of writers in your team; • demonstrating excellent communication skills with the writers, designers and illustrators that you collaborate with; • curating existing content on site to...

blackelephant

Where are you getting this from?

I use it alongside many other resources and find Twinkl great for consolidation, revision, practice or sometimes introduction. Not mastery. I really don't think it's intended to be used in isolation either. I'm a trained professional and get great results, sometimes using Twinkl. I prefer it to comparable sites but always happy to learn of something better - which no one on the thread can volunteer despite criticising it!

What is this wonderful site you're comparing Twinkl with unfavourably? Or are you comparing it unfavourably with your own resources made from scratch?

Or is this because Twinkl is trans friendly? I've seen it knocked here before for that reason. Genuine question.

Thats not this thread though. Id be surprised at any school using twinkl as their entire resource. That's v different to using the odd resource for an activity.

@namechangingforthis19586
I've no great dispute with DS's school using Twinkl as an occasional resource, provided that it is relevant. But it is quite clear that they used it as their sole curriculum platform during the last lockdown and that they are still continuing to use it substantially, well into the summer term. As you are so familiar with it, you must be aware that its basic frameworks are very limited. So every Powerpoint, every comprehension, every factfile is the same. This stifles a child's ability to cope with different text types not to mention their ability to present their own work in a variety of ways.

As a former teacher, I personally am of the view that the resources that work best are the ones that I have created myself. That takes a lot of time of course. As a parent, I am not even expecting the teachers of DS's £12k a year school (with competitive pay & extremely generous PPA time) to do this on every occasion. But surely there is a variety of well researched, well published resources, properly linked to relevant learning objectives that they could draw on. That is my gripe.

I hadn't even begun to think about trans. What a bizarre thing to say. The comments made by other posters on this thread could have come from umpteen years ago, before trans became the issue of the day.

@SavingsQuestions

Thats not this thread though. Id be surprised at any school using twinkl as their entire resource. That's v different to using the odd resource for an activity.

You hit the nail on the head there

Twinkle is very much about activities and not about learning.

So too many people think we have this 'theme' and then go to Twinkle and these loose the focus on what they want a child to 'learn' and it becomes all about low level 'doing' activities to keep children occupied.

So many of the images are awful- the people are stereotypical caricatures.

trojan I agree that the best resources are often those created personally but only because the teacher has invested thinking time and creativity into the lesson as a whole. A more experienced teacher doesn't need to re invent the wheel to have a lovely lesson. Twinkl is formulaic and repetitive but you aren't ignored to use it in a rigid way. If you're not happy about the standard of teaching you obviously need to have a chat with the school. I don't understand why you haven't done so already.

blackelephant

Is learning not about activities? Surely learning is largely activity based? When you say activities, what are you thinking of and what would you have students do instead?

obliged

@namechangingforthis19586
Thank you for this advice. That was the whole point of my thread - to gain a range of responses from primary educationalists before the meeting. Please see penultimate paragraph of my OP.

@namechangingforthis19586

blackelephant

Is learning not about activities? Surely learning is largely activity based? When you say activities, what are you thinking of and what would you have students do instead?

No.

You think 1st about what you want pupils to learn
Then how you want YOUR pupils to learn it

With Twinkle the activities rarely match with that as it is not individual to your pupils. Poor teachers think - our topic is farm- what has Twinkle got or we are learning about Roman warfare-what has Twinkle got

They then lose what they want children to learn and become subsumed in a low grade generic Twinkle activity that does not meet the needs of their learners. The learning is not well sequenced as Twinkle doesnt do that- it is not a curriculum

I can honestly say that I have never seen a strong lesson taught using Twinkle resources.

Teachers with a well developed pedagogy who really understand teaching and learning- that is what makes a good lesson- not Twinkle

They want a teacher for £19k- what kind of teacher are they going to get? eacher Support Advisor

Annual Salary: £19,000 Contract: Temporary 12 month contract Hours Per Week: 37.5 hours per week.

. As Twinkl develops we want to ensure that whenever a teacher has an issue or needs our help that we can provide the best service and help them as quickly as possible. As such we are looking for enthusiastic teachers to join us at our Sheffield offices to help teachers throughout the world.

They advert says teacher but the qualifications are
PGCE qualified or Level 3 Teaching Assistant or equivalent
A to C in GCSE Maths & English

BlackElephant
I think anyone whose training is current would agree with you. Back in the 90s in my first teaching post it was the other way on - a sort of Blue Skies thinking. But that went out of the window with the introduction of the NLS & NNS.

You might as well pay £5 a month for twinkl and do it yourself

blackelephant

Is that what they do. Shocking.

I wouldn't dream of using any resource in that way. Doesn't seem like Twinkl's fault though - there are plenty of sites offering printouts that could be used in that fashion.

I think you're wrong about there being something wrong with activities as such as children are certainly learning when they're occupied and interacting with the lesson materials to achieve learning objectives. What you're describing is keeping students busy by substituting resources that aren't tailored to the learning objectives. Nothing to do with Twinkl.

I'm a TA in state primary. All free and if we used Twinkl for everything our head would be furious.

We mostly use it for creative resources, displays,role plays etc with the occasional worksheet here and there.

The PowerPoints tend to be modified by teachers to fit the learning objective, the task and the needs of the class.

All in all, I wouldn't be happy if this was happening in a state school, never mind if I was paying for it.

What is this wonderful site you're comparing Twinkl with unfavourably?

Loads. White Rose, Maths Shed, Phonics International - all of much higher quality. Do you work for Twinkl, by any chance?