What's going wrong with Scottish education??

[TinfoilHattie]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-39856284

Obviously very tempting to start another SNP bashing thread and I'm pretty clear that the blame for this lies at their door. It's shocking that performance is getting worst, not better and that less than half of S2s are performing well or very well in writing. It's all very well Swinney standing up and saying that it's not good enough but WHY is it not good enough and WHAT is he going to do about it?

Is it Curriculum for Excellence? Are the tests unrealistic? Funding? Changing expectations?

It's all very interesting for me as I have children in P4, P7 and S2 and those are the years which are tested. My kids are doing fine and I have no worries about them, but we're a family which values education and encourages reading. I do worry though about my daughter who spelled her new school as "Acadmay" and it wasn't corrected by the teacher.

So what's going wrong and how do we put it right?

Seems like the answer is to give schools more power to throw the book at those parents who they know are taking the piss. This would improve attendance without doing what England has done, which I think is indeed completely OTT.

I think there has definitely been a change in society too.

Maybe CfE hasn't helped that- sending home 'home shared learning' full of twee and expensive ideas doesn't send out the message that homework is important.

Days at the end of the terms I really don't mind. The children get soooooo tired. We will be revising for the next few weeks (with countless interruptions for Sports Day, Prizegiving, the school show, the summer fair). We finish on a Wednesday- I'm not doing jotter work from that Monday on. The kids are past it.

Well, my DD were absent for a week because of grandad's passing. We had to leave from one day to the next, but AFAIK nobody batted an eyelid.
As to holidays at the end of the school year, the first year we stayed till the bitter end, but that taught me a valuable lesson so this year we depart about 4 days before the end of the year and we save A LOT (we are from the continent). Last year we missed it 2 days at the end.
It has to be said that my kids have almost 100% attendance and zero unauthorised days off (I don't know how the funeral will be counted. I did send an email to the school advising them).

I asked for a few days off -there was a good reason for it, but in fact I wasn't asked the reason. I was a bit shocked by that. Just given the time off.
I hate this habit of the children not doing any work at the end of term. They certainly need all the lesson time they can get.
If there was a half term, they would not be tired. My dd doesn't get tired in fact, as the work is so lightweight, and she never has any homework. That's in secondary.

The problem is, so many kids are missing, some don't do meaningful work as they will just have to do it again. So, the kids miss school. And then there are fewer kids, so fewer teachers do meaningful work.

And, "the kids are so tired" is not really the case in secondary - if they are it is more likely to be from parties and late nights, rather than school based activities.

But, I would love to be able to do more to keep kids in school more. It really would help!

Does anyone know why the SNP have been introducing all these changes, when the previous system in Scotland had such a high reputation?
And why do they seem to be doing it without consultation, and without making changes when teachers see that it doesn't work?
Our Headteacher, from what he says, is an SNP supporter, who thinks that the CFE will work in the future.

Whistlerx,
AFAIK it wasn't the SNAP, but the previous lib-lab coalition who decided the change which was unopposed. The SNP has been in charge of implementation and various tinkering that followed.
The interesting thing is that it seems to me that nobody really knows what CfE means...
My HT recently told me that "curriculum does not matter", but what does matter is "resilience" (whatever that might mean...). I have been thinking about it for some time and to me it is true only if your child is at the top table or has some kind of learning difficulties. The rest (which is the vast majority)... well... difficult to see how they would benefit from a "curriculum does not matter" kind of approach.

SNAP, not SNAP

Blast the autocorrect

Resilience/grit has become the latest stupid buzzword in education (before that it was emotional intelligence, a few years before that it was self-esteem..... etc.)

The sudden preoccupation of schools with resilience/grit is interesting. It is an idea that has some merit--I mean, it IS good to encourage students to push themselves and work hard. The problem is that:

a) it has become yet another thing distracting people from the importance of curriculum. Like, what contents are actually studied.

b) it has also become a way of shrugging off the responsibilities that schools have to, like, teach kids properly. Yes, kids have a responsibility to work hard. But it's shitty for schools to use a weak curriculum and flimsy teaching methods (examples: muddled reading instruction, or failing to put kids through sufficient practice of mathematical procedures so as to ensure fluency) and then respond to the pupils' poor results by basically saying to them "Well, you need to try harder! You're not showing enough resilience!" Fuck that, seriously. How cruel.

c) interestingly, even as more schools have become obsessed with the idea of grit/resilience, this has in no way resulted in any questioning of the idea that "learning is supposed to be fun at all times." So you have schools simultaneously carrying out all this professional development on "resilience" and banging on about how teachers must make their students more resilient and "gritty," while also telling teachers to plan all lessons to be as "engaging" (=entertaining) as possible, and acting as though poor behavior by children is the teacher's fault for not making the lesson fun enough.

We've decided to tackle literacy on our own. I'm giving dd a book to read each week - a good one.

I might have got the wrong end of the stick and you have more than one dd, but isn't your dd in S2 whistlerx . If she is not literate by now, then I agree, she has problems - and you are right to be complaining about the schooling. I could understand if you were encouraging a younger child to read more; when ds didn't "get" reading until he was 6.5 so for the following 2 or 3 years he was "between" groups and we had to supplement his reading encouraged by the school so he could - and did - get back into the top group).

I was a bookworm in my teenage (and pre-teenage) years don't read as often nowadays mostly because when I start a book I have to finish it in a single sitting - loved Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Georgette Heyer, CS Lewis (not just the Narnia books), Tolkein..... Ds doesn't do as much "free" reading as I did - but even though he prefers sciences, he still has a good literacy grounding (and has just sat his English Higher where at worst he'll get a B).

The only "forcing" we, as his parents, have done is to make him continue English to Higher because, as my old English teacher used to say (and so did my mum, who was also a very good English teacher), "Whatever you do at Uni, even if it is science based, you will still need to write reports and construct a coherent argument".

In S2, he studied, amongst other texts, Kidnapped, a Shakespeare play (think it was "A Merchant of Venice" - he did "A Midsummer's Night Dream" in S1) and some poetry (including a bit of Beowulf) school supplied the books so I am not sure of all the texts he covered as he just got on with his homework and refused help from us . I didn't feel the need to make him read extra. His creative writing and persuasive/discursive writing are both excellent, so I have no complaints. (I think it was at his S3 Parents Evening that his very intense English teacher said he'd written a very good creative essay and that he had discovered his "voice". To quote her, "I can teach him the correct grammar but he has to find his own voice" , )

Yes, dd is in S2. They don't appear to tell them to read any particular books. She happily reads the usual adventure type books, but I've decided to start ensuring that she reads some of the classics, so that she will have a decent literary education. She's certainly not getting that from secondary school so far. Have started her off on "My family and other animals", which is going down well. I also try to take her to plays sometimes.

You could try audio books (or newer technological equivalents) in the car etc. too. Not as a substitute for reading the classics in book form as well, but as a time-efficient way to just increase the number of classic works she gets exposed to.

Love "My family"---the description of the family members is hilarious! She could try Durrel's other short stories as well. Great fun.

blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/fact-checking-nicola-sturgeon-told-andrew-neil-education/

This is about the points on education raised in the Andrew Neil interview.

Thanks NoLottery, very interesting, especially the first bits.
Within that article there was this one linked
blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/nicola-sturgeon-knows-policy-real-concern-independence/
It isn't ground breaking but it is interesting.
In any case the definition of "positive destinations" as in "not in prison and not on the dole" is great :D

Now I have seen them all:
Does it matter if a neurosurgeon can't spell?

SNP MSP John Mason attacked over education tweets - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-40120006

I'm surprised that idiot is still allowed to tweet by the SNP