Well, one "positive" aspect of the lockdown is that now I get to see some of the work that pupils in my kids' class (remember, we are in an "excellent" rated school) are expected to produce.
True example, I have just read quite a nice story from a P4. It is a bit of a shame that throughout the story there were no commas, no full stops and no capital letters. As in ZERO over some 300 words. Spelling, despite the spell checker, was random at best.
Looking at my kids, this is clearly the way they are asked to produce work. If you can be bothered to use punctuation and check the spelling, OK, but if you can't that's fine too.
Note, I know this child and he is lovely and comes from a nice home, so he does not belong to the "disadvantaged" or "learning difficulties" or whatever group.
@midnightstar66, NO WAY that what a P6 does here (in my school) can be equated to a Yr5 child. Not in a million years. In fact, I don't think you can make the comparison at all.
For example, my P6 has hardly done any fraction work, just before the lockdown they were introduced to mixed numbers, but (my daughters informs me) they are still pretty much at the "cut the pie" stage.
Grammar is another sticking point. In Scotland it is not done at all, as in AT ALL. England instead is very focused on it (at least in theory).
I couldn't stand the fact that my children did not know what a verb is, or are unable to recognise an adjective, so we had been doing some of that anyway (thanks KhanAcademy!!) and now we are going through some CGP books so that they can at least be familiar with the terminology and the fact that such a thing called grammar exists.
My P4 was asked to read a chapter of a book (any book) and write a list of the adjectives she could find. It was clear that the task was very difficult for her because she kept mixing adjectives and adverbs.
Another child posted a similar list and out of 37 words had 19 adjectives, 6 verbs, 2 nouns, 7 adverbs, 1 preposition (two words are missing but can't be bothered to go through the list again). This is clearly a task above they capabilities because they just don't know what the component parts of a sentence are (verb, adverb, noun, pronoun, adjective, preposition and determiners).
My P6 does not have a clue either what, say, a pronoun is. She is not even familiar with the word. Just recently they did "it's Vs its" and the word pronoun was never mentioned. "Its" denotes possession.
So, in short, any comparison between English and Scottish system is a waste of time.