Returning to primary teaching, What has changed since 2005?

[Hexagon2]

I last worked as a teacher around 15 years ago. I'm wondering about applying to be a TA, or possibly a teacher?
Can anyone give me the lowdown on the big Curriculum changes and trends since 2005 that I need to know about?
I trained in 2000 and taught mainly Year 1, 2 and Reception. I was very familiar with:
-National Literacy Strategy and Numeracy Strategy with Numeracy Hour and Literacy Hour. We covered word level, sentence level and text level in an hour with strict timings

• Use of 'Big' books with lots of mini post it notes to annotate the text, guess missing punctuation, reveal words etc
• No interactive whiteboards yet. Most schools couldn't afford them
• Lots of individual whiteboards, number fans, phonics fans etc to show answers
• No formal method for Maths calculations taught. Lots of building confidence around numbers and providing lots of different strategies for the child to pick what works for them
• Use of a 100 square. My DD and DS look at me in shock when I print one off the internet to help them with their homework. They still seem to use numberlines though.
• Positive behaviour management. Lots of praise and whole class reward schemes, eg: nuggets in a jar culminating in whole class 'Golden Time' on a Friday. I think this still happens!! Time Out sometimes used, although rarely worked
• Use of fidget toys eg: playing with putty, or tactile ball for children with ADHD to hold during carpet time. Wobble boards/cushions in consultation with SENCO.
• Small group interventions outside of classroom in corridor for children struggling to reach expected levels, eg: ALS
• Set places for carpet time to help behaviour management
• Carpet time input at beginning of lesson and again for Plenary at end of lesson.
• All children sitting at grouped tables of ability for Numeracy and Literacy facing each other, even when doing independent work.
• Learning Objective on the board
• Talk partners
• Differentiating activity into 3 or more groups. Each group would get TA input at some point during the week, not always lower ability group.
• Worksheets were ok as long as they were good quality and clear. Some work in exercise books but not as important. Sometimes playing a game eg: phonics matching cards was enough.
• Half termly targets for children in Maths and English often laminated to table
• Lots of props available for kids to use eg : word banks, sentence starters, time conjunctions etc
• Class circle time once a week to cover PSHE/ Nurturing
• One working computer in corner of room if we were lucky. ICT was whole class visit to ICT suite once a week
• Early Years teaching involved having really good resources to cover Maths, Communication and Language, Knowledge and Understanding of the World, PSHE I think. Hmm not sure. Lots of role play areas that needed refreshing every few weeks, small world play. Emphasis on child led activities mostly and observations. One teacher led activity each lesson. Mark making, open access to outdoor play area. Lots of my own money spent on resources at ELC and the Works etc, how naive I was!!

There was sooo much laminating and displays to help the kids around the room. Not one bit of wall empty. Are all these resources not necessary now kids have electronic whiteboards/laptops?

How much of all this is very outdated? And what has changed? Thank you.

A lot of time was spent planning and making resources, adapting everything to different abilities. I was in my 20s and had a poor work/life balance. We couldn't ever pull out last year's planning and tweak that. It was exhausting at times! Or maybe it was just the school I worked at.

Well...
There have been two.new National Curriculums since 2005 - we are currently working to the Gove one.
Systematic synthetic phonics.
Maths mastery approach.
New statutory assessments - phonics screening for one.
The rise of academies...
I could go on, but won't.
If you genuinely do not know what has changed since 2005, I would not employ you as either a teacher or a TA yet.
You need to do some reading, and then get into a school as a volunteer as soon as Covid risk assessments allow to enable you to see what primary schools are like now and whether what made you leave in 2005 would impact on you wanting to re-enter the profession.

Statutory assessment has changed.

Thanks @Scarby9. I have just been reading a little now about the Maths Mastery Approach which looks very different from the Numeracy Strategy. It seems the focus now is on a Chinese style of teaching Maths, with children facing forwards or in mixed ability groups, concepts taught in a very structured way to the whole class, with less emphasis on 'catch up' groups. I can see how this would make for a calmer teaching environment. My own children talk about layers, where they can progress through the layers every lesson so they are not held back by being stuck with a lower ability task. No 100 square, lots of use of part whole models, bar models, partitioning... It does sound rather like I was taught and perhaps makes for a calmer classroom environment.

Yes I sound naive but this is my starting point. The culture of teachers being unsupportive and bullying each other left me feeling very demoralised in my last school. There was no peer teacher learning or sharing resources or plans. I really hope that things have improved since then. I know I was short sighted as I had worked in some great schools that were led well, and I felt a valued and respected.

I have approached a school about volunteering and they seem keen. I am considering TA roles only. I have been a long time out of the classroom. I will keep reading. If anyone can point me in the direction of particular key documents I would greatly appreciate it.

Don't assume all schools have interactive whiteboards/laptops for all pupils! This really is not the case in many many schools!

@Hexagon2

A lot of time was spent planning and making resources, adapting everything to different abilities. I was in my 20s and had a poor work/life balance. We couldn't ever pull out last year's planning and tweak that. It was exhausting at times! Or maybe it was just the school I worked at.

This has not changed! The waves of change sweep so fast through primaries that tweaking last year's planning is the stuff of fantasy, except in a few schools!

Oh my goodness!!! It feels like everything has changed and I've only been teaching primary since 2009!!

Lots of things you mention still happen in my school - positive behaviour management, reward systems, differentiation...

However....
Massive changes in the curriculum from 2014 onwards means that younger children are taught more complex things - eg. some Y3 objectives are now in Y2 which some children aren't actually ready for.

Very overloaded & fact-based curriculum so it feels like you skim things at 100 mph although, yep, also expected to teach in depth for 'mastery' Big push on grammar (to the detriment of really creative writing in my opinion).

'Some work in books but not important' stood out for me. I teach Y2 and we have to evidence EVERYTHING because of the way they are assessed.

Levels were scrapped and replaced with 'working towards', 'at age-related expectations' or 'working above' or 'greater depth'. All of which are, well, levels but not actually as helpful as the old ones. Also, children must achieve all objectives in that band as it's no longer a best-fit.

To complicate matters further, there's no national framework for assessment really (apart from, arguably, Y2 & Y6). Individual schools assess in a similar but different way.

It's all a bit of a mess TBH. I'd definitely recommend having a look at the Nat Curriculum to see what kids are expected to do now.

And some experience in the classroom, even to observe if you can, would be invaluable.

Thanks for your responses. This is all super helpful information. Keep them coming!

It does all seem very complicated, but it always was! I taught during a Labour government and I guess this is a Conservative government reaction. I've always found it a shame that we can't acknowledge what we have done well in the past and add to it or adapt. I can't pretend to know all the latest ideas. I've just been reading about 'S' planning, gulp...what is that?!

When I came to teaching, I sometimes despaired at all the ability groups, lack of formal
calculation methods, not much phonics, no workbooks or textbooks. As I was leaving teaching, I remember Synthetic Phonics starting to become become popular and Ruth Miskin ' Read, Write, Inc' which I think is still used now. There was a big debate about synthetic v analytic(?) phonics. I always used to say that teaching reading was a multi-faceted approach, I think. 15 years had made me forget a lot though. Not so much emphasis on grammar back then, and childrens' flair for writing was acknowledged without having to always check off particular sentence structures to get higher marks.

We would teach children lots of different methods for calculation, such as using number lines, 100 squares, drawing dots, using multilink, some formal written calculations but children could choose their preferred method. But that was sometimes confusing.

All the vocab has changed. Shape comes under 'Geometry' and lots of emphasis on 'Arithmetic'.
Isn't it always so demoralising to be told everything we've been doing is wrong. I thought that my childrens' school must be particularly old fashioned when they are constantly doing SPAG, whole class learning, using dienes and ones, doing really in depth phonics but I see they are doing the latest thing!

It seems like environmental issues are being covered more in Science and Geography. Perhaps that's why my DS has regular nightmares about deforestation and global warming! But at least it is relevant and necessary.

You're right that there is much more whole-class teaching. Rare to see ability tables anymore. Scaffolding to support lowers. Guided reading is now generally being taught as a discrete whole class lesson. Read up on concrete pictorial abstract for maths, as well as trying out at modelling.

The three part lesson idea has been noted by many schools as a bit counterproductive so you likely won't see it in the same way.

Time for subjects other than English and maths is being squeezed.

Technology has changed but not to the point of pupils having a laptop each, at least not in most schools.

Read the 2014 curriculum for a year group you're familiar with to get an idea of the academic expectations.

English - Jane Considine's The Write Stuff and her Hooked on Books are very big at the moment. Can't make my mind up about that tbh, but then like you I trained at the start of the millennium and it was all about 15-15-20-10, then had about 6 years out of school due to my own family and returned to find everything had changed! Now it's more of a ping pong approach, highly scaffolded, lots of mini-plenaries style of teaching.

Forget the guided reading carousel, it's whole class reading now - Ashley Booth has a fab reading spine for free with teaching Slides etc.

Look at Rosenshine's principles of teaching.

Maths - v much a mastery approach. Look into White Rose scheme of learning - they do lots of training webinars that help if you are unsure on the mastery approach. Their home learning videos at the moment are a good guide too.

Agree with pp about objectives being shifted - things I taught Y3s are being taught to Y1s now.

I returned via TA route - would highly recommend it after so long out, esp if you can get some time with class teacher to see how they plan.

Good luck.

The interactive whiteboard one is interesting - things have almost gone full circle on that one. For a while people had really complicated smart notebook documents or powerpoints for lots of lessons but now observations etc are much less about what the teachers does and more about the progress children make so the use of the IWB has simplified a lot thankfully. In fact in general I'd say there's less emphasis on 'exciting' the children which I think is no bad thing - most children actually quite like doing things like column addition and it doesn't need to be dressed up as something else.

The use of technology probably hasn't moved on as much as you think. Maybe a set of laptops/chromebooks/tablets between a year group if you're lucky. Often these won't connect to the internet or be charged or some other inconvenience. We use them only a couple of times a week at my school. Children with SEND might have their own device.

The EGPS curriculum is very different and you might have to learn some new vocabulary unless you have a strong languages background (eg Y4 learn to recognise simple past tense vs the perfect past tense).

Ability tables generally frowned on I would say. Sadly there's often not a general TA to work with groups either...

@Subordinateclause
@Lancrelady80
@Solidaritea
Thanks guys. This really is so helpful, and quite an eye opener. I have always thought my kids' school is super traditional... repetitive work, whole class stuff, and perhaps a little boring...but now I see where it's all coming from. I will go and do some more investigation and research now, but this is a great starting point.

Oh just to add I do use hundred squares a lot still!

@Subordinateclause I'm pleased about that!!

I've been teaching 13 years. Now in y1.

In my current school we use active inspire flip charts for all lessons but these are instead of daily lesson plans. We have a3 medium term plans for each unit of work. Good use of teacher time.

No success criteria stuck in books at start of each lesson to mark against (yay)
Topic based approach but not to the extreme as it was in 2007
Mixed ability seating and I pull out different combinations of children each day to work with me depending on their progress last lesson ( assessment for learning). Works well.
I pads and laptops can be used a couple of times a week in competition with other classes to get hold of them.
Daily phonics. Daily handwriting.
High expectations for outcomes. We cope OK in our catchment but some children are just not ready for the ideas we want them to grasp.
Little time for unstructured play and exploration.
Good marking code in my school which is reasonable. Good sharing of resources.
English is based on a text and genre with a purpose and audience that we share with the children. We cover sentence level objectives through this plus word level where appropriate. Modelling. Toolkits. Not so much on huge flip chart paper as in past years though. I hated those bloody washing lines of paper flapping in the wind.
Working wall for English and Maths. Maths mastery is great actually.

I have moved recently from a very trendy school to one which is a bit behind the times eg we still do a carousel for guided reading.