Education report
Generation of pupils being put off school, report says
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A devastating attack on what is taught in primary schools is delivered today by the biggest inquiry into the sector for more than 40 years.
Too much stress is being placed on the three Rs, imposing a curriculum on primary school pupils that is "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools", it says. The inquiry is recommending sweeping changes to stop children being left disenchanted by schooling at an early age.
Children should not start formal schooling until the age of six – in line with other European countries – the 600-page report on the future of primary education recommends. It was produced by a team directed by Robin Alexander of Cambridge University.
Tests for 11-year-olds and league tables based on them should be scrapped, and instead children should be assessed in every subject they take at 11.
The report is heavily critical of successive Conservative and Labour governments for dictating to teachers how they should do their jobs. Professor Alexander cites "more than one" Labour education secretary saying that primary schools should be teaching children to "read, write and add up properly" – leaving the rest of education to secondary schools. "It is not good enough to say we want high standards in the basics but we just have to take our chance with the rest," said Professor Alexander.
The report concludes: "Such a diet, after all, is even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools, whose practices most people claimed the country had outgrown."
Gillian Pugh, a former head of the National Children's Bureau who chaired the review, added: "There is no research evidence that an early access to formal learning does children any good and a lot of evidence that it can actually do some harm."
The report recommends that children should largely be left to learn through play, with the foundation stage of learning extended until six, followed by formal lessons in primary schools from six to 11.
"Children in England start their formal schooling at a younger age than in most other countries and there is strong support for the view that England should conform to international practice by starting formal school at age six or seven," says the report.
It rejects the findings of a previous inquiry into primary schooling by the former Ofsted inspector Sir Jim Rose on behalf of the Government, saying it should be put on ice because it failed to tackle key issues.
It is equally scathing about government attempts to control the curriculum and dictate to teachers how they should teach, citing as an example the formal literacy and numeracy strategies introduced by Labour which spelled out how lessons should be conducted. "The Stalinist overtones of a 'state theory of learning' enforced by 'the machinery of surveillance and accountability' – league tables, testing targets – are as unattractive as they are serious," says the report. "The general air of pessimism and powerlessness [among teachers] could be an accurate reflection of how people feel, anywhere, when their freedom of action and thought in the area which lies at the heart of their work is reduced."
Professor Alexander's team question whether the rise in the percentage of pupils achieving the required level in maths and English at 11 does, in fact, indicate that standards have improved.
Instead, the report argues, "memorisation and recall have come to be valued more than understanding and enquiry and transmission of information more than the pursuit of knowledge in its fullest sense".
Other recommendations include an end to central prescription by the Government of how teachers should teach.
The report rejects the notion – put forward in a report by the UN agency Unicef – that British children are among the "unhappiest" in the West. The real crisis of childhood, it argues is the "crisis of disadvantage and poverty".
"The divide between the poorest households in Britain and those with relatively high levels of income widened dramatically during the 1980s," says the report. Despite a reduction since then, the gap is now widening again, it continues. Children from disadvantaged homes tend to get shouted at more at home and feel a sense of failure on starting school, it says. As a result, they are more likely to seek out the "class tearaways" for friends than those from a better-off environment.
Good quality teaching is essential for giving pupils a chance to escape from a poor environment, it argues, questioning whether the claim by Ofsted, which is often seized upon by ministers, that "we have the best quality teachers ever", can be verified.
The report advocates more use of specialist teachers in the latter years of primary schooling, arguing that it may be necessary to extend the PGCE primary training course from one to two years to give new staff the necessary expertise.
Last night the main plank of the report – raising the formal start of schooling to six – was rejected by the Government. The Schools minister Vernon Coaker said the Rose review had recommended a less prescriptive curriculum, adding: "It's disappointing that a review which purports to be so comprehensive is simply not up to speed on major changes in primaries."
However, its findings were widely welcomed by teachers' leaders. "How much more evidence does the Government need before it realises that this [the national curriculum tests] is a useless system for assessment which does nothing but bring unwelcome and unnecessary pressure on schools which are self-evidently successful?" said Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers.
The report, funded by the Esme Fairbairn Foundation, is the largest study into primary education since the Plowden report in 1967.
Victorian education: How it compares
The Victorian elementary schools, like those today, concentrated on the three 'R's much, as official reports would have it in both eras, to the detriment of a broader curriculum. But they were better at making sure children were well placed for employment, with girls doing sewing and boys more manual work.
Victorians started compulsory schooling at the age of five, because they wanted to get education of the working classes over quickly so children could start work at the age of 10. Yet no-one has questioned this starting age in the 140 years since it was introduced.
The parent's view: 'Three Rs aren't everything'
Caroline Morgan said she likes the sound of the Alexander review's main recommendation – that the start of formal schooling should be put back to six.
Ms Morgan, who lives in Dorchester and has three children, two of whom are of primary school age – William, nine, and Alice, seven – said the move "can only be a good thing".
"Starting school can be very difficult for some children. It is important to build their confidence so that it doesn't impact upon their learning."
This was one of the key forces behind the review's recommendations – the belief that beginning formal education before a child is ready for it can lower their confidence and leave them floundering in class.
She also believes that too much concentration on the "three Rs" can be counter-productive. "Our school head aims to get dirty with the school curriculum with the children going on regular trips, teaching the pupils in interesting hands-on ways, which is also fun," she said.
"It should not be just about literacy and numeracy. By moving away from this we can help to improve children's perception of school and make them want to go."
The teacher's view: 'A step in the right direction'
Primary school teacher Lesley Ward professes she is "delighted" with the key recommendations of the report. "I think this is wonderful news and a step in the right direction that will allow children to be children again," she said.
She said the move to begin formal schooling at six would "allow children to settle in before they are set the challenges of literacy and numeracy".
Ward, a primary school supply teacher from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, added: "These changes will no doubt improve children's happiness and commitment to school in future years."
She also welcomed the scrapping of the national curriculum tests in maths and English for 11-year-olds. "They are not an accurate measure of a child's ability and can demotivate a child if they score a 'level three' [one level below the required standard], even if that is a great result for the child.
"Too much emphasis is placed on working through the curriculum rather than allowing children to learn in an active, enjoyable manner."
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Comments
that said the beginning of education is reading; on top of that the intellect needs to be trained, frequently by repetition; all these take discipline, which is the very first thing a child needs to learn.
I liked school, by the way, apart from the PE and religion.
Kids don't hate discipline either, unless they have parents who let them get away with anything and then suddenly have to deal with it at school.
The "secret" to such good behaviour is no secret at all, though I suspect NOT what you're calling for. When YOU work, you expect a reward - money, holidays, a good meal out, a nice car, a big house. All too often children are thought of as a different animal - little people who seek no reward except (in the minds of adults) to have a decent job in another 20 or 30 years, the equivalent of 4 or 5 lifetimes from their perspective.
So the pupils at my school were expected to work hard, then have a reward. The day was: work, reward, work, reward, work, reward, and work, reward. In addition they could come to school early and do anything constructive that they wished. No homework either. If children have worked hard for the whole day, why on earth should they have to do homework? Most adults don't, even in work-mad Britain!
It's time we started treating children to a childhood.
They'll achieve far more later in life if we at least give them that.
(By the way, my schools were always in deprived areas.)
Suggs sang about,how to bend not break the rules.
My bruv said,years ago......they tell you the date of the battle of Hasting,not how to fill in a tax return.
School,it is all about reading between the lines,always has been,always will be.
It occurs to me that you may have misunderstood my use of the word "you" to be a personal attack: in fact, it was intended to be taken impersonally.
So far as my own contribution is concerned, I suspect that anyone reasonable can appreciate that the letter "e" was missed from "understand" as the result of a typing error: however, given that you followed the word with a question mark, I trust that your question is answered.
Just in case you didn't misunderstand in the way my first paragraph suggests, may I point out that your own text contained the following errors:
"i"?
"skool"?
But doubtless, you would claim both errors to have been deliberate?
You engage me
Stupid thick worthless people. Are we supposed to pity them?
The only tests we had in my day were for the 11+ which I don't really remember. We had a rigorous education in the 3Rs with regularly reading, spelling tests and the reciting of tables until you got them right. It worked.
But we had time for many other activities in class. We had a well-rounded education in what was very much a family atmosphere. Homework didn't start until I went to grammar school.
I look back on my primary school days we affection. Will present-day youngsters be able to do the same? I hope so. The National Curriculum has always been about the needs of adults, not children. I would welcome the scrapping of SATS and all the paraphenalia that goes with them.
but, the most important thing was, we had routine. we had the lords prayer every day (i realise we cant do that now before anybody bleats), a square meal for lunch, and lots of sport. and we hadnt been hijacked by the PC brigade!!!!!!
2. If there are "wankers"in schools, the overwhelming majority are so-called pupils.
3. What perks?
I once heard a teacher say that all this stuff about imagination is all well and good but they couldn't get their students to understand what a quasar and a pulsar were; and that computers were the way of the future and that was what they should be learning. He lacked the understanding that to visualise and understand something they have not directly experienced and identified - people need to use their imagination and that a computer had to be imagined before it could be invented (more proof - the submarine was imagined by Jules Verne; and the helocopter by Leonardo Da Vinci and the spell checker on computers - someone with enough nouse to understand that to err is human and eveyone makes spelling mistakes and typos.)
Glynne Sutcliffe, Adelaide, South Australia
glynnesutcliffe@internode.on.net
The real aim of education should be to encourage each child to learn as early, as much and as fast as the child possible can. So ideally all children should be assessed for academic learning abilities every six months from the age of three years old onwards and put in classes appropriate for their developmental age and not in classes streamed according to their calendar age. Formal school education should also include self control and discipline as a way of life AND sports, outdoor activities, science, self defense classes and environmental studies, health and safety; first aid etc. from as early an age as each child can handle such learning and benefit from it. Music, art and foreign languages from as early an age as individual children can benefit from it would also be an asset if state schools can afford it.
Personal experience has shown me that , as a general rule, grossly “mixed ability” classes and attempts at simultaneously teaching children of grossly varying academic abilities in the same class at the same time and place is a waste of resources as well as teachers’ energies and abilities. Children should spend the bulk of their time at school being taught in classes appropriate for their academic and intellectual abilities and should relatively spend less time interacting in mixed ability classes - although the latter activity is also important for children to realize that there is huge diversity even among so-called “normal” people; that children and people do not just come in all shapes, colours and sizes but also from various different cultures and backgrounds as well as vary in their physical, emotional, intellectual and academic abilities.
Children just wanna have fun and they will learn anyway no matter what 'experts' think is best for them. :-)
As a parent of 3 small children, I have seen first hand how many children are starting school before they are ready and how demoralising it is for them. It is terribly sad that the government will throw thousands of five year olds to the wolves to defend a system designed to get their mothers back to work, not to educate them properly.
If we want to get mums back to work we should provide day care for children from age 2 to 6. We should call it "day care" instead of school and make it the best day care we can. Calling it school makes it ok to herd our children like cattle into a room with 30 children and 1 teacher, which is ridiculous.
I have been sympathetic to Gordon since he came in, but this is the last straw for me. I'm going LibDem all the way now.
The private sector has turning out top class pupils for generations. Perhaps its time to take a leaf out of their book rather than the silly political creeds and ideologies of the trendies, lefties and young socialists that make up much of the failing state schools?
I think the UN report is correct, there has been more truancy over the years than there ever was when I was a child.
If this means that teachers will be able to teach rather than spend their time filling in forms and loads of paper work, it is at least worth a try.
We had to remove our son from school due to bullying and my husband and I taught him at home and brought in a tutor for subjects we weren't very good at, I taught English, social studies, cookery, sewing, how to take care of a house, we did outside studies which included a rounded knowledge of nature including biology and botany, which also incorporated maths and journaling I also taught him the healing properties of herbs, Mike my husband taught him maths IT I know quiet a lot of these weren't on the curriculum but he then started college at 14 and they were surprised how well rounded he was in his education and he is now training as an accountant.
Our state schooling doesn't always work because some children need to be taught in a less regimented way, he learnt more at home than he ever would at school and he has a knowledge on how to look after himself if he ever moves away from home, he won't live on baked beans on toast he knows how to cook, iron, wash vacuum and dust and we are really proud of his achievements and know he has all the skills for life. He went from a frightened lad to a fully confident teenager in a very short time.
He has also won prizes from college student of the year, and an award plus cheque for his business skills, of course we cannot take the credit for all of this it is also his own hard work and studying that has got him to where he is today.
Removing your child from school shouldn't be done for the wrong reasons, for example they just don't like it, if you do take them out contact a group called Education Otherwise, they know all the important legal stuff and if you do take your child out of school you must educate them, not let them play truant for the rest of their school lives.
I cannot think of anything worse for both my daughters than starting school at 6. Children mature at different rates and my elder daughter, although having an August birthday, was very keen to learn and very mature. Still is and has done extremely well at school. School uniform, having lunch at school, bringing home books were all things my daughters really wanted to do and saw moving up from nursery as a real goal and were VERY enthusiastic about it. They both enjoyed school at 4 and still do at 17 and 14.
However, the report is right in that some children should start later but this depends on the educational diet they are receiving until that point. A lot of the forward thinking European countries have an amazing kindergarten curriculum which really prepares children for learning and then accellerates them from 6 years old. However, I have always wondered what you would do with the really bright child who wants to read at 4 and can read whole books at 5? Some parents will never have the time or expertise to enhance a low key learning experience and why should the best children have to wait for something they are crying out to do. I have found very few people who want their children to start formal education at 6 - more parents join in the "parent olympics" all vying to have children brighter than others. All this points to variable intakes which seem to have been abandoned in many areas, but what will happen when 6 year olds are not ready for school? Start at 8?
The national curriculum tests in general have been a thorn in the side of incompetent teachers who been failing our children, scrapping it would let these teacher off the hook and reward failure.
People working in every profession are subject to scrutiny of peers and other professionals why should teachers be exempt from this scrutiny. Curriculum tests and league tables are a measure of accountability and safeguard against perpetual culture of failure which has become the accepted norm in certain schools around the country.
J Iqbal
If you want to know which is a good school and which isn't, then get off your backside and go and look at a few before sending your child to one of them!
What is the point of children being able to rattle off a list of facts and figures if they can not apply this "knowledge" to a real life context? Learning through play and their own experience of the world is a fantastic idea afterall, how many of us "touched the hot thing" even though we were told not to? We had to experience it to learn not to do it again!
Allowing the children to explore and enquire in the primary class room will be a huge step forward. It is a lso a lesson that Secondary Schools could learn too.
If Labour can get it right in Wales, why niot in England?
I have 2 kids in full time education at the moment and I feel they have been let down by the Labour policy of "inclusive" education.
I know my next statement will be contraversial and provocative but this is what my own experience is showing me;
Kids who have learning difficulties (much as their parents may wish it) should not be educated in the mainstream system but at specialist establishments. I have seen with my own eyes, the disruption and delays that this system imposed on my progeny. Classes are disrupted constantly and all in the name of inclusivity! I am not a Victorian and don't feel there should be descrimination but making the many suffer to benefit the few is failing the many in my eyes.
We learned long multiplication and division at the age of six! But only if we wanted to. When two of us discovered a Roman milestone in the garden, the headmaster came to give the class a special lesson on Roman numerals and invited us to try multiplication and division with them, so that we could learn how impossible it was.
I have many happy memories of that nursery school and next to none of my very ordinary junior school (where I had to sit through lessons on things I already knew, being bored stiff). After that, I either disliked or hated most of my schooling until the 5th and 6th forms of grammar school.
Based on this experience, I am convinced that rigidly imposing a fixed curriculum and goals for every age is wrong and that the answer is flexibility and responding to the individual child's pace of learning, whether slow or fast. If learning is made interesting and available rather than boring and compulsory, children will choose to learn but perhaps not all the time. Don't stop five year olds learning e.g. long division, make it available to them, but don't pressure them to do it either and respect children's changing interests and attention spans.
Here, here to an earlier contributor regarding the value of an inspirational teacher. It would have been nice to have had at least one inspirational teacher myself. Can you teach a teacher to be inspirational? I think not. You can certainly disincline a potentially inspirational teacher from becoming a teacher by prescribing too strictly a teaching method or content. And by the way learning theory is always speculative. League tables are as crude as they are obvious in the state’s shadowy control of the population. Education has always been a political football. Politicians are in the business of selling balls.
For me twenty minutes a day or there abouts was enough and I taught myself to read at five (Good old ‘Peter and Jane’); with a little encouragement from my mother, I got on with it. I don’t think I’m special. When I went to school I never bothered to read. I wanted to grub around in the dirt and gaze at the sky. The most interesting thing about school was girls. The first big word I learnt was ‘hypocrisy’. I was 8. Ted Heath was just introducing Value Added Tax (incredible to think that people actually swallowed this con). I was thinking about adults in general but it made perfect sense to me.
I’m not advocating letting the littluns run wild all day but children as a matter for the State are as political as taxation or transport or public health. The UK I think, is still a democracy, so in theory, when the once great British Public get off their collective hands and realize how divisive the politics of education is, they may stop the state from fiddling with the early education of the Great British Children.
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did anyone ask why the parents tried to get the children to read early? could it be that they noticed that there was a problem in the way the child was replicating things or perceiving shapes in the first place? Was there an absence of other forms of visual stimulation and identification. Visual identification is a priori within the human species- we identify movement first then shapes that have been given meaning (note a human figure always draws our attention first in any landscape). After this comes sound and the human voice pervades our consciosness first if it is high pitched (paniced) and sounds we associate with danger or out of place other than that it revolves around things that interest us or we find valueable. Note many dyslexics have great auditory interpretation and memory.
Most children who are exposed to reading and listening and see letters and their shapes together as whole words and concepts and images tend to read well. Those who are slow to learn to read either don't have the positive encouragement at home or are taught to sound out letters within words rather than seeing the letters as a word that means something. Sounding out is good for speaking aloud but not for either spelling or reading for meaning.
On top of this he has been bullied since reception - the school has done nothing apart from deny it.
When I started to flag up issues of real concern to the education department, including the lack of HPA guidelines being followed for infections in school. The head banned his mother, disabled with three diseases from the local sports day, leaving our son, with no parent to watch - due to father working away with the only salary coming in. We also make journeys by taxi £30 a time to reach modern GP care, all funded ourselves.
Our son has been left traumatized and unable to move to a neighbouring school due to fright about the amount of bullied children who moved over to our school, from that one, plus a GP who struck the whole family off for having scarlet fever, has his wife working there.
We wonder with the accountability for public wages how in one area, two heads of small primary schools off with stress, despite parents asking for help..... no help coming just new heads and others put out of sight on a sickness wage, and this particular head allowed to bend the rules and bully an entire family. Naturally he gets away with it and the education department turn a full blind eye.
Some parts of East Anglia are so off the mark with regard to this behaviour that we hope that a documentary will be made about it's local institutions.
Prior to the arrival of this dysfunctional head, we had a reasonable standard of living. All our children do well at school, but 5 year's of trauma may now ruin this for our bright young son.