curriculum - Doubled Up

With schools being warned of the credit crunch hitting them,  I wondered what 2009 may bring for English education generally.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• More pupils. It has been predicted that people who would otherwise send their children to private school will cut back by sending their children to state schools instead.

• Less money for building. Building works are often initially financed by the private sector, which is finding it difficult to get credit these days.

• Another potential disaster regarding SATs marking. Although this is wishful thinking on my part as the prediction is that if Edexcel muck up in the same way as the previous contractors did, then SATS may be dumped altogether.

• Reviews of potential changes to the primary curriculum. Personally, I find this really exciting, so long as it will allow greater flexibility. At last, it seems that the people in charge are looking at skills as well as content.

• Moving towards on-line, real time reporting to parents. Secondary schools should really be getting going with this in 2009. (My previous blog was on this topic.

• Change in legislation to give schools the power to search pupils for drugs and alcohol.

• School reports. By this I mean giving schools grades. There is talk of giving schools an overall grade of A-F as a means of giving parents another way to judge schools (as opposed to just looking at exam results). The grade will cover all aspects of school life such as exam results, attendance, wellbeing of pupils, progress of pupils etc.

• Developments in getting parents more involved in their children’s learning. This seems to be an important issue to Jim Knight, and not before time in my humble opinion. I’m looking forward to seeing how schools will do this.

• Changes to governing bodies. I remember hearing rumours last year that GBs will become smaller and be more answerable to schools’ stakeholders
  

• I am absolutely sure there is more. Feel free to add anything I’ve missed.

I am so glad that the government has begun to make a step in the right direction with our education system. We have become so bogged down by teaching content, that we have forgotten to teach skills. It is actually proven that good social and personal skills lead to more successful careers than good exam results.

People who worry solely about having subject specialists in the future are misguided. Teaching uninspiring content in uninspiring ways to unwilling children is not going to make them subject specialists. What may, however, is teaching them to love learning and to love your subject by a) caring about them and b) making your teaching so interesting and inspiring that they are thirsty for more (not necessarily in that order)

The other thing that needs to be considered is that we don't know what kind of subject specialists the future will need. The world is changing at a pace faster than we can imagine - new vocabulary to do with technology is being added to our language at a rate that wrinklies like me can't keep up with - poking, wikis, clouding to name a few (apologies if I've misspellt them, I have no idea what they mean). America is in debt to China and I heard say only the other day that India and China have more young people with degrees than the US has young people.

Now, I love my subjects (German and French). But I am not arrogant enough to think that getting a grade C GCSE, nor indeed becoming expert speakers of them is going to make young people of today lead happy, fulfilling lives and to contribute to society in a positive way.

If our curriculum isn't made more flexible soon, we will find ourselves doing antiquated things like organising school holidays  so that the farmers' children can help their families bring in the hay at Easter and the harvest in the summer.

 It only dawned on me recently that, when we selected the infant school for our kids, we hadn't actually looked at the junior school that it feeds into and that, seeing as they will be spending longer there than at the infant school, this was probably unwise. Anyway, last night the junior school had an open evening and I took my eldest along. And, boy, was I impressed! The head's presentation was far from slick - the remote broke down for the PowerPoint presentation and he had to keep bobbing up and down to move the slides on, and he only remembered to introduce himself a couple of minutes into his talk. But I think that says a lot - actually, he was more keen to tell us about his school and his children than about himself. He struck me as a really kind man who genuinly wanted the best for the children in his care. Everything he said was positive, everything was about building up children's self-esteem, everything was about the children.

The point at which he won me over completely was when he said; "We've tweaked the National Curriculum a bit. Well, actually, we've used it to suit our purposes." He went on to explain that, whilst the kids have full access to the NC, they are not bound by it. If a class shows a massive interest in, say, learning Russian, and the teacher can accomodate it, then they go with it. Despite this, SATs results (yawn) are excellent (I would argue it could also be because of this?).

The school is incredibly well cared for and well resourced - swimming pool, football pitches, library, ICT etc etc. The staff we met are friendly and approachable. They have links to about 8 countries, are committed to learning outside the classroom and have an excellent pastoral system. Yet, last year, when Ofsted made a (one day) visit, the inspector only deemed it a 'good' school with many outstanding features. The reason? SATs results had 'dipped' that year.

I have one question - what is more important? A positive learning experience that builds confidence and self esteem and teaches children to respect each other and their environment, or level 4 SATs? To me the answer is obvious.