The Rose Review

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.