Holy Ghost

in an interesting, topsy-turvy week where we have seen:

- a score of just 17% in GCSE Maths apparently qualifying pupils for a grade B pass;

- academic researchers at the university of york concluding that teaching pupils formal grammar should be scrapped as it does not help them to write english;

and

- the Department of Education funding a wiltshire school to scrap homework because the school's head - and the Royal Society of Arts - believes that homework "like the national curriculum, is a dinosaur" and that teachers "have better things to do than mark it."

how safe do you believe state education standards to be in the hands of this government, its agencies and other bodies relevant bodies responsible for its delivery?

what is the apparent motivation behind making every pupil a winner, regardless of their performance?

when dr patrick hazlewood, headmaster of st.john's in marlborough says that the national curriculum should be "one based on competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information," do you have any idea what on earth he means or which jargon-packed management book he has swallowed?


it's friday. discuss. all views welcome.

ProperCharlie

Most of it is a total load of cr*p. As for the guy saying teaching formal grammar is a waste of time, whether that's true or not, where the f*ck has this bloke been for the last 30 years? Most state schools stopped teaching formal rules based grammar decades ago.

The govt. should let teachers get on with teaching and stop interfering with something that they know next to nothing about.

CrisPDuk

You can hardly blame it on the current government, Roy Hattersley and his cronies were busy ******* up what was the worlds best education system 40 years ago This bunch of self-serving ***** are just finishing the job for him.

PC The trouble with letting the teachers get on with teaching is that too many of them are more interested in making their own lives easier, rather than actually educating our future

Hanslow

The fact of the matter is that some kids are brainier than others. They should be helping the thickos to learn and nurture the brainier ones. Rather than dumbing down the quality of the work, and hence neutralising the brainy kids shining above the others, they should be setting hard to reach targets to make them work for their achievements.

What are they going to do when they get a real job and find that it's not plain sailing? Are we going to get our jobs made easier just so that we can do them and feel good all the time? Sometimes it's good to struggle to feel the satisfaction at the end of overcoming the struggle. Of course, you may feel a bit down if you don't overcome it, but kids should be taught not to give up and to try again until successful.

In my day (it was all fields ) a B grade was 60-70% None of this A* crap either, it was an A and that was it at 70+%. As an employer, if I got a load of CVs with a host of A* on them from all candidates, how do I separate the better ones out?

IMHO they should be making the grading so that only a few get the top grade so you can see the better kids.

<flame suit secured and sitting comfortably>

Holy Ghost

give this man a cigar. right now.

OllyK

You can make that sentence more generic and it will still hold true:

The govt. should let <insert any role> get on with <insert any job/career> and stop interfering with something that they know next to nothing about.

OllyK

Ahhh, sniff, back to the good old days when the grading was based around percentile ranges on a normal distribution curve!

Brendan Hughes

Out of interest, is there anywhere we can look on the web for our year/exam board, and find out what our grades (A, B, C) really meant?

I suppose they don't make that info public as then it becomes (shock horror) comparable...

ProperCharlie

CrisPD - you get bad teachers just the same as you get bad coppers and bad soldiers. Most of them are pretty committed to what they do, otherwise theywouldn't be doing it. It's a lot harder than most people seem to think. IMO the most important thing is to give teachers back the respect that they once had. Now ""teacher" seems to be synonymous with "scum" in many people's minds. When the parents have no respect for the teacher, how is the kid going to respect them?

Iain Young

I have several friends who are teachers, and they are a very hard working and committed bunch of people. With the amount of paperwork they have to get through, plus after school events etc, you're usually looking at a working day of at least 12 hours. Add to that to pretty low salary, the day to day continual abuse from the kids, being constrained in what they can actually teach (national cirriculum) etc, it makes for a very difficult job. I think the majority of them do a superb job under the circumstances and it's unfair to blame then solely for the state of the education system...

It's pretty meaningless comparing grades now with what we got. The stuff in gcse etc is pretty dumbed down compared to with what was there a few years ago. For example, I did stuff in the first year of the gcse sciences which doesn't appear until A-level now...

Holy Ghost

i've often thought a big problem that has never been resolved is the hard-line politicisation of the mainstream teaching union executives over many years.

education is not political. how can the transfer of knowledge, the creation of literacy, the embedding of curiousity and the desire to question be made political? but regrettably it is.

seems to me they want to see teachers do anything but teach and try any methodology in the pursuit of "self-expression" and "inclusivity" and other such bankrupt liberal PC to55. even if it creates ill-discipline, illiteracy and ignorance while simultaneously undermining teachers and teaching.

sadly all now mirrored precisely by the policy drivel produced by our current government.

Holy Ghost

[QUOTE=Iain Young]I have several friends who are teachers, and they are a very hard working and committed bunch of people. With the amount of paperwork they have to get through, plus after school events etc, you're usually looking at a working day of at least 12 hours. Add to that to pretty low salary, the day to day continual abuse from the kids, being constrained in what they can actually teach (national cirriculum) etc, it makes for a very difficult job. I think the majority of them do a superb job under the circumstances and it's unfair to blame then solely for the state of the education system...

good point - teachers are getting shafted here by people who should - but don't - know better.

CrisPDuk

Fair point, I have to say that most of the teachers I had were pretty committed (they should have been, putting up with some of us) and even though my particular school had a bad reputation due to two council estates being in it's catchment, it was always in the top 3 for the area when it came to O & A level results

The problem respect-wise these days derives form the fact that the vast majority of parents believe these days that the sun shines from their kid's backsides and will not countenance being told that their precious treasure is a little **** This attitude has in turn been bred, I feel, by successions of social workers, child psychologists and the rest telling parents that children never lie, never steal & definitely never misbehave. WTF of course they do, they're fecking little humans, it's what our species does best

Sorry, rant over

Holy Ghost

undermining society from the inside out you might say ...

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Bad news: EVERYTHING is political. And the unions became politicised because successive governments did.


M

Iain Young

Education itself isn't politcal, but what are political issues are the conditions in which teachers are being made to (attempt to) teach, along with mis-treatment / indifference from the government, and also the contents of the national cirriculum.

Well said. I probably know half a dozen or so teachers, all from different schools in the Swindon and Oxfordshire areas, and without exception they all wish they could actually do some proper teaching again rather than the "all-inclusive" drivel that the government is making them inflict on the kids.

A big problem is the mixed ability classes. All these succeed in doing is slowing down the bright kids so they get bored, frustrated and can't be bothered, and they don't help the less abled kids because they don't get the attention they deserve. This is one of the major reasons that the National Cirriculum has been dumbed down over the last few years (even though the government will deny it). It's so more people can get good results regardless of ability, so it makes the figures look good on paper.

I'd like to see mixed ability abolished, but I'm afraid it's just not pc to do it these days

farmer1

Since starting back at sixth form in my school it has been quite interesting to see the differences between countries.

I am currently taking maths A level along with a few others. But in my maths said we have a few people who have come to England this year and joined our six form.

Lets take one piece of the syllabus, for example Integration(sp?) a topic I have not met before this year. We have one guy from the Ukraine who was taught this in the equivilent year 10 over there. We have a pupil from America originally from China who was taught this in the equivilent of year 9. And most astonishing of all we have a pupil from Korea I believe, who was taught this in primary school.

No how on earth has the UK got to the point were top pupils from a decent grammar school struggle with mathematics taught to pupils in primary school in other countries.

This is completely beyond me. However I do feel a lot of the problem is down to motivation. Pupils from my school will do the minimium they can to achieve the maximium possible.

Take myself for example for the two years of GCSE science I paid no attention in class and had a laugh at the back with my mates.

3 days before the exam I realise ahh I havent got a clue about anything we have "done", so i reach for a revision guide and read through everything for about 3 hours in total and walk out of the exam with an A*

Now I hid A level and you have to understand the science not just remember it, this is why the majority of my year struggle.

The problem lies in being taught for exams all year you are taught to get the highest possibhle grade rather then have the best understanding.

By doing about 10 practice papers you can pretty much have the answers they are looking for known of the top of your head without actually understanding exactly what it means.