Educational Reform is on the way
- Article 3 of 5
- Action Network, October 2009
Just about everyone thinks there’s something wrong with Britain’s education system. What is wrong is something that everyone argues over, however, so it’s no surprise that every government has its own ideas, and spends most of its time in office reforming education time and time again. As one teacher puts it, “Like anything, education goes round in circles. Someone cries out ‘Kids can’t read or write,’ so someone at government level sets targets. Teachers teach to try and achieve these targets, lessons are boring, Ofsted criticise teaching and teachers, the unions kick up. Kids still can’t read and write, someone else says ‘make the lessons less prescriptive, give teachers more freedom in what they teach.’ So it starts again."
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With the public now to be consulted on the report, it’ll be parents who might raise the biggest objections, however. Novelist Julia Williams, whose children are 13, 11, 9 and 7, thinks that Rose’s conclusions are basically sound, but is “deeply sceptical of the emphasis on IT – infants don’t need to use computers, they need to learn how to read and write and count.” Where the report also fails is the “middle range of kids”. “The special needs ones usually get help and the bright ones are okay, but because they have to achieve the average marks to get the school the right value added in the league tables, the middle range loses out hugely.” And SATs? “They have no educational benefit whatsoever as far as I can tell. It’s like getting lab rats to press the green or red button.”
Rose may have done the best he could with the remit he was given, but despite his work, there will still be plenty of reform in primary education to come.
The Rose Report’s chief recommendations
Sir Jim Rose recommends:
- All children should start primary school in the September after their fourth birthday, so summer-born children no longer wait one or two additional terms before they start
- Parents who would prefer greater emphasis on play will be able to send their children to nursery at this stage.
- The current curriculum, including its 11 separate subjects, be replaced with six “areas of learning”, freeing teachers to pick and choose lesson content and do more cross-curriculum teaching, making links between science, maths and history.
- A new section of the curriculum entitled “primary personal, learning and thinking skills” to teach children how to be healthy and happy and develop their social skills
- At least one or two foreign languages – probably French and German – should be taught from seven years of age.
- ICT to be on an equal footing with English and maths – children should be able to use Google by the time they’re seven and publish websites and podcasts by the time they’re 11.
- A greater emphasis on speaking and listening skills as well as reading and writing to combat the fact that children from disadvantaged homes will have heard a million fewer words by the time they start school.
- Children will be given their own personal tutors in the final years of primary school: these will be secondary school teachers who will help the pupils adjust to life in secondary school.
- Increased use of drama in other lessons, such as history which might include role-playing to dramatise key moments
- Ten to 11 year olds will be encouraged to take part in essay-style extended projects to give secondary school teachers an insight into their thinking skills.
- Children should study their home town in geography
- History lessons to look at at least two distinct periods of history and include a broad chronology of British and world history
- The targets of children being able to use phonics to write simple words by age five should become “ambitions” instead.
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