gaaah!

[winterbadger]

Thanks to reabhecc for alerting me to the existence of this AHA blog. Which in turn linked to this article on proposed education reforms in the UK. I think my head may go 'splody now.

In January the government commissioned Sir Jim Rose, a former chief inspector of primary schools, to trim ten existing required subjects to give extra space to computing skills and to accommodate two new compulsory subjects: a foreign language and the now-optional “personal, social, health and economic education” (eating fruit and veg, refraining from hitting one’s classmates and much more). On December 8th he published his interim report—and many fear that, as well as losing fat, education will see a lot of meat go too.

Sir Jim proposes merging the subjects into six “learning areas”. History and geography will become “human, social and environmental understanding”; reading, writing and foreign languages, “understanding English, communication and languages”. Physical education, some bits of science and various odds and ends will merge into “understanding physical health and well-being”, and so on. His plan would “reduce prescription”, he says, and, far from downgrading important ideas, “embed and intensify [them] to better effect in cross-curricular studies”.

Since from some point in the last century, schools are *always* the place that crackpots go to try monumentally stupid ideas about how to "redesign society", this shouldn't surprise me, I suppose. And, of course, this sort of woolly-headed "chuck things into a pot and call it a stew" thinking is what gave us the maladroit "Department for Children, Schools and Families" in the first place. But come ON!

I don't know if they're handling things any better, but at least the Scottish Executive has a Directorate of Schools, a Secretary of Education, and a Minister for Schools. A little more focus about what you;re supposed to be doing and a little less flannel never hurts!

Comments

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the Scottish government (please, Executive is so last year) is handling things any better, but I do know that teachers keep complaining that Scottish schools are in a sort of state of permanent revolution, massive changes being forced on them every few years before they've had a chance to make the previous massive changes work properly yet. They keep throwing out the exam system and curriculum and introducing a new one. The latest idea is some sort of Baccalaureat.

[winterbadger]

"schools are in a sort of state of permanent revolution, massive changes being forced on them every few years before they've had a chance to make the previous massive changes work properly yet"

This, unfortunately, is just the nature of schools teaching pretty much anywhere, except elite private schools, which I think is one of the reasons my dad stuck to teaching in those all his life, despite the pay (at least here in the US) being about half or less what you get in publicly funded schools.

[silme.livejournal.com]

I taught in an elite private school in England for two years -- one with an American curriculum. Never again. It was for profit -- the profit of the owners. Teachers made less money than state teachers in England, and things weren't done to benefit the students. Give me state schools any day, where at least you can unionise. Employees at private schools here really don't have many rights. One of my new colleagues is a refugee from the private system and the whims of her previous school's owners.

Private schools here in the UK pay less than state schools, and state schools here pay less than in the US. (I took a big pay cut when I moved here.) Also, when it comes to secondary school and sixth form in England, kids really need GCSE and A level qualifications -- and the equivalent in Scotland. Private schools teach the same specifications as state schools. (Actually, state teachers have more say as we're the ones they consult when the specs are written. Right now, GCSE English is being changed quite a bit, and the woman writing the new GCSE English Lit spec for AQA is seeking help from lit teachers.)

That said, England does the equivalent of what you're talking about in Scotland. And I have friends whose daughter had major health issues when she should have been doing her standards and highers. She really needed to be homeschooled or do them via distance learning, but she couldn't do that in Fife. She wound up doing GCSEs and A levels via distance learning from England. The Scottish curriculum worked for her brother, but not for her.

All of that said, keep in mind that educational trends, as in the US, tend to come and go. Also, Rose is a consultant recommending expensive changes during a recession. After all, the government also pretty much has said that they're going to ignore his recommendation to bin KS2 SATs, alas.

Sorry to take over the soapbox. But I do teach here and I hold teaching qualifications here (and I still have valid US ones -- well, valid for Colorado, as well), so I'm fairly opionated regarding education here. Right now, I'm incensed about the stupid IFL, which seems to be like the GTC was/is for secondary teachers.

Not a bad idea, but the implementation

[mikecosgrave.livejournal.com]

I don't think it is actually a bad idea - one of the big problems is that dividing the curriculum into little boxes labeled by subject is that students lose the ability to think outside the box; or have it ground out of them. In the real world, stuff is not divided into neat subject divisions. One of the biggest problems I have in college is getting them to think broadly, rather than in little boxes.

Also, of course, rigid subject divisions mean that you have a timetable with a limited number of little boxes and you can only teach subjects which fit - so inevitably, some things which kids need to learn get cut. One recent suggestion was to make history optional in Ireland, which would probably see it squeezed out by more 'relevant' subjects.

So on the whole, I think it is not a bad idea in principle, but I do agree that education in UK has been in a state of permanent revolution for, oh, 30 years or so now, as successive governments seek some magic solution to falling standards. They have been long on plans, but hopeless on implementing them properly and actually sticking to them for more than 30 seconds - or resourcing them properly.