To find this really depressing?

My friend's son was 4 in May and started school in September. Unsurprisingly, He can't read or write. After a week he had learned to recognise about 6 different letters but was struggling to recognise several others. However, after 5 days at school he had been told about using a question mark when a sentence was a "mystery". Why does a 4 year old who cannot read or write need to worry about question marks? Michael Gove (Previous Education Secretary) and his department have a LOT to answer for. I cannot believe that this generation is going to be book lovers!
As a reception teacher in the 70s I am shocked how much education has changed, and not for the better!

agree 100% its SO depressing

When I was in primary school we learnt poems off by heart for english homework

My DDs learn complex linguistic terms (it's not just basic grammar) which are beyond what you need to read and write competently, and by god it sucks the joy out of the subject.

I have worked in schools since 1991 and have only just fully retired. For the last few years I have worked with Children in Y2 and Y6, helping them to prepare for SATS. Obviously as a teacher you want the kids to do really well in their tests, yet at the same time we are being forced to teach ridiculous grammar rules - when what we need as a nation are articulate people who love and appreciate their own language. Children in the Infants do not need to know what nouns, verbs, adjectives are, what the difference is between a statement, an interjection and a question. It is a nonsense! Write to your MP's, to the Education Sec. and COMPLAIN!
Incidentally my GD had homework from her Nursery recently - she is 18 months old!!

Not you're not being unreasonable to find this depressing. I watched Michael Moore's latest film where he went to different countries to steal ideas to take back to America. He went to Denmark (I think) for their education - they have NO HOMEWORK and their education is considered the best. He spoke to a Head who said she wanted to see them learning through play and socialising.

Obviously it is essential for somebody to sit with children to do their reading and their written work when they are small, otherwise it either won't happen or will be scribbled off with letters formed the wrong way round. I had four children who enjoyed reading, but I found much of the other homework to be an exhausting battle, especially at secondary school.

As others have said I'm sure that there isn't time for this in every household, especially in large families or where both parents work very long hours. There are also families where nobody can be bothered to help. I can't help but think that this is why there are still children leaving primary school illiterate and innumerate.

It is such a shame that with all the extra teaching assistants in schools there cannot be more teaching going on, with less of the meaningless satisfying of criteria, assessments and measurements of work. As Casawan suggests it might be possible to extend school hours? Personally I would prefer that "homework" (other than necessary reading) was actually done in study periods at school, perhaps with teaching assistants sitting in with the classes to help with difficulties.

When SAT's were started the idea was to test whether the school was up to scratch, not whether each individual child was doing at least as well as his/her specified learning age. The "Added Value" concept is difficult - suburban schools in middle class areas with readily available nursery schools have a very different intake to schools on estates with more limited opportunities and more children for whom English is a second language. The suburban schools, often classified as excellent or outstanding, have a head start with their well prepared pupils and might have no problem with subordinate clauses or the vagaries of English grammar. But for the average child in the average school this seems largely surplus to requirements. Being able to read and write well, to calculate properly and speak intelligibly should be within the capabilities of a normal school.

So glad you said that I was a TA for 30 years and that's just how it was, so sad to see how education is going. My grandaughter is so unhappy at her secondary school and I feel so sorry for her. It is her last year as she is doing her GCSEs does not want to stay and we are looking at 6th form colleges. Just wish political parties would leave education.

DS brought his 2 children over for the weekend, he is divorced and their mum refuses to spend any time on homework with them, so they always do it with him. I went through the youngest's (4) reading book with her and found this comment in her record from school "R... successfully identified the R grapheme, and recognised it as being part of her name". Don't they talk about lettrs any more?

I don't think there is areal problem with children learning the correct names for things, the problem is that things must be taught, regardless of the level the child has actually achieved, when the curriculum says they must. So there are children being taught main and subordinate clauses when they can barely read.
Casawan we finished at 4pm as well, but our lunch time was 12-1.30pm. and we had an afternoon playtime. Lunch is now usually 12-1pm and there is no playtime so not so very different.

Just found this article. Apparently there were guidelines for homework, set up in 1998, but these were scrapped by Gove in 2012, thus leaving the idea of how much homework should be set in the hands of head teachers. It clearly has not improved the situation, from what you are all saying.

See the article
www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9121048/Michael-Gove-scraps-homework-rules.html

This seems OK to me. I guess the issue is if not everyone has easy online access from home, but that's certainly coming if not already here. So it's just a debate about whether it is a bit early to introduce this. A lot of kids love being online for games etc (a whole other matter - lots of potential risk there IMHO), perhaps they might even be more motivated to do their homework if it is online.

My granddaughter will be 8 in November and is coping perfectly well. Her dad says that her grammar is better than his.

GD arrived at the weekend and said she was going to do maths homework, her mother got out the laptop, all done online.

And, yes, it's very sad.

Schools now have to show 'value added'. It's not enough to be able to read and write and do basic arithmetic by seven years old. The school has to show where they started from so they can prove they are toeing the government/Ofsted line. Inspections are all about data these days. That's why reception class children are followed round relentlessly by someone with a clipboard.

Speaking and listening are part of literacy. Many reception children start school unable to converse in sentences, particularly boys, so value added is more than possible to achieve here but it can't be shown without evidence.

Following Ninathenanna's post, my grandson also had maths homework to do online when he was in year 5. Mental arithmetic. He had 10 secs to get the answer to each question & I commented that I would have had trouble doing it myself (I am discalculate to be fair) but he looked withering at me & said- Grandma- there is a pause button you know!
What is the point of that? Once it was done he sent it to his teacher online & she marked it for the following day.

Children are sponges and can absorb both grammar and the love of reading. It isn't an either/or and one thing doesn't push out the other. There's no harm in learning the technicalities at a young age and it is because they teach the youngsters the hard stuff early that private schools and grammar schools do so well.

Believe me, trying to teach subordinate clauses at GCSE level (because the children haven't a clue what the terms mean and need to) is a nightmare. I found myself wasting time teaching top set GCSE pupils to give a name a capital letter and to end a sentence with a full stop.

My own children were sent to schools where the standards were high and the basics taught traditionally and properly and they were the better educationally for it.

I honestly don't understand why parents would complain that their children were being taught something real and useful. Do they also complain that their children are being taught that two and two are four?

Lucky girl, you are spot on! I have seen this too. My G'dtr No1 is 8, in yr 4, and gets at least 5 hours of homework each week, plus reading and spellings. G'dtr No2 is 5, in yr1, and gets reading, spelling, plus about 2 hours of other work each week. I think the load is heavy, but DiL makes sure the work gets done. The problem, I think, is that there is not enough time in school day these days. When I was at school we finished at 4pm. My gdtrs finish at 3pm. Those 5 extra hours each week would make so much difference.
Because there is so much pressure on teachers, children do not get enough of their time. G'dtr No 2 has a speech delay which means she has trouble pronouncing some letter combinations. She is much improved now, but in reception she was marked down as behind in her reading. She is actually a good reader, has moved through the set stages ahead of most of the class, but because no one could be bothered to actually take time to listen properly during guided reading, and understand that the issue was with her pronunciation, not her reading skills, she has unfairly been identified as a low achiever. If there was less pressure and more time this sort of thing would not happen. And in what sort of world do we decide that a four year old is 'failing'?

Sad and angry. Watching our two granddaughters one takes to her school work like the proverbial duck to water, busy teaching me the rules of grammar I guess I did know once. The other is at risk of giving up at seven because she just isn't interested in what she 'should'' be reading and would prefer to be reading her own books, making up stories, playing out of doors or making things indoors rather than plodding through her set homework. I could cry with frustration as I suspect could her teacher.

Firstly I should declare that I speak as an ex teacher. If teachers (and TA's) were allowed to spend more time teaching and less time ticking boxes education standards might improve! As for the OP I completely agree. We are no longer living in the 1950s. Encourage a love of reading and language in general - they can do all the analysis at a later stage. Kids need to enjoy learning so that they will want to continue doing it for many years to come. Rant over :-)

In some countries children don't start school until they are 7. Two extremes

Years ago, when SATS were first introduced, I said to my colleagues 'If we allow the government to bring in, it will be the thin end of the wedge and they'll be able to do whatever they like with education in the future.' This is one occasion where I wish I hadn't been proved right

Targets are not exclusive to primary and secondary schools. I am shocked that targets are set in nurseries for toddlers. This makes me feel very sad - tint tots should be learning through play, not having to complete assessments!

Here is what I inappropriately posted on the thread about grammar schools. It might make more sense here.

We need good well-trained well-supported teachers working in well-maintained buildings with good resources; we need freedom and flexibility for teachers to exercise their professional judgement regarding their locality and school; we need a broad curriculum; we need paperwork to be reduced to a minimum.

I went to a grandparents' morning at my DGS's reception class. As we went around with him chatting and looking at what he had been doing, a TA was following us around with a clipboard so that she could note down what he had said and done and find categories of expectations to tick off. To those of you who have been nowhere near education for yours, you really would not believe what goes on. There are lists of categories of expectations for children from 'do they talk to their peers' to 'can they wipe their arses' - and you have to provide proof that these have been achieved. It is all quite crazy like some dystopian film. He had an achievement folder that had a list of criteria met and their reference number after each item - e.g. painted a picture (ref.* - shows manual dexterity; ref.* - knows colours; Ref* - able to blend colours) - I expect you are getting the picture. For one of his activities there was three quarters of a page of criteria!

Reception class teachers know when their charges need a bit of help getting on with one another, or lack some basic social skills and they just gently help them along - all this proof and box-ticking is demeaning to both parties.

Don't get me started - it all makes me so angry - such a waste of everyone's time, enthusiasm and skills.

When Minibags was in primary school and the headteacher contacted me because she was not doing homework, we (MrBags and I) wrote a letter explaining why. We pointed out that the school had no say about what a child does when the child is not in school and that three generations of the family never did homework at primary school age and this never cause any problems about their becoming good students during their teens and into further education.

The silly thing was that although MiniB was not doing the reading she was being set at age six, she was reading loads of other stuff, most of it far more interesting to her than whatever the school reading scheme books offered. The school knew this but because they had a homework "policy" felt they had to say something. We said: "Policies can be changed".

I sent a copy of the letter to each of MiniB's primary school teachers in turn. She's now fifteen and is a study freak, never satisfied with less than an A. Attitudes to studying are learned at home. Primary school kids need to play when they are not in school. Children learn through play. Homework policies at primary schools are just government box ticking exercises and have no educational value at all.

For anyone who's interested, Michael Rosen writes some good stuff and The Importance of Being Little by Erika Cristakis is also excellent.

We did.something called box analysis when I was 9 or 10 which I found fun. Subordinate clauses etc at O Level.

As you say grandma2213 when teaching SN children we also tried to keep their learning in line with their mainstream peers but the goal posts got wider and wider. Having to match up to them was a nonsense.