Literacy and numeracy standards

Going back a few posts, I do agree with BAnanas about the way maths has been taught since the National Curriculum was brought in. There were some good ideas in the NC BUT this idea that you did 'clocks' for two days and then didn't revisit the topic for several weeks was totally nuts. It was as if they believed that once you'd taught something, however briefly, the robots, sorry children, would understand and retain that knowledge.
When we were taught to write, writing was the point of the lesson. Since the NC came in I have worked with 6 and 7 year olds who can barely string a sentence together, and over the year we have had to work at writing in several 'genres', [Their word, not mine] including playwriting, reports, instructions, riddles, rap poetry, etc. Writing is a skill in itself and I strongly believe that children should be taught to write and free to write about anything without having these constrictions placed upon them. How can you get a child to focus on the rules for playwriting when they're still getting their heads round capital letters, full stops and spellings? I never did understand why at such a young age we had to spend two weeks on how to write a play. This lack of concentration on absorbing the skills of writing until they are second nature, has to be a huge contributing reason for the poor standard of young adults literacy. They've all been through the same mill. I shall now climb off my soap box and go and have a long swim to calm down.

Seem to be a few problems with the Free Schools idea?
www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/09/free-school-head-no-teaching-qualifications-leaves-job?CMP=twt_fd

I don't doubt the report's conclusions about the impact of social exclusion on the attainment of some pupils. I think the 14-19 curriculum is in a mess and it is a great shame that the Tomlinson recommendations were abandoned. I don't doubt that there are far too many young people who are NEETs and that their prospects for employment are very limited. I don't doubt the negative impact of generations of poverty and unemployment on some groups of young people, especially in some areas of the country.
I think international comparisons are fraught with difficulty and this is not a huge sample, so I would not read too much into the detail of the data, beyond the broad conclusions.
I don't think the conclusions suggest that turning the entire education system upside down once again would achieve anything.
And I don't thing Gove has a clue.

In private schools teachers do not have interference from the state, and they have small class sizes. That's why some people send their kids there if they can afford to.
There is a free school in Durham just opened up with fewer than 30 children and 6 teachers. So they should do okay, then.
I do research into my family. It's amazing how many of them were teachers, and even my mother did not know about them.
The censuses tell me that in 1871 one of them was a pupil teacher at the age of 15. He then went to Nottingham where his niece had joined him by 1881 and was a pupil teacher. One of her cousins was a teacher in a workhouse by the age of 25. That must have been hard work. The census when she was 35 she had moved back to Hull and was living with another aunt and living off her own means because both her parents had died. Her mother had been a teacher, too.
My grandmother was a head in a village school in East Yorkshire. She had over 70 children aged from 5 to 14 in the same room, just like in the classroom at Beamish. They lived in the schoolhouse, which was the other half of the building. That's where my parents met in 1940. My grandmother had one pupil teacher to help her and to train to take over her job.
She was doing this having had radium treatment for breast cancer. I so wish I had met my grandmother.

pogs

The School Admissions (Infant Class Sizes) (England) Regulations 2012 - there are a few exceptions to the 30 rule.

Jendurham

I find it interesting you say classes were 25 max. When was that? What year did 30 become the max?.

Interesting link about class sizes, Aka. The secondary size shows how daft averages are. As a teacher of English and maths, I never had a class size of under 30. However, I used to teach classes of six when teaching remedial.

OK ... perhaps we were simply more obedient and better behaved...because if my parents knew I'd been in trouble at school....

Class not case.

PS I omitted to put my point Absent which was that while pupils are motivated, value education, and parents support the school, then larger case sizes could work. A bit like they do in China today. But then that's all rote learning and little individual attention.

I don't think I valued education as a primary school pupil. Going to school and learning "stuff' was just what I had to to do. I'm not even sure that I valued it at secondary school. Again, it was just something I took for granted.

Class size is very relevant in any context. But, I agree, it's only one issue affecting attainment (whatever measure you use). If children and parents don't value education (and many don't) then you will get disruption, lack of aspiration, motivation, etc. none of these are conducive to a healthy learning environment.

I'm starting to rant now so

The maximum class size for primary children used to be 25, so you've proved my point, POGS.

I think the report shows there has been a glut of pillocks in education for years.

The size of classes is relevant but has to be put in context. As one of this so-called cleverer generation – is clever the same as literate and numerate, by the way – I would point out that my post-war primary school classes never had fewer than 58 pupils.

I don't have a political axe to grind about Michael Gove; I just think he is a pillock. I would still think he is a pillock if he were a member of the Labour Party, UKIP, Greens, Monster Raving Loonies or an Independent.

When I think of how much Malala Yousafzai values her education and how many pupils in the UK don't, then I wonder .... where has it all gone wrong?

Your post of 23.07 makes sense to me, Aka - sadly, we can't turn the clock back.

primary class size in uk is one of the largest in the developed world

I know this report is 2 years old but this have actually got worse and the government is talking about allowing class size to rise above 30.

anno true.

In too many schools there is a general attitude of 'it's not cool to be clever' and children who do aspire to better things are frequently bullied. Schools that can overcome this anti-aspirational ethos are the ones that will produce successful students and this must start in the primary schools - after year 6 it is probably too late.

I don't have the answers but perhaps if teachers were allowed to teach, if every parent valued education, supported teachers and passed this message to their offspring, and successive governments stopped interfering and moving the goal posts every few years, just perhaps children and schools could settle down to teaching and learning.

Jendurham

As for school class sizes all I know is my Grandchild was refused admission to our first choice school because they had 30 pupils.
Is that not a general rule, or just Leicestershire? She is 7 years old by the way.

Perhaps timing has something to do with it. Many of us went to school soon after the war, when there was a huge desire to make everything better. Once you got into the 60's there was the feeling that anyone could do anything if they wanted. Since then we seem to have sunk into apathy with low aspirations among the pupils and low expectations from the teachers.

I just get so depressed seeing the wasted potential of so many children. This is the 21st Century - they should be out there changing the world!

Haven't met anyone who actually likes Gove, Pogs. Maybe I should get out more. On the other hand, if I did meet someone who liked him, I wouldn't want to meet him again.
One thing about education that I do not think anyone can refute is that class sizes have definitely been on the increase over the last few years.
If children in primary school were in smaller groups, they would have a better chance of learning to read and write and add up before they went to secondary school. English is a notoriously difficult language for foreigners to learn because of the number of exceptions in spelling and pronunciation. Why is it always assumed that the native English speaker should find it easy?
I know this report is about 16-24 year olds, but they were in larger classes than my sons were.

Sel

I think the OECD report is shameful, I believe I can remember discussing something similar on a thread a while ago, probably last year. All I know is we hear year on year from business our school leavers are struggling to obtain jobs because of their poor educational standards. This is obviously a generalisation but it is doing our children no good to refuse to accept the facts. Head in the sand, denial, call it what you want.

I get very confused with the whole education problem to be honest. Gove is like Marmite , some like him, some hate him. If for one moment a persons political bias was taken out of the equation what are we left with, more of the same!. That to me is a tragedy for our children, for the teaching profession and the country.

I felt my childrens' maths lessons at primary school were particularly woeful, insomuch as they appeared to flit between different topics. So for example a few days on long division, before moving on to a few days doing fractions, this approach may have been fine for the most capable pupils but for those who didn't grasp a concept straightaway, there didn't seem to be any time to consolidate what they had learned before moving on, they seemed to rotate everything, presumably so they didn't get bored, but personally I would have preferred them to spend ages on one thing and let it sink in. In retrospect this is how I remember my arithmetic lessons from junior school, we would be taught one thing ad nauseam. It really doesn't surprise me that employers find younger prospective employees arithmetic below par, I don't think it's their fault, but how they have been taught. In my younger son's GCSE year, I asked his maths' teacher if she could recommend a private tutor, it was at this stage I found out, that apart from the most capable, most kids were being tutored privately for this subject and his teacher confessed that she agreed with me that the approach to teaching arithmetic in junior school was unsatisfactory. Hence the number of children relying on private tuition at a later stage. I would like to point out that this wasn't a sink school and the GCSE results were and are above the national average, including those for Maths and English.

Another thing that became apparent to me when my son got his GCSE passes it included one in French, he knew less French than me, a subject I was truly abysmal at when I was at school!