There are some primary schools that are failing to bring children to an adequate standard in reading and numeracy. It must be miserable to arrive in a secondary school with very poor reading.Our school used to regularly take in a dozen kids from the two main feeder schools who were still struggling at key stage 1 level. For a few years we used to have a "transition group' who had a lovely primary trained teacher and a better ratio, trying to give them a boost and get them settled in secondary.
Many years ago my ex was working in primary. He was very committed to the idea that reading was the key. He concentrated on reading with his class for a whole term, and measured reading ages. They made magnificent gains in a term e.g. a whole year or more. The head was furious because he was not concentrating on the whole curriculum as required. (this was before the national curriculum). What I think this highlights is that schools tend to chug along doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that . But if you were to start from scratch as he was doing, you might look at the best ways to learn something and do things very differently. But the curriculum is very constraining and experimental or evidence based approaches consequently constrained too. I would favour having targets for the school (e.g. reading ages) and keeping all results on testing confidential. Kids need to be given personal feedback and encouragement, not test results.
Does the "literacy hour" still exist? Does it work? Seemed to me very formal when v young children were taught what adverbs were.
The answer is not another bloody overhaul of testing. Good quality support needed for those schools along with a bit more rigour in inspection. Dismantling local authority support for schools probably won't help. Our advisory team made redundant a few years ago now.
Pre Warning re Tonight’s Eastenders
Prayer ban at Katharine Birbalsingh’s school is lawful, High Court rules .