Literacy and numeracy standards

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Class not case.

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

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.

Jendurham

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

pogs

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Aka you are so right about the need for children and their parents to value education! And someone else said that much of a child's learning takes place outside school, which is also true. If children don't see books and reading as something normal, for example, then the importance which schools place upon them must seem very strange.

Teachers would also value more time to teach, as well I know, but this has been repeatedly discussed on GN, so I will not start again.

BTW, I had appalling Mths teachers back in the 50s and 60s - no classroom disruption, just a collective grey pall over every lesson.

Parents in families with problems do not value education and we cannot make them however hard we try. They themselves feel let down by the education system as they are the product of successive governments' interference. They cannot see that their education did them any good, so why would they want more of the same for their children?

I really do think that we need to leave the teachers to teach - this is what they are trained to do and what they do best if they are just left to get on with it. Of course there has to be monitoring by the head and the governing body, but as long as they feel straight-jacketed and undermined they will have poor morale with the inevitable consequences.

The only person I know who is a neet is my sister's son, who is 36 and outside the age group concerned. However, he is also the only one I know whose parents did not support the staff at his school. If my kids or my other sister's kids had been in trouble at school we'd have wanted to know why and probably supported the staff. They have always been in education or work. If my sister's son was in trouble at school, she would always believe what he said and ring up the school and say he was not going to do the punishment, usually detention. He has still never had a proper job, and usually ended up walking out of any work placement he was given.
But we all had the same parents who valued education, so what happened to change my middle sister?

Has anyone else read School Wars by Melissa Benn.
Needless to say, I agree with most of what she says about the education system.
One of the problems with taking education out of the hands of the politicians is the starting base. Would it mean we would have to accept the system as it is at the moment, which I would definitely disagree with. It's such a mix of different types of school and management.

Parents in families with problems do not value education and we cannot make them however hard we try.

That's a bit sweeping Mishap. There may be many reasons why families have problems but it doesn't automatically follow that the parents don't value education. I don't particularly want to plaster private information about my daughter all over Gransnet, but suffice it to say that, regardless of my degrees and the fact I value education, we had huge problems when my daughter was a teenager which included her refusal to attend school from the age of 12 – any school and we tried three different ones.

Btw She is now studying for a degree in psychology while holding down a highly responsible job and raising a family. So far all her grades are A+.