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Richard Garner
Richard Garner is The Independent’s education editor. He has also written comment pieces on the development of private schooling in the UK and the influence of the home environment on a child’s school performance.
Taken at face value, Sir Jim Rose’s review of the primary curriculum has come up with some interesting proposals to overhaul what is taught in schools.
The trouble is he has been working with one hand tied behind his back as a result of Children’s Secretary Ed Balls’ decision to exclude consideration of the national curriculum SATs tests for 11-year-olds from his remit. Sir Jim himself refers to them as “the elephant in the room” that every teacher wanted to talk about as he visited schools to gather his evidence.
I like his call to strengthen modern language teaching by offering all pupils one or two languages from the age of seven that they can take on to secondary school.
I think it can make sense, too, not to have rigid subject definitions for the non-core subjects such as history and geography but to teach them under a general theme of human, social and environmental understanding – although I might not have chosen those precise words myself. (Apparently, around fifty per cent of primary school already do this).
I applaud the idea that more attention should be devoted to speaking and listening skills as a results of what the report describes as the “word poverty” of many of today’s youngsters. There is that staggering statistic that a youngster from a deprived background hears only 13 million words by the time he or she is four compared to 45 million in a more affluent home).
Trouble is, the teachers are not going to have the time to devote to this while they are spending so much time coaching their pupils for the tests. It is not the tests that are the problem. We need some form of accountability for the primary school system. It is the “high stakes” nature of them and their use for national league tables – on which schools are judged. A move to a system whereby every parent had the right to find out the performance of any school they wanted to send their child rather than publishing national performance tables would help relieve this.
The trouble is he has been working with one hand tied behind his back as a result of Children’s Secretary Ed Balls’ decision to exclude consideration of the national curriculum SATs tests for 11-year-olds from his remit. Sir Jim himself refers to them as “the elephant in the room” that every teacher wanted to talk about as he visited schools to gather his evidence.
I like his call to strengthen modern language teaching by offering all pupils one or two languages from the age of seven that they can take on to secondary school.
I think it can make sense, too, not to have rigid subject definitions for the non-core subjects such as history and geography but to teach them under a general theme of human, social and environmental understanding – although I might not have chosen those precise words myself. (Apparently, around fifty per cent of primary school already do this).
I applaud the idea that more attention should be devoted to speaking and listening skills as a results of what the report describes as the “word poverty” of many of today’s youngsters. There is that staggering statistic that a youngster from a deprived background hears only 13 million words by the time he or she is four compared to 45 million in a more affluent home).
Trouble is, the teachers are not going to have the time to devote to this while they are spending so much time coaching their pupils for the tests. It is not the tests that are the problem. We need some form of accountability for the primary school system. It is the “high stakes” nature of them and their use for national league tables – on which schools are judged. A move to a system whereby every parent had the right to find out the performance of any school they wanted to send their child rather than publishing national performance tables would help relieve this.
