Teenagers draw on animation film to highlight plight of child soldiers
Books Not Bullets is the brainchild of a group of Kirklees youngsters after they heard firsthand tales of genocide survivors.

Beverley Addy – Guardian 01/03/2011

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Isn’t it interesting that as the statistics of exam success rise each year and as the chorus of governmental self-congratulation grows ever louder, that we now have demands for a 5-year MOT for teachers? I asked C who still teaches a day a week in school what she thought of this. She said she would resign immediately. It’s exactly what I would do were I still teaching in school. And we had it easy. Our pupils could be unruly at times but they never threatened or attacked us and neither did their parents, which is not an uncommon occurrence in some places. In fact – to go by letters from past pupils – we seemed to have made a decent job of it……..

From George Szirtes’s blog.

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Headteachers to get more powers as era of centralised control ends

Farewell then the Numeracy and Literacy Strategy, all the heartache and disillusion these strategies have caused. For me the Literacy Strategy was always worse than the Numeracy, but then I’ve always found maths easier to teach. Just that bit more linear and explainable in bite size chunks.

Who remembers with fondness ‘the carousel’? It went against the grain of all your instincts as a teacher but it was the ‘bees knees’ and the way things had to be done. Similarly, I will miss trying to get in three of four objectives into a lesson and squashing all the weeks objectives into a weeks planning  and then throwing in the few that didn’t quite fit.. That 15 15 20 10 monika, although that’s largely gone, will be sadly let go.

Around the time they realised they’d left out speaking and listening from the melting pot, they began to blame teachers for it’s loss, saying it was within the National Curriculum really.

This blame game seems to be happening again on a big scale, “well the literacy strategy and the numeracy strategy were never statutary.” They might not have been but heaven help you if you weren’t doing them. Non Statutary – Foobah! It’s a bit like those ‘non statutary’ Yearly SATs tests which SATurated the time in school with so many tests. It took a brave head to stand out against ‘The Strategies” given the weight of paperwork, the advisors, the school development officers who advocated it, even if they didn’t believe in it’s advocacy. They all parroted the line. Even the University lecturers, who knew it wasn’t enough.

We’ll all miss that great timesaver, the online planning tool, that never worked!

There are so many fond memories from these fantastic strategies. Fantasy indeed both the thought and the strategies.

Will they take the website down? How will we plan? What are we going to do? How will ofsted check us? It’s all up for grabs now?

And why? Not because anyone has seen sense but because it all costs too much. On a day when the Bankers get their bonuses Back, 2000 steel workers loose their jobs and British Airways Staff are asked to work for free.

Are there comparisons to be made with ‘Care in the Community’? Pity the poor heads, who will have to make it work on a local scale?

Whithered ‘Education, Education, Education. on the vine, it did. In ‘whatsit’ speak ‘improvements have stalled’ But belatedly people have realised that teaching to a test can can only stall or get 100% every year and then you’re really up against it.

We need some better measures of what constitutes a good education. No longer, narrowly defined outcomes will measure our success. That narrow path has lead to the world we live in.

This appeared this morning.

Cadenzas in a curriculum

My school days were lit up by two wonderful teachers. Would there be room for them today?

Rebecca Front in the Guardian. Friday 26th June 2009

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This echoes the Panorama programme from earlier this year. Do you remember the Sats monster?

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British class sizes among the highest in the world.
By Jessica Shepherd in the Guardian.

An average of 24.5.

Interestingly the Private sector has an average of 13 less than this.

In their words “Britain stands out as having the biggest difference in Primary Class size between Public and Private classrooms of all the OECD countries.”

Well prepared for the small teaching groups in our prestigious universities presumably?

From an OECD Report

Which had another interesting little snippett. Experienced Primary Teachers saw their salaries rise by 7% between 1996 and 2006. In other OECD countries the average was 15%.

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Balls hints at end to SATs tests.

from the BBC Website on Sunday.

Is sanity about to prevail??

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First acknowledging a problem.

Education: Primary pupils without basic skills highlight Labour’s biggest failure, says schools minister.
Polly Curtis in the Guardian on the 21st August.

Then advocating Academy Schools to solve some of the problems.

City academies to take over struggling primary schools

Polly Curtis and Allegra Stratton in the Guardian on the 25th August.

With some interesting rebuttals in the letters page today.

Academies are Primary concern.

As one Ralph Gayton points out this country has one of the worst records for class sizes in the state Primary sector. We’re still at an average of 26 and we all know that can go up to 28, 30, 32, 34 ……….

It’s also interesting in the context of another piece of research that appeared this week.

August born children struggle right through to University from the Institute of Fiscal Studies

I wonder when someone will put this into their educational thinking.

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The Children, School and Families Committee site is here.

Their report is here.

Mr Ball’s response is here.

There were some interesting follow up letters to Jenni Russell’s article here.

Keep the tests and refine assessment seems to be the key. To the extent that trained assessment specialists will now become part of fabric of schools. It’s taken nine or is it ten years to get serious about assessment since the advent of the Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. I only hope it’s going to backed up by serious academic research, will not expect linear progression and will acknowledge that learning and teaching is messy and not at all straightforward.

Let’s hope there’s a sensible simplification of demands that will make the assessment meaningful.

I keep wondering where is the University research that supports the proposed pedagogy?

And the curriculum is still too overloaded, especially if more investigative and collaborative ways of working are to be encouraged. Which if some of the Web2.0 thinkers are to be believed is vital for our future.

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