Another education rant!

At Grandma’s Cafe this morning for breakfast, my daughter told me a tale of badly-behaved children in a shopping centre. Her smallest child, who has been learning good manners and insists that when her older brother burps “pardon me” is not good enough but he should say “‘scuse me!”, was sitting in one of those kiddy rides, in this case a little bus. She was sitting in the back, probably singing “The wheels on the bus”. Another child came storming over, no parents in sight, and sat himself in the driver’s seat. Then another slightly older child, probably his brother, arrived - still no parents - and yanked the other out of the driver’s seat and pushed him into the back of the bus so that he could take over the driving. Two more unaccompanied siblings arrived and piled onto the bus.

Our grandchild, on her best I-know-my-manners behaviour moved over to make room and said, “There you go”. Whereupon the “driver” of the bus turned and roared at her. When she protested, “Mummy, this boy shouted at me”, the younger child, the one ousted from the driver’s seat, slapped her.

My daughter had been watching this. She is a primary school teacher and went into teacher mode: no shouting, just a serious teacher voice saying, “Now, we don’t shout and slap, do we? We use our kind hands, don’t we”. Pretty restrained, I thought.

By now the parents had arrived and the father blustered over to ask what was going on. When the situation was explained to him, he clearly felt no compunction to apologise himself but simply growled at the child, “What do you say?”. He then pulled the child out of the bus and roared at the others to follow.

Presumably this is one of those fathers you read about who assume that school should teach their children how to behave as well as teaching them to dress themselves, use a knife and fork, and just as a sideline how to read and write and do a bit of basic Maths!

Recently I read about an academy chain who had decided that a solution to bad behaviour was to make the uncouth youths repeat a year. Nothing like a bit of humiliation, not to mention the boredom factor of doing the same stuff over again, to make the world go around. And, of course, there is the encouragement that these older miscreants give to the younger would-be miscreants. Other countries in Europe have mostly phased out this practice for just those reasons. The “repetidores”, big louts two or even three years older than the rest of the class, have largely disappeared from Spanish schools. So quite why the academy chain thinks it would work is beyond me.

The behaviour problem is one of the reasons why young teachers tend to move out of the profession after only a few years in the profession. A contributory factor might be something else I read about. According to the Times Educational Supplement, it is increasingly hard for experienced teachers to find work in schools unless they actively seek promotion. “Just think about it. You're on the upper pay scale and want to move schools. Perhaps, you've held a position of responsibility and want to "just be a teacher" once again. After all, didn’t we go into this job for the love of teaching? But there’s a hitch: why would a school, with the financial pressures that they now face, employ you, as opposed to a newly qualified teacher who costs almost £20K less? After all, there are situations where taking the NQT would make some sense, especially if the department is strong and could support and mentor them, at least until they are up to a similar standard to the more experienced teacher.” 

Consequently there is no longer the mix of young-and-enthusiastic and older-and-more-experienced which used to exist, the second group helping the first to deal with recalcitrant or just plain naughty students and the first group reminding the second about the joy of new ideas!

Cost cutting has its costs!

Our fourteen year old grandson, not always a little angel, sometimes a bit too quick with a sharp or indeed cheeky retort, has been selected to be in the group at his secondary school which does the English Baccalaureate.
Despite being described as just doing enough to get by, he is recognised as bright enough to be one of this group. What would he be like, I wonder, if he really tried?!

So what is the English Baccalaureate, apart from seeming to me be a misnomer since in other countries “baccalaureate” is equivalent to our A-Levels?

Here’s an answer from their web page:-

The EBacc is a set of subjects at GCSE that keeps young people’s options open for further study and future careers.

The EBacc is:
 • English language and literature
 • maths
 • the sciences
 • geography or history
 • a language

So our rather idle young man will have to continue with Spanish. He is a bit miffed about this. I am a bit miffed about his reaction. It might be because he has had a string of different teachers over the last three years, none of whom has managed to give him a love of language learning or any sense of the fun that can be involved. I need to start doing some remedial work now, I think!

He is not alone in his age group to want to avoid foreign language learning. Apparently some youngsters are getting so stressed about it that they are getting doctors’ notes to excuse them from those lessons.

Oh, boy! Yes, you have to work at understanding the ins and outs of a foreign language but the same applies to Maths. And I’ve not heard of parents taking their offspring to see a doctor so that they can get out of Maths lessons!

Something needs to be done at all levels, it seems to me!