Learning is delightful and delicious …

According to the latest missive from Ofsted, “challenging” schools should be adopting a back to basics disciplinary policy .

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor in astonishment.

Ofsted

The Ofsted.

Said that??

Are there pink things flying around outside making “oink oink” noises? Is the sky falling down?

If they really mean what they’ve said in that report, then they should be taking steps to help all those failing/tough/challenging schools to adopt those policies – which include a ban on shaved heads, patterns shaved into hair, designer trainers, gang colours; suspending pupils without having to worry about figures, and then calling in parents at all hours to give them a good talking to!

The suspension figures might seem incredibly high but I don’t think that would last. We all know that there are always a few kids who will never change their attitudes or behaviour, but for the rest of them, who copy that behaviour because they can get away with it – a short-sharp-shock suspension would be a one-off, never to be repeated because of the bollocking they got at home the first time.

“The street stops at the gate” is a soundbite I actually like, for once. I think we should adopt that as our rallying cry!

This article on The Trials of French Teacher Training from the BBC website raised more than a wry smile – mostly because we’re having problems getting pupils to reach the standard required by some undergraduate courses because of the erosion in standards of A levels. Could you imagine the British (state) education system turning out more than a handful graduates who could handle the same sort of tests that prospective teachers in France have to take? I mean, I know trainee teachers who took four or five attempts to pass their QTS tests in basic literacy and numeracy! (Which, incidentally, took me all of ten minutes each, especially when I realised that I was allowed to use a pen, paper and calculator for the maths one – I’d been doing the practice tests in my head!)

I don’t disagree that the status of teaching in this country needs to be raised – but if we’re going to, as the article says consider moves to accept only the brightest, the “brightest” have got to come from somewhere. And until the British education system is fixed, that ain’t gonna happen.

Chicken and egg. Yeah. We’re clucked.

Is anyone really surprised at the news that National Challenge funding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?.

I had a look at the tables of who’s getting what to see what the schools I work at are in line for. Well, in both cases, it’s better than the measly five grand some schools have been allocated, but it’s still not a lot when you consider the problems they face in terms of low aspiration, attainment and behaviour.

I suppose the term “National Challenge School” has been thought up in order to replace the rather unflattering phrase “failing school”.

But we all know that’s what it means.

Can’t you just imagine the amount of flack this guy is going to get?

The thing is though – he’s not wrong.

For whatever reason, we have a generation of children, teenagers and young adults who have no aspirations to anything whatsoever. And I want to make it clear that I’m not just talking about single parent familes here – I know it’s a widespread problem that affects all kinds of family units.

But before we can start to really tackle the problem, the policymakers need to acknowledge that it actually exists.

Magnus Linklatter in The Times today –

Lower-ability students should study the skills they need, not academic subjects they can’t handle.

I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but the basic idea – that those pupils who aren’t what used to be termed “academically inclined” should instead be able to learn other subjects and skills which will be of more use to them in future than differential calculus (do schools still do that nowadays?) – is one that’s been buzzing around like a bee in my bonnet for some time now.

Why do those who make educational policy insist on trying to treat everyone as though they’re the same? Of course a ‘bright’ child can be born into a poor, disadvantaged family, just as the silver spoons can spawn a thicko less gifted individual. And also of course, the advantages that money can bring will often result in the less bright child doing better in the long run than the other one, so the idea of spending money trying to help the disadvantaged is not a bad one. But I’d argue that a lot of it is being spent in the wrong way.

I do think it’s scandalous that in some schools (my own included) the percentage of pupils achieving A-C in Maths is well below 50%. Pumping money into the existing system may well raise things by a few percetage points, but I don’t think that’s what’s needed.

I’ve said this before, but pupils of lower ability aren’t stupid. They know when they’re not good at something, and when presented with something they don’t think they can do, or can’t cope with, they disrupt, thus affecting the learning of all the other pupils in the class. I ask time and time again, what’s the point of putting the less able kids in a class with the “won’t, can’t” brigade, because the less able, who need more help, not less – stand practically no chance of learning anything.

So wouldn’t it be better if, at 14, the less bright, the disaffected or whatever you want to call them – were given the chance to learn things that might be of use to them in the world of work? I’m not saying they shouldn’t be taught Maths, English and Science, but maybe it can be related to the other things they’re doing so that they can actually see the “point.” I’m in no way suggesting that we should be pandering to the little dears and letting them do whatever the hell they want – but the way things are now, those kids are getting away with murder. They know we can do nothing other than put them in detention, or exclude them from school for a few days (just what they want!) and worst of all they’re preventing those that want to from learning. That, in my book is the ultimate sin as far as education is concerned, because the minority is being allowed to ruin things for everyone else.

I also freely admit that there are some pupils who will never respond to anything at school, no matter what’s on offer or how it’s presented to them, but this really is a small minority.

In any case, the doors to an education are never closed and perhaps once these kids have grown up a bit and realise that maybe the stuff that teachers were trying to help them to learn would have been useful after all, they can return to eduation as adults.

Maybe this is an unpopular view – all I can say is that every colleague with whom I’ve ever had a conversation about this subject has taken a similar view. We deal with disadvantaged, disaffected pupils every day, we see the havoc they wreak on the classes they’re in, the way they wreck lessons simply because they can, and things aren’t going to improve unless several things happen, one of which involves the introduction of a lot more flexibility in the curriculum.

The latest initiative by Ed Balls, that parents should teach their children to cook is just a bit oxymoronic, to say the least.

We are continually told that one of the reasons for the bad diet eaten by a large number of children and adults is because a vast number of people have never learned to cook. I mean, there are lots of people out there today who probably wouldn’t know what to do when faced with an actual potato.

So – whilst I totally agree with the sentiment – just who is going to teach these kids to cook? Their parents didn’t learn and there’s even a chance that their grandparents didn’t learn, so although Balls is saying that the emphasis shouldn’t just be on the school to teach them, it’s going to have to be for the time being – unless part of his plan is to run adult classes, too!

So Cookery is going to be compulsory from 2011 – but is it going to be actual cookery, or has Health and Safety scuppered anything involving hot ovens or sharp knives?

According to Ofsted, music teaching is inadequate in half of secondary schools. Only half?

Well, I don’t know where to start, other than to say that I think that that’s wrongly phrased. In my experience, it’s not the teaching that’s inadequate. Music teachers – like Drama teachers, I’d guess – are often hampered by the pre-conception on the part of pupils, parents and colleagues that their subject is a doss and pupils don’t have to do any work. Music has the added problem of having to deal with preconceptions at the opposite end of the spectrum, namely that “it’s too ‘ard” and so pupils don’t even try.

What we’re faced with in secondary schools is sometimes a very wide mix of abilities – some pupils come from feeder primaries like the one I worked in last year, or the one my own children attend which have a lot of musical activities and pupils who take up instruments when they’re old enough. That’s if you’re lucky. In the schools at I’m teaching now – both of which are National Challenge schools – the majority of the pupils appear to have done little or no music at primary schools, and this has a knock-on effect.

I’ve been trying to teach the basics of notation to year 7 classes, and I’ve just run out of ways to make the explanations any simpler. Some of the kids get it – those who will exert themselves enough to try to think about it – but many just won’t even try. The message that music “isn’t important” has already gotten through – as I suggested here and so kids don’t treat music as a lesson. They don’t seem to expect to have to do any work, or write anything down – although as I often say, “you can’t make a cake without knowing the recipe, and you can’t do the task I’m setting you until you understand what you have to do”. They eem to think that a music lesson means they can listen to their iPods for fifty minutes, or that I will give them a guitar to mess around with.

Pupil: “Miss, this is a moosic lesson I shouldn’t ‘ave ter doo writin’”
Me: “Well, this is a lesson; I’m sure you do more writing than this in English.”
Pupil: “Yebbut this is moosic. Can’t I play the guitar or sumpfin?”
Me: “Can you play the guitar?”
Pupil: “Nobbut -”

The thought of teaching a class of 25 to play the guitar is chilling. Not only because I can only manage a few chords myself, but because with these kids, the potential for broken strings, broken guitars and broken heads in enormous. A Health and Safety nightmare. And in any case, the one time I did attempt to teach a very much reduced class – I had about 8, I think – to play a couple of chords, they just couldn’t manage it. The concept of putting a finger on one string in the space between two particular frets really was totally beyond them.

But I digress.

I assess (or attempt to) pupils every half term, but again, as I said in the post I referenced above, there’s a lot of “creative accounting” involved. If I took the NC levels at face value, I think there would only be a handful of pupils in year 9 who would be able to achieve a level 3. The rest of them have no more musical ability now than they had in year 7. But if I mark them accurately and honestly, it makes me look bad because hardly any of the kids have made any progress.

I don’t know what the answer is. I know what I’d like it to be – music teaching in primary schools needs to be more uniform, and taught by specialist teachers if at all possible. I know that because of the nature of primary teaching, that’s not always possible, but the school I was at last year employed me to provide PPA cover for the rest of the staff which meant that all pupils – from foundation to year 6 got a music lesson from a qualified music teacher each week.
The reason I wasn’t kept on this year?

Money. Of course.

But even though Ofsted has “exposed” the inadequacy of music provision in secondary schools, I can’t see them pushing schools to do much about it. It needs a lot of investment, especially those schools in more deprived areas where people wouldn’t know an expressive art if it stood on their toes and punched them in the nose.

But it’s about more than that. Music helps to promote analytical thinking and a sense of teamwork, can foster a sense of self-esteem, build confidence, develop creativity – all things which are of enormous value, and if the government is serious about providing all this and a “rounded” education for our kids, then this is one area that really needs looking at, and soon.