Learning is delightful and delicious …

Why is it that so many young people, after attending school for more than 10 years, are found to be so poorly equipped for employment? the Sunday Times asks today.

This is another of those articles that initially makes me throw up my hands and cry “hallellujah!” – simply because I’m glad that somebody else out there has cottoned onto something about which I’ve been moaning for ages.

Although of course, my joy is short-lived when I come bak to the real world and admit that despite the publicity, it won’t change anything; and fades faster when I reflect on the sorry state we’re in when so many of the children I and others are teaching are unlikely to be able to find jobs (and in many cases, don’t aspire to them anyway).

I can’t put it any better than this –

Yet employers find that, despite their formal qualifications, many young people are unable to communicate simply and well; they cannot work in teams; they lack initiative, enterprise and the capacity to foresee and resolve problems; they cannot plan a schedule or manage themselves; and they lack a thirst for continued learning and personal growth. They are deficient in the soft skills that form an essential component of each individual’s human capital, some of them to the extent that they are in fact unemployable.

It’s what I’ve been saying for ages. We’re not teaching kids how to think for themselves.

You’ve only got to give out a simple worksdheet to see that – hands are in the air and there are chants of “I don’ geddit” before the paper has even hit the desk.

Despite an insistance in every training session I’ve attended about pedagogial issues, all of which insist that lessons should be a maximum of 40% teacher-led, that the focus is on learning rather than teaching and whatever else is flavour of the month, there is no advice on how to combat the sheer apathy and disinterest of a large number of kids. There is often little or no willingness to engage with any activity that requires the slightest amount of effort, and believe me, you can plan and give the root’nest, toot’nest, all-singing, all-dancing-with-bells-on lesson and still get absolutely nowhere. Other than completely exhausted.

Employability skills are the product of a well rounded education.

Yes, quite. The number of times I’ve been tempted to have the “rounded education” argument with every eleven year old who asks “wot do I ‘af ter do French for? I in’t goin ter France”, or “why do we ‘af ter do moosic?”. But of course, even if I did get into the discussion (not a good idea), seventeen is a very long way off to an eleven year old.

Over-prescription is stifling creativity and imagination in our schools. We’re teaching kids to pass exams, but they’re not really learning anything – certainly not a number of the skills that will serve them in later life.

The answer? I don’t think it really lies just with schools any more, because it’s clear that schools can’t “solve” this alone. Slimming down the national curriculum, but NOT to the extent that it throws out arts subjects as has been suggested – may help, but we also need to get rid of national testing and league tables, which are putting such a huge amount of pressure on pupils and teachers alike. But it needs to go beyond that, because no matter how good the lessons or the teachers, if you’re standing in front of a bunch of kids who see no point whatsoever in getting an education, it’ll still be a waste of time.

We need to abandon this stupid “one size fits all” approach to education – we’re all different and have different levels of intelligence and ability, so we need to teach pupils that they can’t be good at everything and that sometimes they will fail, and teach them how to deal with that failure so that they don’t just give up and turn their energies in a more negative direction, like disruption. Schools need to have the confidence that measures they take to deal with disruptive pupils will be supported, and we need to come up with a way of providing an education for those pupils who are too disruptive to attend a “regular” school. The odd anger-management or self-esteem class won’t do it – we need to be giving the “silent majority” of pupils who will learn, given half a chance the, well – half a chance to do so!

Things like that cost money – although I doubt there’d be a willingness to go down that route even if the economy hadn’t gone tits-up; because if Alan Steer is to be believed, there are no real behaviour problems in schools.

And I’m the bloody Queen of Sheba.

And that, right there, is another of the things that will hold back and/or totally prevent any progress towards a solution to the problems highlighted in the article I linked to at the beginning of this post – the head-in-the-sand approach to the issue of behaviour. Until we find a way to improve standards of behaviour in many schools, there will be little or no progress academically OR socially, and the proportion of “employable” young people available to take their place in the workforce will continue to diminish.

Why is it, that almost every educational news-story I read makes me immediately think of Basil Fawlty’s line about Sybill’s specialist subject on Mastermind being “stating the bleedin’ obvious.”?

Today, we’re told that boys don’t do well in mixed-sex English classes.

I don’t teach English, but even I can see that boys’ literary skills are, in general, lower than girls’. And – also in general – the reasons for that are bleedin’ obvious.

Although I don’t think it’s just down to the fact, as the article states, that boys realise that girls are “better” at it than they are and just don’t bother. I think it goes deeper than that. I teach music – and in the majority of cases, when the set project is a composition task, the girls are almost invariably more wiling to use their imaginations and experiment. Again, that’s a generalisation, because of course, there are some boys who are willing to have a go, but I’d say that it’s true 90% of the time in my experience. Which is why I say that the idea that boys do worse in English when there are girls in the class isn’t just down to their thinking that the girls will outperform them.

To me, it indicates something more serious than that – the fact that it’s not “cool” for boys to be seen to be creative. Or rather, not to be seen to be creative in certain subjects. It’s okay to be able to “Bend it like Beckham” or to come up with a device to set off all the fire alarms across the school in science – but to be “arty”, for most boys is a definite “no-no” and will, in most cases, lead to their being labelled a “gayboy”. And the article also states that there is no corresponding dip in the achievement of girls in maths or science – they do okay whether the boys are there or not.

And while I’m on the subject (sort of) of “boys versus girls” – I’ve been gnashing my teeth for weeks over the way that other recent stories about whether boys need to be taught separately and differently from girls, and about it not being “cool” for boys to do well at school – are being presented. I’m fed up with reading about lessons being “geared” towards girls.

What?

Just because they may involve having to sit still, write things down and actually think about things sometimes? How is that “girl-centric”? I fully accept that boys tend, in many cases, to need to be more active than girls – but there are limits as to what you can do about that in a classroom. And let’s face it – some of those boys will grow up to be… lorry drivers… office workers… will do other jobs where they have to sit still, so they have to learn to do that sometime!

I’ve read many comments on various blogs from men who clearly feel increasingly hard-done-by and who have made some incredibly bitter and sometimes downright nasty comments about the fact that they feel that things in general are now biased towards women. They’re entitled to their opinion. But all I can say is that IF that’s true, then it’s about bloody time. For centuries, women were the underdogs – treated worse than dogs in many cases. It wasn’t worth educating them because all they needed to do was keep house and have babies; they couldn’t own property, couldn’t vote – and even as recently as a hundred years ago, were regarded as “property”, belonging either to their husband or their father.

So yes. Maybe it’s our ‘turn’ now.

BUT – having said that, I certainly don’t think that one sex should do well at the expense of the other.
We need to find ways to help boys not feel ashamed about being good at “girly” subjects and vice-versa.

And this is starting to become a completely different post from the one I started, so I think I’ll end it there for now.

Catching up on the news, it seems that last week’s “educational topic of the week” (and in my head, I hear a Harry-Hill-like jingle while typing those words!) was mostly about the worsening behaviour in schools.

Really? /sarcasm. These come around with alarming regularity and (surprise!) nothing changes. Many Principals are shit-scared to throw out the worst offenders because it shows up on the figures, and until that is changed and each one can do what they think is best for their school without having to worry how it looks when compared with the school up the road or across town, things are only going to get worse. Unless you’re lucky enough to work in a school where the head has the balls to say “sod the figures” and take the action that’s needed.

And soon – we’re told – schools are going to have a US-style report-card grade, which will take into account the “happiness” of pupils. I’d like to think that some schools will be in for a shock when they realise how pissed off the majority of kids are at the continual disruption caused to their lessons by the “usual suspects”.

Will these report cards also take into account the happiness of the staff?

Hm. Thought not.

Anyway, it’s articles like these which starts off by saying that -

Parents let their children rule the roost at home and then expect schools to discipline them,

- that make me think I should create a “no shit, Sherlock” tag for this blog.

There were several articles published last week in the wake of the survey by the ATL which states that around 40% of teachers have been subject to abuse by parents and that around one third of teachers in primary schools have been subject to physical violence by pupils. This account, from the BBC News site is chilling –

A six-year-old completely trashed the staff room, put a knife through a computer screen, attacked staff and we had to call the police.
“Another six-year-old attacked staff and pupils with the teacher’s scissors.

- and there are many more where that came from.

Then there was this, from the Guardian –

Some 40% of teachers surveyed said student behaviour had got worse over the past two years, while 58% said it had worsened over the past five.

I’m amazed at such low numbers. I can only assume that the teachers surveyed who did not think that behaviour had worsened in the last two or five years are either working at top end state schools or in the independent sector.

But for me, the quote of the week came from Dr Susan Greenfield in We don’t need a Twittericulum in the Telegraph.

…we are rearing a generation of kids that are in danger of becoming emotionally stunted, inarticulate, hedonists with the attention span of a gnat.

I’d argue with the “in danger of” part, because there are a large number of kids who are already there, in my experience.

Still on the topic of behaviour, yet on a slightly different tack, I read this article in the Times, about the fact that teachers are being targeted by unruly pupils both at school and at home. I have to say, I often walk to the car park at the end of the day wondering whether that’s the day my car will have been keyed, or been broken into. Not that I keep anything in there worth nicking, mind you. But again, kids know that at worst, all they’re going to get is a finger wagged at them and probably a stiff talking to – and they don’t give a toss about that.

I don’t advocate corporal punishment, but we really need to find things that we can do to try to curb the worst excesses of behaviour. In the majority of cases, I’d imagine that parents either don’t or aren’t able to exercise any discipline at home, so taking away the X-Box or PS2 isn’t an option. Detentions at 7am was something one school I was at was thinking about trying – although whether they were actually going to go to pupils houses and haul them out of bed was never made clear. Detentions on Saturday mornings during which pupils would be expected to do the work they hadn’t done in class – but again, who is going to make sure the little dears turn up? Perhaps that’s where the suggestion I’ve often seen, that in the case of parents on benefits, those benefits are reduced in some way if the kids don’t turn up – could be applied, although again, I have no idea how such a system would be operated.

The point is though, that something needs to be done, and it needs to be done fast. Someone – and clearly, despite his name the current education secretary does not have them – with serious cojones needs to say “stuff the league tables and sort out these kids”.

Oh look. There are those pink flying things again. Oink!

I went to Tescos this morning with my youngest daughter. My husband takes our eldest to her swimming club on a Saturday morning, so I usually go out and do stuff. Anyway, we decided we’d get some breakfast in the cafe – we got our food and sat down.

At the table behind us were two boys. If the eldest of them was more than eleven, I’d be surprised, and I imagine the other boy was his younger brother. There was no adult with them, and I assumed that their mum must have dumped them there while she did the shopping. That’s bad enough, but for these boys, breakfast was a six-pack of McCoy’s crisps, coke and a box of chocolate doughnuts. They were loud and rather obnoxious, talking, laughing and telling each other to “piss off” at the tops of their voices. At one point, the elder boy decided to “accidentally” fall onto the floor – and at that point, I went over to a member of staff to point out that these two boys were unaccompanied, behaving very badly and using foul language. I went back to my seat, and my daughter told me that the man opposite – who had arrived with his wife and baby – had told the boy to get up. The boy was back in his seat, but made some comment which I didn’t hear, because the man who’d told him off said “if you want to play, go to the park.” The boy answered back “well, you can go to the park” or something and he and his brother carried on talking and giggling very loudly.

Finally, the member of staff I’d spoken to came back with either the store manager or someone from security who asked the boys if they had an adult with them. They said no. He then told them that they weren’t allowed to be in there without an adult and that also, they were only allowed to eat food that had been purchased in the cafe. The elder boy then piped up that their dad was waiting in the car outside, and then they left. You could hear the collective sigh of relief from those of us sitting in the vicinity.

But you know what? I actually felt quite intiminated by the older boy. Perhaps it was because I had my daughter with me (she’s six), but really, that kid is going to grow up into the worst kind of knuckledragger.

But what kind of parent sits out in the car, lets their kids go around Tescos on their own picking up crisps, coke and doughnuts (such a nutritious breakfast!)? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question, because I know the answer only too well.

I have to deal with rude, obnoxious and threatening kids for forty weeks of the year. I don’t particularly want to encounter them when I’m off duty!