Chris Keates claims that teaching children to recite poetry or their times tables off by heart will ‘shackle teachers’ discretion’. What is she afraid of? Perhaps it is having ‘progressive' teaching methods exposed for what they are – stupid, lazy and ideologically hidebound.
Chris Keates’s defensive and hostile response to Michael Gove’s long awaited and much needed reform proposals for primary school education says it all. No other explanations for the pathetic standard of literacy and numeracy are required.
When the ugly sisters of the teachers unions (Chris Keates and Mary Bousted) have their say it is always negative, never positive. It is always why not, never how to.
What worse example could they set children? How much less inspirational could they be? They should put up or shut up.
For all the fanfare surrounding Michael Gove’s proposed changes to the primary school curriculum these reforms albeit overdue are pretty basic.
Had not expectations of both teachers and pupils fallen so low, they would not even be news worthy.
If you look at the small print what Mr Gove is demanding is not much by good private primary standards. He is simply aspiring for children to know their times tables up to 12 by the time they are nine; to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide decimals such as 32.4 or 4.78 by the end of primary school; to be able to learn and recite by heart from the age of 5. He also wants children to start learning foreign languages in primary schools and to reintroduce Latin
Readers may be shocked to know how little of this is currently demanded or expected. For example the current times table ‘target’ is just to 10 by Year Six. Worse, because the target only has to be met by then no one gets unduly alarmed if the children do not begin to master them in the years before.
This is even the case in schools that Ofsted rates as outstanding. In my local ‘flagship’ primary school the practice is to give the children (the poor little things) only the ‘comfortable’ numbers to learn first.
What these are you may well ask.
Revamp: Education Secretary Michael Gove will this week tear up the rules governing what must be taught at primary school amid evidence that British children have slipped behind the rest of the worldI can tell you. They are the two times, three times, five times and ten times tables. These have to be learnt first - because they are comfortable numbers. After that the child is made to go back and fill the gaps. You couldn’t make it up if you had to.
No doubt this innovation was the outcome of an expensive piece of ‘education research’ that the tax payer unwittingly stumped up for.
That is not all. I do hope that Michael Gove is aware of the utter lack of conviction with which times tables (up to ten) are actually taught. Forget the recitation of my childhood - one times two is two, two times two is four etc. Today’s children are made to count them. Two, four six eight … or five, ten fifteen, twenty...
It seems to have bypassed the teaching unions and the educational establishment that you don’t create a numerate generation by having kids count in multiples – they need to know how numbers relate to each other. That’s why they need to recite their tables too.
This brings us to the biggest obstacle these basic reforms face and which is why they have been so long in coming, despite ever worsening literacy and numeracy standards.
‘Traditional’ reforms do not ‘sit well’ with the teaching practices that teachers have been trained in and indoctrinated into. Labour’s so-called education reforms far from challenging this culture, reinforced it. That is why learning number facts for addition is still beyond many schools. It is why the idea of achieving automatic recall runs headlong into the sacred ‘number line’ which requires kids to count on their fingers.
Overhaul: In Government proposals schools will be expected to teach children how to calculate using decimal places and fractionsThe dilemma – or even tragedy – for Michael Gove is that to counter this culture he has to be prescriptive (which must go against his liberal principles) to get rid of the ideologically hidebound prescriptions that exist.
He has to break the practices of progressive education both in teacher training and in the classroom.
These are individualised rather than class teaching, tables not desks; children sitting round them in circles looking at each other instead of facing the teacher. Children must face forward again and have their own desk and their own space.
They are marked too by the disappearance of the text books from schools as well as books in general; by the absence of personal atlases, bibles, dictionaries and books of verse.
The most damaging ‘progressive’ innovation he needs to confront is teaching by cyclostyled sheets – separate sheets of paper, instead of by blackboard, text book and work books that contain the record of work.
More... Gove on a mission to restore times tables: Primary schools told to return to traditional values The clever government proposals that will INCREASE the number of child and teenage smokers
It seems extraordinary to me that 'oustanding' schools present children as young as six with barely legible A5 print outs on which they can hardly see the pictures they are meant to compare or contrast.
We need to know what is going on in schools.
Parents, but not Ofsted, will tell you that poetry recitation in state primaries currently simply does not exist. Yet at top private prep schools like Westminster boys learn to recite from the age of 7, in front of the school assembly as well as the class.
Learning how to speak publicly and confidently with good enough diction to be understood makes all the difference in a child’s life.
Action: The most damaging 'progressive' innovation Gove needs to confront is teaching by separate sheets of paper, instead of by text bookOne of the reasons for East Side Young Leaders’ Academy’s success in getting their boys from the east end of London into public school is that every child learns to declaim or recite by heart from day one, whether or not he can yet read or write. The confidence of these boys is a joy to watch.
But for the average state primary school child there is no such chance, unless they are lucky enough to go to Sunday school. Not even a sheet of poetry comes home from the flagship primaries I know. Their teachers claim there is no time in their overfilled curriculum. But the truth is that they are so stuck in its box that if it is not written down they cannot teach it.
So at one of these schools when the ‘topic’ was ‘fairy tales’ did the teacher turn to Hans Christian Anderson or to Grimm’s fairy tales – or even to the Oxford book of children’s verse?
No. She put Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid in the class video machine for the afternoon while she got on with her PPA. PPA, for the uninitiated, is planning, preparation and administration that all teachers have half a day a week set aside for already.
So what hope is there for these reforms happening?
It would be more likely if they were not going out for public consultation before they are redrafted and published at a later date, as the Department for Education ominously promises. Is this spurious process of 'stakeholder' democracy really necessary? That is another challenge for Michael Gove.
