A Monster is Hatched
A Monster is Hatched
A Monster is Hatched
My column for the East Anglian Daily Times (19/1/12):
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In Mary Shelley's classic novel, the wayward Dr Frankenstein retreats to the shadowy recesses of a castle and stitches together body parts. He creates the monster that will stalk and finally destroy him. His determination to be the inventor of new life ends in disaster.
I was reminded of this when term began last week. It seems that somewhere in the bowels of the Department of Education, officials are stitching together a new national curriculum.
Many teachers will question whether this is a good use of their time. The curriculum was last changed four years ago, and several times prior to that over the past fifteen years, so don’t expect us to get overexcited, like sleepless children awaiting Father Christmas.
Because all of this tinkering with the curriculum does get a bit tiresome. I suspect there aren't many countries where every time there's a new Government, or even a new education minister, it's thought appropriate to rewrite everything that children are taught.
How reassuring if what teachers taught and what children studied stayed pretty much the same regardless of who's running the country. Shouldn’t ‘the best that has been thought and said’ stay more consistent from one parliamentary term to another? Shouldn’t we have a curriculum that is free from political meddling?
It's an interesting question to think about who should define our national curriculum. Should it be politicians? Teachers? Employers? Should it be experts in their subjects who perhaps work in universities? Or should it be some combination of those people, plus parents?
In the past there have been vast committees of experts. This time the process appears to have been reduced to a small and shadowy group of officials. Their long-awaited efforts are expected to be published this month.
Let’s hope that it’s not just another short-term version of the national curriculum with yet another likely to be hatched in four or five years’ time. All this tinkering does get in the way of teachers’ real job – that is, teaching.
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When the key stage 2 results came out last month, they showed Suffolk as being one of the worst performing counties in England. There was a collective gasp of disbelief. The same is likely to happen when the key stage 4 performance tables – GCSE – come out in the next couple of weeks.
How can it be, we will ask ourselves, that a county that is so attractive and pleasant to live in, and with so few pockets of deprivation, can appear to perform so badly?
This year, of course, we will know that there is – as they say – an elephant in the room. Suffolk was especially badly hit by last summer’s GCSE fiasco. The vast majority of secondary schools used the examination board AQA and most saw their results disastrously damaged by the mid-year shift in grade boundaries.
Because of the way English results are tied to the way a school’s performance is judged makes English and Maths results especially important. A problem in one of those subjects leads to a problem with the school’s results overall and, in turn, with a county’s.
It’s a sign of the madcap way in which results in our country are used not just to show student attainment, but also to judge lots of other things.
No wonder observers in many other countries – say, Finland or Denmark or Sweden – think it’s such an odd and obsessive way to measure our schools.
This, however, is the way it is, and as the brief furore about performance tables passes like a summer rainstorm, it is worth thinking about all the stuff the league tables won’t tell you – the quality of relationship between teachers and pupils, the extra-curricular music, drama and sport, the building of character, the joy and the fun.
Of course the jolt of performance tables will add new urgency to the need to improve. We know that. But we also need to celebrate how much great work is already taking place in so many of our schools. Let’s measure what we value and not just value what can be measured.
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Sixth Form joke:
A weatherman has reacted angrily to being sacked for always giving cold gloomy forecasts. No more mist & ice guy.
Geoff Barton
16 January 2013
6pm
Wednesday, 16 January 2013