Tom Strong writes:
So, going on holiday with your family is coming dangerously
close to being a crime, unless you do it when the state tells you to.
The Department for Education (DfE)
is now threatening to toughen up the law on parents taking their children out
of school during term time, in light of Jon Platt’s refreshing victory over the Isle of Wight Education
Authority.
If you want to know why the
government’s decision to tighten the law on term-time absence should be opposed
by parents and teachers everywhere, you need only look to the statement
provided by the DfE following Platt’s case:
‘The evidence is clear that every
extra day of school missed can affect a pupil’s chance of gaining good GCSEs,
which has a lasting effect on their life chances.’
‘Extra’ is a small word, but here
it belies a massive hypocrisy.
In using lesson time for purposes other than the
formal transmission of knowledge, Jon Platt was only following a practice that
has been endemic among school authorities for years.
The days Platt’s daughter
spent out of lessons were in addition to ones she had spent out of lessons
because of the state.
When it comes to the pillaging of
the timetable, it is not parents but the state that is the guilty party. Here
are five ways in which schools are the real lesson-snatchers.
1) Rubbish training
Every parent knows that there are
five days in the school year when they have to arrange childcare because school
is closed.
What is so important that it means children are kept out of school
for a week each year, denting their GCSE grades and life chances?
The
in-service training of teachers (‘Inset’).
In my own experience, this vital ‘training’ has
involved, among other things, banging a drum as part of a Latin American street
band; covering a wall with Post-It notes, bearing the definition of the word
resilient; and play-acting at being a difficult student.
And that’s before we
get to the obligatory safeguarding training about how to spot signs of child
abuse, which has consisted of the same Powerpoint, every year, in every school,
for the past eight years.
If we scrapped Inset days, every
child could go on holiday during term-time for a week each year without
incident.
2) Snake oil
Motivational speakers, Brain Gym
sessions, charity workers going on about cognitive behavioural therapy,
body-image consultants, yet more self-appointed safeguarding ‘experts’…
Schools
routinely open their doors to anyone who wants to grab whole chunks of the
school day to push their fashionable fancies on the young.
Added up over a year, it amounts to
days’ worth of fretting about personal problems.
Perhaps a fraction of it might
have been useful to a handful of children. Nevertheless, it is no substitute
for real subjects, which can truly expand students’ horizons.
3) Edutainment
For more than a generation, what
happens in lessons has been dictated by Ofsted, government and state-approved
education specialists.
Their watchword is engagement: unless your teaching
panders to low-attention spans and serves up non-challenging content, you’re
guilty of not catering to students’ individual needs and learning styles.
Hence
the plethora of poster-making, DVD-watching, faux-debating and role-playing
that passes for education in many schools.
This is all a profligate use of
time, which, as teacher-commentator Tom Bennett put it recently, is ‘lighting cigars with
fivers made out of children’s opportunities’.
So what if a student visits
Greece in term time? At least their inevitable poster of the Acropolis will be
better informed.
4) Support and
feedback
As a result of the DfE’s Every
Child Matters policy, and the statutory requirement that all pupils make
sufficient progress at school, today’s teachers are encouraged to do whatever
it takes to ensure students maximise their exam success.
In addition to
teaching and assessing a topic, a teacher is now expected to offer detailed
written feedback to each pupil, provide reams of evidence of work, offer
bespoke support, run revision classes and issue individualised targets.
There are two unintended
consequences of this new regime: first, it undermines students’ autonomy and
discourages them from taking responsibility for their intellectual fate; secondly,
it means wasting time revisiting old material again and again in a bid to
5) Behaviour
An hour a day is lost to poor
behaviour in today’s classrooms, according to Ofsted.
How
come? Are students today really naughtier than in previous generations? Of
course not. What has changed is the exercise of
adult authority in the classroom.
With government-inspired talk of a mental-health crisis among young people, schools have
developed an institutional paralysis when it comes to exerting authority over
disruptive pupils.
Bad behaviour is a result of low
self-esteem, say the state-sponsored psychologists, and we must therefore do
all we can to boost the morale of errant pupils.
So, rather than tell them off,
teachers are encouraged to pander to the offender with ‘learning conversations’
about their emotions and anger-management.
Meanwhile, the rest of the class is
forced to endure the pantomime while time burns.
No comments:
Post a Comment