Are our Young People getting the best education?
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“Seriously, what planet are you on?
Edit: wrong quote, meant to quote tim.”Hilarious joke there, thanks.
What ever happened to the so called Super Schools programme from 20 years ago. The mergers and redevelopment of three town centre schools was to “solve” problem issues in education.
From day one with huge overspend things have gradually gone down hill.There was a time when Cllr Phil Wynn would come on these threads and make comments yet now he is in power seat as Lead Member for Education he seems to have been silenced. Does free speech not exist amongst Council Members
The problems have been highlighted for a long time but no solution has been forthcoming from either schools , Council or parents. How do you solve the problem of low attainment? Children need to want to succeed, have high aspirations and support to achieve them. Attendance is the responsibility of the parents as is acceptable behaviour. Stimulating and interesting teaching is down to the school and funding the Council. So where does Wrexham fail ?
[quote quote=171170]The problems have been highlighted for a long time but no solution has been forthcoming from either schools , Council or parents. How do you solve the problem of low attainment? Children need to want to succeed, have high aspirations and support to achieve them. Attendance is the responsibility of the parents as is acceptable behaviour. Stimulating and interesting teaching is down to the school and funding the Council. So where does Wrexham fail ?[/quote]
Parents are responsible for the behaviour of their children at home and to make sure they get through the door into school – once that happens then the responsibility is passed over to the schools and the teachers. If this wasn’t the case then schools and teachers would have no right or permission to issue any kind of disciplinary measures (admittedly very tame versus back in the day) when behaviour becomes unacceptable. Ultimately the responsibility then falls back on the parents if the child is that disruptive or non cooperative or fails to attend and this is where failings lie.
If parents were actually competent enough to educate and teach values needed for the world of work then there’d be a much higher level of homeschooling and a greater success rate that way. It would become a trend. But this isn’t the case so we have to rely on schools to guide our kids to some level of academic success.
You have to ask what becomes the metric of acceptable levels of school performance – where people are happy with how the school is running?
I feel like there will always be an upper and lower level of children for whom the general path of education won’t be affected by the quality of the school they go to. Lower level children just won’t play ball regardless of how good the school is as they are just not interested and just won’t attend or cooperate. Equally there are ‘gifted’ (school’s words) children who would expect to succeed even in a really poor school because they have a high level of aptitude and ability for self study.
So you’d have to exclude these 2 types of extremes (or create completely different specialist pathways for them – how do you teach the unteachable? How do you accelerate the learning of the highly capable?). Then focus on the average pupil – how do you create a good educational environment for those who can be expected to attain say Grades D-B and then push their overall average scores higher by the end of their 5 years in Secondary School.
You also need to look at updating the curriculum themselves, which really struggle to stay relevant and up to date. Whilst it’s great that we are going to push through the next level of scientists etc… When are we just going to accept that not everyone is academic and instead of making them take Physics, Chemistry and Biology for 2 years at GCSE (a huge chunk of the learning time) – why not let them do some kind of skilled trade instead? You only need to look at how successful apprenticeships are at getting people to do a decent job. If you started people at 14 on an apprenticeship style pathway – we’d have a lot more skilled mechanics, plumbers, electricians etc… give them work placements. It’s the same with History and Geography – do pupils really need to spend a term on World War 2 or Tudor England at a GCSE level? Likewise who is going to need to explain Oxbow lakes or label Glaciers?
Nobody is saying knock these all on the head – it’s just outside of essential literacy and numeracy, which everyone should be doing – they need to broaden the curriculum and better match pupils to their actual real skills and interests and push them in a direction that might help them attain a job – rather than label them a failure because they can’t label a heart or memorise the periodic table when they want to do something completely different but useful like become a driving instructor or a chef.
Do you think that schools having to spend their budget on educating non-English speaking pupils (not Welsh) plays a part?
When I were a lad we had none of this pussy footing cr@p and mum and dad would help with homework and we had no computers. We also got caned if we were bad so it stopped you from being naughty There we no schools in special measures and we did ok. We got jobs, we bought houses.
We are all doomed because the future is snowflake!
A post on facebook appeared last night about the treatment of some students in Darland school. Not sure what has gone exactly but it is centred around a boy being restrained by a number of teachers and dragged back to school from Rossett Park. People are getting very uptight and angry about it!
To view the post and video uploaded there you need to be signed into facebook
Janey
[quote quote=171246]A post on facebook appeared last night about the treatment of some students in Darland school. Not sure what has gone exactly but it is centred around a boy being restrained by a number of teachers and dragged back to school from Rossett Park. People are getting very uptight and angry about it!
To view the post and video uploaded there you need to be signed into facebook
Janey[/quote]
It would be useful to know the background to the video really. Too much trial by social media these days.
Was unable to view the video or corresponding angry comments – so I am guessing quite sensibly it has been taken down.
Whilst it is great that anyone can create video evidence of apparent incidents that may need further intervention by the appropriate authorities on their mobile phones.
You have to question the integrity of those who instead of handing the video over to the police or the school who are equipped to deal with issues sensibly – they decide to slap it up on Facebook to generate some kind of outrage-storm. People take glee and delight in sharing such things and getting a reaction even though it can be very distressing for everyone concerned.
For starters there is a safeguarding issue that a child is involved and therefore won’t have given permission for their images to be shared publicly online. Duty of care by Facebook should have meant the video should have been taken down faster than they do. Also if there is some kind of matter for the police involved then they need to decide if it is a criminal matter or not. Not everyone’s friends, mums, dads, aunties and uncles and grandparents – the local window cleaner, the candlestick maker and nosy Jim to start pointing fingers.
There is a child’s future reputation at stake as well as perhaps some of the teachers. I’m certain that in some ways it’s highly distressful if an already bad situation is going on and the first thing people think to do is gawp and film like voyeurs.
It’s total pathetic bullshit – the very worst example of human nature – everyone loves a bit of someone else’s business even if it means zero consideration or respect for those involved.
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