the primary head's blog

Imagine it: you are the person in charge of the country’s education. What an honour. What a privilege. You can be brave and make innovative decisions that will secure the future of our country’s children. You can take today’s problems and put in place real solutions that will ensure every stage of education is well thought out and builds upon the last.

I mean let’s just stick our hands into the education lucky dip tombola and pull out…1 in 5 pupils do not attain the national standard at Year 6.

Right, let’s get cracking.

OK, think, think, think. What could we do? I mean there’s lots we could do at a primary level (unburdening teachers from being responsible for fixing all of society’s ills and allow them to focus on teaching, carefully structuring work load expectations so teachers have the time to focus on the children, creating a progressive monitoring system to support school improvement, putting in place a sensible and logical curriculum created by valued educationalists, establishing fair and consistent ways of making checks on pupil progress and having simple assessment systems to use at the end of Year 6 that don’t pretend to show a linear line of progression from when a child has mastered walking upright to when they leave primary school through crudely calculated unrelated, unrealistic and meaningless progress measures) but what about after the horse has bolted? What could we do at secondary?

Well, how about having a detailed breakdown of a child’s strengths and needs passed on from primary to secondary that could help the secondary teachers map out the year 7 curriculum so that it catered for the real needs of each child? Or, how about a detailed analysis report from the test-setters that allow the secondary schools to focus on the areas of knowledge, understanding and application that, on the day of the test, the child fell down on and therefore could be the barriers to the child’s future progress? Or, how about seeing how the children get on in a secondary environment to start with and make adjustments as necessary as the year goes on – I mean, I guess the secondary teachers will know what the children need once they start teaching them? Would it also be useful to be forward thinking, as in focus on where the child needs to go and making sure they get there rather than getting bogged down in previous test scores?

I think some of that could really work. But then again, it does sound like a lot of hard work.

Sod it, let’s just test them again…

…and again…

…and again…

…and again…

…and again…

…and again…

…and again…

…it’s only education after all.