Every now and then, children’s author Michael Rosen writes a snarky open letter to whomever happens to be education secretary of the day castigating them for his bugbear du jour. His latest offering makes the hyperbolic accusation that Justine Greening is “killing off painting, pottery, thinking … and fun.” What an evil witch!
What are the grounds for Michael’s claim? Well, firstly he identifies several potentially ill-thought out approaches to education currently mandated in many primary schools such as ability grouping within classes* and a state of semi-permanent testing which some misguided souls mistakenly believe to be the best way to educate children. I too abhor these practices but they are not in any way enforced by central government. Now, you could argue that in response to floor targets, hight stakes inspections and forced academisation that primary heads feel they have no choice except to set their weary but well-intentioned shoulders to this Sisyphean burden and roll their reluctant charges through test after mind-numbing test. You could argue that, but you could equally argue that such an approach was wilfully stupid and that any head teacher minded to behave in this way was an unimaginative brute unfit to educate children.
Or you could consider the fact that testing – call it quizzing if you’re squeamish – is not only fairer than any form of teacher assessment, it’s also a hugely useful and astonishingly well-researched pedagogical tool which staves off the natural human inclination to forget the greater part of anything that’s been learned.
Michael then makes the point that while primary teachers are engaged in all this testing ignoring they are neglecting the important things in life such as “reading for fun, painting, dancing, pottery, thinking, film-making, photography or going for a walk”. Again, this is entirely within the control of primary schools and is in fact something Ofsted specifically look at to ensure schools are providing a broad and balanced curriculum. But that’s not really the point, is it?
Does this “kill off” fun? No, of course not. Children are as free as they ever were to go for walks when they’re not at school. Children will, I’m sure, continue playing Pokemon Go, watching Netflix and whatever else they enjoy regardless of the whims of either Justine Greening or Michael Rosen. The narrative that school should be about going for walks and other activities considered wholesome is just more evidence of the rot of therapeutic education.
There’s a broader argument about what schools are actually for. To what extent should compulsory education be about going for a walk? As a parent, I don’t mind my children being given the opportunity to take part in non-academic pursuits, but it’s not why I want them to go to school. I’m rather hoping they’ll be given the background knowledge to be able to fully access an academic curriculum and have the best possible chance of being academically successful.
But, I get the sense that this is something Michael is less keen on. He asserts that the new GCSEs are “packed with more information than many children can understand or remember”. Really? What a low expectation! Of course it’s true that not all children will be capable of getting a top grade (when was it ever otherwise?) but are we really prepared fatalistically to accept that “many children” won’t be able to understand or remember much of the information examined at GCSE just on Michael’s say so? Some will, some won’t, but none will if we don’t give it a go. Then he just gets a but silly and makes the following remarks:
Again, as with the tests for 11-year-olds, it really doesn’t matter what much of this information is, so long as there’s a lot of it, enough of it is “traditional” – for example Wordsworth – and it can be broken down into small enough bits so that there are yes/no answers for it. This teaches students that life is made up of right or wrong facts; it’s not about empathy, invention, investigation, experiment, interpretation, cooperation or change. There is only “is”, never “might be”.
As anyone who’s actually looked at any of the new GCSE exams knows, this is patently false. There’s little credit given to students only able to offer yes/no answers and an ability to show an affinity for “empathy, invention, investigation, experiment, interpretation, cooperation or change” is rewarded across a range of subjects. What ‘might be’ is certainly prioritised over the narrow ‘is’ of Michael’s fevered imagination. (And the fact that Wordsworth is favoured over Michael’s oeuvre in the new English Literature specifications is at once a possible case of sour grapes and no bad thing.)
All this is a great shame because there’s a lot to genuinely be upset with the secretary of state about. Pretty much everyone is in firm agreement that expanding grammar schools is a woeful idea and the increasing lack of funding in FE is scandalous. But as long as Michael determinedly tilts at the windmills of his mind, I for one am mightily relieved that despite his national newspaper column he has little power to influence anything in education.
* As an aside, Michael makes the claim that children are regularly “tested to see if they are on the right tables” and that, “Mostly they are.” Apparently not, at least according to Dylan Wiliam who estimates that because of the limits of reliability and validity, “only half the students are placed where they ‘should’ be”.
David, have you ever had the experience of writing an article for a newspaper? You will know, I’m sure that there are people called ‘editors’ or ‘sub-editors’ who have the specific job of writing sensational headlines or ‘teases’ which may, or may not, express what is said in the piece. The writer of the article has no say or control over these. So when you suggest that I said something was being ‘killed off’, that wasn’t me. I said something different in the article. I said ‘squeezed down to taster sessions’. So the accusation that I made a ‘hyperbolic’ suggestion is not actually true.
I think it stands: your article is full of hyperbole
Neat: first make an inaccurate accusation, second, when this is pointed out, simply say that it was all junk anyway.
Yes, that’s *exactly* what I thought of your response 🙂
And as for the matter that you didn’t spot that someone who writes headlines is not the same as the person who writes the article, we can leave that to one side. What was it you used to teach?
Having checked with some contacts at the Guardian they confirm that the headline would have been a sub editor’s choice but suggested that someone of your clout could almost certainly have it changed if you complain.
Anyway, I’ll adjust the post in light of this.
I love the idea that you ‘checked’ about sub-editors. What? In case I was lying about it? As for whether I could change it – I don’t see it until the day it’s come out and been up for a while. The whole thing is designed and done. Of course, if it was libellous or some such I would plead with them to take it down. If it’s just inaccurate and a bit wally-ish, I assume that experienced readers like you twig that it’s not me who writes the headings.
I too thought Mr R was responsible for the article’s introduction, for it’s not really a headline or a title; it is the actual opening to the letter: ‘Dear Justine Greening: you’re killing off painting, pottery, thinking… and fun [space] Michael Rosen’. There isn’t another, different opening below. It doesn’t start again with Michael’s own ‘Dear…’ The subtitle to the side is ‘Letter from a curious parent’ and so it’s fair to assume that the opening is his. The word ‘killing’ is also characteristic of Michael’s comments on education (e.g. ‘drill, skill and kill’ amongst others) in which he seems to favour war-related language. To be fair, I think Sherlock Homes himself might have deduced that the opening line was penned by Michael!
If the opening words, arguably the most memorable of any article, don’t represent Michael’s opinion, whose opinion do they represent? Someone who has researched the subject well and who is confident that the comment is justified? I think the opening comment is damning of the very hard work, considerable creativity and successful balancing act that goes on in schools.
Hyperbole indeed. The hallmark of a Rosen response. But without it, Rosen articles just wouldn’t be as much fun!
A killing off or a squeezing down suggests that a greater abundance of painting, pottery, thinking and fun has gone before in better, golden days of yore. I think that’s unjustified.
Echoing Michael’s article (if you can echo 43 years in advance – perhaps paving the way would be better), writing in ‘The Language of Primary School Children’ in 1973, Connie Rosen, from observations in over 80 primary schools, said ‘Young children have a curiosity and an urge to find out about the world… All too often this curiosity is not sanctioned in school and their attention is directed instead to barren collections of information which give no hint of the excitement of discovery and doubt.’
That’s in 1973.
She goes on to say that she is ‘writing at a time when intelligent men are predicting or are recommending the abolition of schools asserting that by their very nature as institutions they are doomed to provide a context which is so chilling and repressive that better ways can be found for learning and growing up.’ She reiterates Hargreaves’ (1976) conclusions that ‘in secondary schools of the kind he investigated the majority of pupils and staff regarded life in them as a necessary evil’.
Connie Rosen, however, felt that with this extreme view society was ‘in danger of forgetting the really important achievements of our primary schools’ – she clearly felt that there was good practice in the new ‘open classrooms’ of the 1970s and much of her book is about finding and sharing it. I feel that Michael’s article and attitude is in danger of neglecting to acknowledge good practice, better practice, all over again. I think it’s hard to dispute that state schools are more encouraging of creativity and personal differences than ever before, even while they are tasked with raising academic standards. I, for one, as a mother of four in school right now, all at the same time, am glad.
Without doubt, my children’s school days, even with an increased focus on attainment, progression and standards (some might even say because of it), are much more fun and interesting than my own.
My children attend primary and secondary schools that do place an emphasis on achieving personal bests in tests and exams, but they normalise testing by making it frequent, quick and low stakes, and balance it all with reassurance that exams need not be terrifying. They present the Y6 tests as important but not high stakes for them – after all, their result doesn’t change which school they go to under our present system.
My parent friends feel that this approach is good preparation for tackling the tests of adult life.
Alongside all this, they ensure fun is very much part of every week – they actively plan for it – and that creativity is encouraged. If Connie Rosen could see life in my children’s schools – absolutely not ‘chilling’ or ‘repressive’ at all – I think she would be mightily relieved by how much we have moved on since the gloomier days of 1973.
How has a typical day changed? Well, around 33% of a school day is spent in registration, assembly, playtime, lunchtime and in PE so that’s a fair chunk to compare.
REGISTRATION: – Today, my children are expected to settle quickly to read with a bright and cheerful class library in primary and large school library at my daughter’s secondary. For me, in the 1970s and 80s, we mixed chattering with some reading but, by secondary, registration and some (not all) of my lessons looked and felt very like the registration and lessons in this Panorama documentary from 1977: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY7ThNFtf68. There’s little creativity or fun shown here, nor is there very much in the way of standards or expectations, and it’s not difficult to see why ‘pupils and staff regarded life in them as a necessary evil’.
ASSEMBLY: – Today, my children learn a frequently changing range of up-beat recorded songs – like the esteem-building:
“1-2-3, it’s good to be me
And I want the world to know it’s good to be me.
I’m a special person, and there’s only one of me…”
(My current favourite is autumnal – ‘Cauliflowers fluffy’. If you haven’t heard this, listen to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRQEQgyGAGA. Michael Rosen himself could have penned this enjoyably daft ditty!)
And their class assemblies, shown to parents, are deliberately planned to be all-inclusive, high fun-factor, creative experiences, far more so than during my school days where assemblies were at best boring (we sang a limited range of hymns from the same book for seven years in primary), and at worst terrifying – it wasn’t very unusual to see a child smacked for being naughty.
Smacking in the 1970s was not fun.
PLAYTIME & AFTER SCHOOL CLUBS: – I had an extra 15 minute break in the afternoon but my school day was longer. Today my children have 45 extra minutes outside school – in after school care if parents are working but they can attend after school clubs, like free football, free orienteering, free chess club or free running club (from a list of many more), just as my four children do each week in state secondary and primary schools.
We had netball practice if picked for the school’s A-C teams. Girls weren’t allowed to play football. We had free gymnastics but had to follow BAGA awards strictly, tested weekly in order to gain our badges. All clubs were suspended soon after I started secondary school due to teacher strikes and most never re-started.
PLAYTIME GAMES: – From what my children tell me, not much has changed: football, hopscotch, play based on stories, but no conkers! However, today they also have an amazing trim trail, paid for with money raised by PTA, and all manner of plastic playground games equipment that we never had.
PE: – Today my children cover all the sports I played but my daughters get to play football and my sons play netball – progress indeed! This week, our primary school has announced that PE will take place twice a week from September for all children, inside and outside. Last term my three primary children took part in ‘Run to Rio’ at school – running a mile around the field, every day from Easter to the end of term and that was in addition to PE. For them, there’s more sport than ever, not less.
So, registration, assembly, break and lunch time and PE = at least 33% of my children’s school day is officially planned to be fun, varied, musical, sporting and non-academic, and much more so than during my own school days.
It’s certain that the other 66% will also contain a considerable amount of pottery, painting, thinking and fun:
– art, technology and drama (I have four folders – yes, and pottery! – from last summer term to more than prove it)
– music (ALL year 4 children have class brass lessons and hire fully funded by our PTA)
– topic work (hence the playground games revolving around Romans and volcanoes!) in primary schools and practical elements of other subjects at secondary
– scheduled ‘fun’*
There absolutely is ‘invention, investigation, experiment, interpretation, cooperation and change’ going on in my children’s schools.
I think my children’s schools, typical of many, do a pretty good balancing act: trying to raise standards to challenge and support all with limited time and money while trying to make the school experience an enjoyable one. Attitudes, facilities, teaching and learning strategies and, crucially, expectations have moved on since Connie Rosen’s observations in 1973, since the Panorama documentary of 1977, since my own state schooling in the 1970s and 80s and since I started teaching in the 1990s. As warned by Connie Rosen in 1973, I think it’s vital that we don’t view the past rose-tinted, that we acknowledge what has advanced and remember to celebrate the really important achievements of our schools today.
*See below in a separate comment the example of last year’s calendar of fun from my children’s schools
Given that I knew my mother, why would you think that I would think the past was necessarily better. The notion of ‘squeezed out’ as a metaphor doesn’t include any temporal element. I meant squeezed out now. I’m also not sure why the evidence of one terrific school – and I know some, believe me – discounts my argument about a tendency for certain kinds of education being squeezed out. Do you think I might have been talking to teachers at any point over the last 10 years either in schools, at conferences, (and I’m a parent)? Do you think any of these might have expressed these concerns themselves? One incident among many: arriving at one secondary school, teacher rushes up to me and says, ‘For goodness sake, in one of your columns highlight how the eBacc is having the effect of squeezing out the arts subjects?’ I then did a post on Facebook asking teachers if this was the case and I received many replies saying that I was behind the wheel, it was happening now and cited examples of how it was happening.
In the primary sector, you’ll notice how I kept my article to 8 years and up. I’ve had countless letters from teachers and parents describing the ‘squeezing’ process. I know how teachers fight against this and do their best to create environments different from the ones implied by the questions on KS SATs papers and they also tell me how difficult it is to do so.
Hi Michael
I am under the impression whenever I read your articles that you feel that there is a constant worsening, tightening, ‘bleakening’ in education, that things were somehow rosier in the past. Perhaps I misunderstand what you try to say. I don’t remember you saying that things are on the whole much better these days, but then I haven’t read everything you’ve written – there’s a lot out there 🙂
Still, I think your mother’s advice holds: when intelligent men focus on what they think is bad in our schools, we should seek to remember what others think is good, and so I gave an opinion with evidence from one specific school and referenced similar feedback from friends and family at many.
Yes, I’m sure you talk to teachers a lot. I know you hear people’s concerns and you highlight them. I don’t think my comments discount yours, just balance them. I think it’s constructive to bring balance to an argument if there’s evidence to give. There is.
I, too, was thinking largely in terms of age 8 and above – my four children range from 8-13 and my examples relate mostly to them – although I did think a little about R-Y2. I commented (separately below – you may not have seen it) that I agree that starting GCSEs in Y9 restricts children’s access to the wider curriculum a year earlier than before – and I agree it’s not a good thing, though I’ve been surprised to hear many fellow parents disagree.
I’ve pointed out, for balance, that many subjects are affected, not just the arts. Children learn about geography for a year less than they used to if they don’t choose it for GCSE. The notion of fun, though, in this debate is a bit of a red herring. If children hate drama, they’ll be glad to drop it early (for some it really isn’t fun). If children love history, they’ll be sad to drop it on the basis that they prefer geography,say, and can’t do everything they want to do. It’s not squeezing down fun, it’s squeezing down the range of learning earlier, and that’s of arts as well as academic subjects.
The concern to raise – a concern I share – is whether or not schools that do this (not all do) are narrowing education too much too soon, not whether or not there’s less fun to be had as a consequence.
Because some secondary schools do narrow the curriculum a year early and because we have harder exams now in Y6 doesn’t mean that it’s accurate to say fun is being killed. There’s an awful lot of fun still going on and going strong in schools, more than in past decades by my reckoning.
Best wishes,
Jacqui
I’m not sure how ‘fun’ got into this debate. I supervise students doing projects on using literature in schools, – writing or reading it – and we work very clearly on how to evaluate it in terms other than fun. We draw up matrices on e.g. ‘analogising’, ‘schema-making’, ‘higher order thinking’, ‘creating an environment in which informed opinion can take place’, ‘what does ‘interpretation’ actually mean?’ ‘what is ‘engagement’?’ and so on.
As for whether things are getting better or worse: some things get better, some things get worse, in my book. However, it’s a fine day to be asking! Welcome to grammar schools, expansion of one-faith schools.
re your aside. I think you missed something called ‘irony’. When I said that the tests test whether the children are on the right tables that’s right in the sense of ‘right’.
I did indeed Michael – I assumed you were trying to communicate something factually correct. Never mind: always easier to blame the reader 🙂
Context might be of help. Do I think putting children on tables for streaming for tests is good? No. So why would I think there are ‘right’ tables? Hope that helps.
I assumed the context was that you wanted the best for children and therefore you’d prefer them being on the right tables rather than the wrong ones. Keep trying.
It comes most directly from the article’s memorable opening about ‘killing off… fun’ which it turns out seems to have been written by a mystery person and may not exactly be your view, although you do go on to talk about the squeezing of ‘reading for fun’ followed by what you seem to be suggesting are fun activities in everyone’s book: ‘painting, dancing, pottery, thinking… or going for a quick walk’ – containing the very words of the opening that you didn’t write. Fun seemed to be a main thread.
I have retold the story many times of arriving at a school, where the teacher said he was very glad to see me as the children on the ‘quick table’ were writing poems and the ones on the slow table were doing rhyming words. I have told it so often I didn’t think I needed to repeat it to indicate my reservations about ‘tables’. I’m very glad that Dylan has shown that children are often on the ‘wrong’ table. That’s actually part of what I’m trying to say.
As I concluded in the blog, there’s much we could agree on.
Well blow me, I read the conclusion as thank god Rosen has little influence in education. Given that I’m ‘only’ (inverted irony commas for you, David) a parent of some 37 years nonstop school parenting, then of course it’s ideal that people like me have no influence, eh? By the way, I also teach teachers on an MA in Children’s Literature and Action research into reading and writing, so I spend two terms hearing what they say about their teaching, their pupils’ reading and writing too. I fear for your sake that that’s too much influence.
I know, right?
Dear God, what does Michael Rosen teach about reading and writing? Creativity, as he should well know, is not spontaneous, it is the result of discipline and hard work.
I tell them all to run around naked to the sound of Stravinsky and then just emote and emote and emote. If not, to bemoan and bemoan and bemoan.
Apart from that, I should have pointed out that I don’t teach ‘creative writing’. I teach one term on critical theory in relation to children’s literature and the other I supervise students’ projects who carry out what is known in the US as ‘action research’. They set up a project to investigate whether a given process has positive or negative outcomes: kind of participant-observer anthropology in relation to a class or group of readers and/or writers.
Thanks for asking in such a generous and polite way, though.
He did call you God.
I have read the full article and it is, as usual, incredibly ill-informed, especially in relation to GCSEs. There are no, repeat no, questions in the English Language GCSE that require a yes or no response. Most of the questions require lengthy, sophisticated responses. As for the objection of Wordsworth. Is Michael Rosen, himself a poet, really objecting to (arguably) our most celebrated poet appearing on the national literary qualification. Too many long words for plebby kids to understand?? Jesus wept. Talk about the tyranny of low expectations.
1. Why assume I was only talking about English? As far as I can make out from my daughter’s work she has one or two other subjects too.
2. I have absolutely no objection to Wordsworth. Did I say that i did? I was giving a reason for why the Tories not only include it, but make him impossible to avoid. Why Wordsworth rather than Donne given this high privileged position? Gove never had to justify that decision ie why the Romantics rather than the Metaphysicals?
3. Who says that Wordsworth is ‘our most celebrated poet’? Who allotted him that status? And why?
4. Where have I ever been against the widest possible dissemination of ‘long words’? I present a free radio programme which is evangelical about the analysis of language available – when running – twice a week and on iPlayer, used by teachers, I gather whenever and wherever they want to. I’ve written two books for children, one on Shakespeare, one on Dickens. I have done an anthology of ‘Classic Poetry’ (including Wordsworth) published by Walker, for children. In three week’s time I have a book coming out on reading and writing poetry aimed at all ages but in particular 10-15 year olds which draws on classic as well as modern poetry.
5. Tell me about low expectations.
To be fair, your piece does clearly imply that GCSE English is broken down into yes / no answers. It also suggests that the content is of little worth: “…it really doesn’t matter what it is…”. I teach GCSE Literature. I am dedicated to doing so, and believe in the value of this work. We had good results this summer, and I am pleased that we taught students to construct developed, confident and thoughtful written answers to challenging and interesting questions, about worthwhile texts. It’s wearing when our efforts are dismissed and denigrated, particularly when this is published in national newspapers.
Thanks for picking me up on ‘it really doesn’t matter what it is’. This isn’t intended to mean that what is on offer is or is not of ‘worth’. It is intended to indicate that as far as the exam machine and its overriding purpose goes, the people who run it don’t really care about the content, so long as outwardly, it sounds as if something ‘traditional’ is going on. There is nothing intrinsically more worthwhile about Wordsworth than Heaney or Donne.
I agree that i implied that it was GCSE English that is about right/wrong answers when I meant to say that across the whole raft of GCSEs there is a large amount of right/wrong answers. In my haste and lack of care, I didn’t make that clear.
Again and again wherever I write or speak, I do my best to avoid putting any blame on teachers. But now, more than ever before teachers do not create curricula. What they teach and even how they teach is prescribed by people who are not or frequently were not teachers. The SATS GPS test was introduced by people who didn’t teach, designed by people who didn’t teach, and is implemented by people who didn’t teach.
I am sorry of you thought that I was denigrating your work. I wasn’t intending to. Next time, (as I have done in the past) I will run a crap-detecter over what I’ve written to check that I don’t.
Michael, you are a well-known and well-regarded writer, of creative and modern fiction, amongst other things.
You went through an education system which was, by modern standards, even Gove-ian standards, repressive: you passed the then-compulsory 11+, you had a standard grammar school education of the mid to late 1950s, you got into first a medical school and then Oxford. Progressive, child-centered education was still in the future, and yet, and yet, here you are. As also here are all the authors of your generation, products mostly of grammar schools of a fairly traditional mien and (horror!) private schools – David Hare, say, or David Edgar.
And of course there is a generation slightly older that you – Frayn, Bennett, Bradbury, Lodge – for whom a mixture of national service and post-war grammar schools had a similar effect.
One could easily advance the argument that (for white men, at least, let us not get too excited) the immediately post-war period was something of a golden age of educating English authors; certainly, there was no shortage of creative and innovative novels being published in the 1970s and 1980s by people from that background. If you read nothing but “English white men born 1945–1950” and only ever attended their plays, you’d have a reasonable canon to keep you busy for a few years.
So how did that creative impulse survive the education of the era? And is there any evidence that (leaving aside the massive elephants of race, class and gender) education today is doing any better? You received a traditional education of a fairly regressive hue and emerged as a creative writer. So did a lot of other people. You are claiming, what? That you’d have been a better writer with a different education? That other people would be writing too? What?
Your analysis of my education is perfect in all but one respect: a lack of understanding of what exactly it was in my background that enabled me to access that particular kind of education, while 75% of those around me at primary school, were excluded from it, and sent to Sec Mods, where most of them left school at 15?
I often ask that question (and have written a book largely about it, available from the usual outlets), and find that the main reason is that my parents, both coming from dirt poor backgrounds with zero formal education in it, were in the Communist Party. Apart from a tragically naive belief in the hope that utopia was being built in the Soviet Union, it gave them a persistent and powerful interest in, and passionate commitment to in a) questioning received wisdom especially in relation to the education we were being given b) constant jesuitical belief in dialogue c)passionate commitment to their children – sometimes overly so d) education from cradle to the grave e) seeing the world as a place full of ideas and resources. e) our autonomy as planners of our own lives e.g. going on trips, holidays, etc
To be honest, for both me and my brother, school was mostly a less interesting form of the education we got at home and on holidays.
So, be biographical by all means, play the man not the ball, if you want, but if you’re doing it, best to be holistic about it, I’d say.
Schools do present themselves as worlds full of ideas and resources. The teachers exude it. To suggest they don’t, to suggest they squeeze down or kill of creativity is just not true.Credit where credit is due.
Let’s go on a fun hunt and look at last year’s school ‘calendar of fun’ for my four children…
(These are events from my personal diary because I had to send a box in or produce a costume or be somewhere at a particular time. Many, many more took place in school (theatre/author visits, Tea with the Head, round the world days, etc) that I didn’t record. This is the tip of the creative iceberg. From what friends and family tell me, many schools provide similar experiences across the country. )
September:
Fun Run – a full day, whole school sporting activity
Mufti Day – for donating a used book to the school library
October:
Harvest festival preparations and event
School photos
Y4 whole class trombone lessons – weekly for the year (and funded by PTA)
After school running club – weekly
Hampton Court trip
November:
Roman and Celts day – dress up and full day of activities (baking, painting, fighting!)
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Cake bake day
Decorate a jam jar for the school fair in class time
Stargazing pop up astronomy event with visiting professor after school
December:
Junior Disco
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Christmas jumper day
Christmas party
School show (primary)
January:
Mufti day
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
February
Y4 whole class trombone lessons –
After school running club – weekly
School play (secondary)
Anglo Saxon workshop
Cake bake
Y3 special assembly
March
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Mufti day
Y4 special assembly
World book day celebrations – wear onesies to school
Music Dept performance at local theatre (secondary)
Country dancing programme in PE
April
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Y4 Residential Hindleap Warren (3 days)
Y3 Residential High Ashurst (2 days)
May
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Mufti Day
Y3 Henley Fort trip
Evacuation day re-enactment at church hall (dress up)
Mufti Day
Weekly swimming lesson for R-Y2
June
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Take shoe boxes to school for craft
Mufti day
Jam jar decorating in school for summer fair
After school running club – weekly
Weekly swimming lesson for R-Y2
District Sports Day – local schools’ athletics
Y3 School trip to Pizza Express
Brass concert for Y4 brass instruments
Flower show exhibits in class (poems about sheepdogs, paintings etc)
Weekly swimming lesson for R-Y2
July
Y4 whole class trombone lessons
After school running club – weekly
Activities Week (5 days of non-academic events – secondary school)
Y3 Making pizzas in school
KS2 sports day
Y7 prize giving – during school day
Lots of fun end of school activities
I do agree with Michael that choosing GCSEs in Year 8 to start in Year 9 deprives children of a year of access to the wider curriculum (and that includes academic subjects such as geography and computers as much as textiles or drama, whatever subjects a child does not go on to choose for GCSE). But it isn’t just the art subjects being squeezed by starting GCSEs in Year 9; access to the wider range of subjects is being squeezed earlier, the creative and the academic ones. For me, that is the problem.
As for fun. I don’t agree that the arts subjects are fun (suggesting more lightweight?) while the academic subjects are not fun and are harder and heavier. Pottery in its own rights is very technical and requires great skill. I wouldn’t have said it was necessarily ‘fun’ for most students. It might be very enjoyable for many – but mainly for those who are good at it, or, at least, for those who are pleased with the work they produce (of whatever standard). A sense of achievement, which is, perhaps, a more important goal to plan for in the school curriculum, comes from the satisfaction of producing something interesting, beautiful, meaningful, quirky, worthwhile. It might be fun to get your hands messy but some students don’t enjoy pottery at all or hate drama or loathe PE, just as some love nothing better than using a compass or a protractor and tackling an almost impossible maths problem. What’s one student’s fun is another student’s failing.
The issue is that if we are to choose subjects at all, how many is too few and how soon is too soon? Because having to choose subjects at all squeezes subjects not chosen out, creative or academic.
What’s one student’s fun is another student’s failing.
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Quite. Perhaps it’s the global monoculture wotdunnit, but the progressive education fun-lovin’ child stereotype is wrong and intriguing given that many of the people pushing it tend to be strong supporters of ‘inclusion’.
You missed hight
Many adults–most especially mothers–would like children to dwell forever in a cuddly universe where all giants are friendly and all wheelbarrows are painted with pretty flowers. In reality, growing up is not only inevitable, but children WANT to grow up. They respond enthusiastically to adults who teach them how the world works–they know that knowledge is power. Anyone who doubts this should visit Michaela Community School in Wembley and see how enthusiastically their pupils respond to a regime that includes testing as a normal part of teaching and learning. Tests are the equivalent of the pencil marks on the door jamb that tell you that you’re not a little kid any more.
Your first sentence is extraordinarily sexist and patronising towards mothers for someone who seeks to influence public policy. Shocking!
Ah, I see. Only feedback that agrees with David is published here…
Oh, not at all Lucy – if you look through the comments you’ll find very many dissenting views. This is, however, my blog. If someone gets in touch to just tick me off or is rude in some way I delete the comment. Life is just too short.
And just to be very clear, this comments section is only for on topic discussions. Any replies to this will also be deleted.
If you want to continue this particular conversation please feel free to email me: ddidau@gmail.com
This article seems like a very personal attack on Michael Rosen in order to humiliate him. The man’s not killed anyone.
Oh really, you two. Michael and David; Beatrice and Benedick.