May 31 2007

Adjust your grammar

5 Responses to “Adjust your grammar”

1. # a-tracyon 31 May 2007 at 6:44 pm

   The one thing you must remember about grammar streams in every comprehensive is to stretch those children who don’t quite make it to the top stream in Year 7 and in order to move them up they need extra teaching and more time in the particular subject. For example a child could be grammar grade in English and humanities and a little under the pass mark in Maths, if this child is moved up in Year 9 they will have missed an awful lot of work from years 7 and 8 and will need additional classes in the way that drama/dance and sports teachers give time after school, however, will the teaching profession want to do this? Or at least offer extra homework which will need marking and advice.

   There is also the problem that the lowest stream can become truly hard work for teaching staff. I believe they prefer mixed ability classes so they don’t have to deal with so much disinterest in the one class. There needs to be some serious thinking about how best to benefit these children instead of all the talk about compulsory foreign languages for all and compulsory history for all and compulsory three sciences for all, just how many subjects do people think get covered in High Schools now - it’s usually nine with double English, double Science and Maths compulsory.

   This is where another problem crops up in the Comp/Grammar stream idea. Many of the best schools offer eleven subjects (two more GCSE’s to study) but the timetable for the whole comp. school can only support nine whether there is a grammar stream or not so children sometimes drop subjects like a modern foreign language or triple science that they would continue with if they could study 11.

2. # Brian Tomkinsonon 31 May 2007 at 7:33 pm

   I suppose it is too much to hope that Graham Brady will now replace Willetts as shadow education spokesman in the forthcoming re-shuffle! He certainly seems to have a better grasp of the subject and superior presentational skills to the hapless “two brains”.

3. # a-tracyon 31 May 2007 at 7:41 pm

   One more thought, one reason why mixed ability form groups in comprehensive schools are important is for social mixing of students in their community. If children are streamed too early and you create ‘bod’ streams for all topics there would be problems. I quite like the new co-ordinated curriculum subject for this reason, it is project based and can be done in teams in year 7 and 8 which is like a continuation if you like of history/geography/re and English from primary education, however the setting by ability does need to be done the year before subject choices are made to really begin to stretch the children academically, fill in the knowledge gaps ready for the GCSE years, and allow the children the opportunity to see for themselves their best subjects and where their interests lie without peer pressure holding them back.

4. # Nick Gullifordon 02 Jun 2007 at 4:53 am

   It is interesting that like other commentators on the excellent speech of David Willetts, you have not mentioned what he said about Variable Value Vouchers. David Willetts said, “……. there is another approach which appears to have great appeal because it trusts parents - introduce school vouchers. The idea is to empower parents to choose the good schools by giving them direct spending power. There is a subtle, and more attractive form of a voucher in which you adjust the spending power for the social background of the student so that children from a poor area have, if you like, a higher price on their head. If a parent’s request for their child to get to the school of their choice is written on the back of a cheque to pay for it then the letter is going to get far more attention. This is a powerful and important argument. We do need to go further towards clearer, more predictable per capita funding of pupils, aimed particularly at the poorer children being let down at the moment.” It is a pity when a radical idea is proposed - especially by a Conservative - that it is studiously ignored by the people who could be debating it. Variable Value Vouchers distributed on the basis of the ONS Neighbourhood Statistics showing areas of deprivation - which rank 32,000 neigbourhoods - could lead the way to all schools becoming independent.

   Reply: I did not comment on it because it has not been the centre of the argument about the speech. I am a long term advocate of making all schools independent, with the money following the pupil. We currently put a much higher price on the head of a school pupil in the inner cities than we do in the leafy shires, so we know the money is there to do this. Under my proposals you could continue

5. # Robert Hudsonon 04 Jun 2007 at 7:06 pm

   It will be hard to replicate the academically first-class teaching staff of one grammar school in the proposed grammar streams of the perhaps twenty comprehensive schools of a large city.

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