by -
My daughter’s Year Six homework last weekend included questions on subjunctive, past progressive, modal and a few other grammar terms that don’t make much sense.
She is a pupil in the small rural primary school in Cumbria where I am head. And yes, her teacher is right to prepare her for the Sats tests she will sit next term, but blimey, our national curriculum and bare assessment systems are full of useless rubbish.
We are not teaching skills for the future – we are teaching a Victorian curriculum when we are no longer in the Victorian age. I’m very tired of the challenges we face, and the things that are put on us, so I’m willing to speak out, but I don’t think we need to fight the system.
Take the exam system, for example. Year Two Satellites are now optional and have been replaced by baseline tests at the end of Reception. We dropped the Second Saturday as soon as possible because we do not agree with putting children through such severe testing conditions when they are six years old. They produce terrible reports that tell us nothing.
In Year One the Pronunciation Test is taking place, asking the children which words are difficult and which are real words – it’s weird. We have just over 100 children in the whole school, and we know the children better than a test result – as do all the teachers in every school.
In Year Four, the children have an online multiple test. Again, that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know; most children pass it. It’s not a paper exam though – I’m grateful to see some aspects of our education system catching up with the modern world.
Then there are Year Six Sats, which stand for standard assessment tests – but they’re not tests. They are an exam, one of which the children have to do sitting in a room under exam conditions: no demonstrations, no talking, no help and no use whatsoever – for the children or for us as a school.
As a principal I do not value them at all. The secondary schools around here do not particularly use them to stream students, and because we play them badly, the children and their families are not too interested either. But we start working on the layout around this time of year because, ultimately, we are accountable to the Government and Ofsted. By the time our children leave us in Year Six they are confident, articulate, independent children with an amazing range of digital skills, initiative and work ethic: far more important than whatever Sats call them.
I’m certainly not against tests – we constantly test the children in my school in different ways. But the national curriculum is very poorly designed, and completely unfit for purpose. And the education picture in this country is so bleak.
A third of children in this country, for example, fail Sats and GCSEs. Those exams test things they may never know, but are nonetheless a path to higher education.
We are not meeting the needs of businesses or our economy with what we are teaching in secondary schools. Someone has to connect the dots. There must be other ways, which may also involve exams. I have a child about to go to middle school who is the cutest and cutest child; I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t go and do GCSE, but they should also be given the opportunity to do more active learning. It’s not like it won’t be useful – if you can find a decent builder or electrician here in Cumbria, you’ve done really well – and they charge £50 an hour. They are earning more than me.
In my school, we enrich the national curriculum, which suits what we offer. We teach digital skills; we employ someone who comes in every week to teach computing – working with robots, different software and generational AI.
We embed digital skills and competence across the curriculum and children in Years Five and Six work with and train other students in the UK, other nations (such as Norway, where we were featured on national television) and training front of teachers (ITT). students. We do a lot of work outdoors, much of it connected to our farm and the polytunnels, and this year our Year Six children will submit their work to the Prince’s Trust, which has given us the opportunity to be the first primary school in the country . offer an Ofqual approved diploma.
Active learning promotes retention, so we focus on play-based learning. Our Year Five/Six classroom has comfortable chairs and nice oak tables – the children look after them and are more relaxed too. The work they do in the new environment has also improved. We wouldn’t expect adults to sit on hard plastic chairs for five to six hours a day – most couldn’t. Why on earth do we expect this from children?
Our last Ofsted inspection was in January 2023. We liked the inspectors; they could see that the children were making progress on things like digital skills, but they couldn’t fully report on that because it’s not part of the national curriculum. They loved our farm, and the animals, and how the children looked after it, but they couldn’t report on that either.
I’m certainly not in the “abolish Ofsted” camp – there needs to be some accountability – but I have no doubt that it needs dramatic reform. My small rural school is inspected with the same framework as my friend and colleagues school in Fleetwood, which has significant problems of deprivation and very different challenges ahead – the same framework should not be used to make arrangements explore various such.
The UK only spends 3.9 per cent of its GDP on education expenditure, and it shows. In the past year, we have advertised full-time positions for two teaching assistants and we have not applied for one. It’s not uncommon – the pay is terrible. Why would they come to work as a teaching assistant for 32 hours a week for minimum wage when they can get more than that and more hours at the local store?
We can’t get midday supervisors because they are paid even less. Teachers across the country are leaving in droves because the pressure is terrible and the workload is huge. The leaders are leaving as soon as they can and no one wants to replace them because the job is killing.
Recruitment targets have been sorely missed in recent years, especially last year. We are now in a situation where we cannot supply our schools, and the Government has buried its head in the sand: they are offering a 1.5 per cent pay rise this year. And yet where we are, an hour south of Scotland, the teachers earn around 15 percent more. How can you justify that?
In Singapore, they don’t have a separate education “department” as we know it, but anyone who works in the Singaporean equivalent must have worked in a school so they understand education. In Estonia, they start teaching digital skills in kindergarten. There are no formal exams in Finland in schools, but by the time they pass the Pisa tests at 16, they’re blowing us out of the water – and they’re having a much happier childhood. In the UK, seven million adults – one in six – are illiterate. Our education system has failed them. As a county, we are ashamed.
And you’re not talking about a minor issue here: it’s the entire education system that’s dying. 1.5 million children are continuously absent from school and around 150,000 are home schooled. It scares the crap out of me, the insane number of people who effectively say the education system isn’t right for them.
We have to sit back and ask what is going on. Why are we teaching children facts and figures, when they can Google something and get the answer instantly? Instead we should teach them the skills to find and refer to those facts and figures. We should be teaching about AI bias, and developing personalized pathways.
Of course the basic building blocks need to be taught, but to check the underlying? Can any adult do that? And did he keep them back? I do not argue that we should teach how to use the decimal system – it is vital for money; but who uses physical money anymore? We should be teaching kids about cryptocurrency, bitcoin, blockchain, data management, and decision making.
Actually, I despair. I’m at a great school that has won national awards and is called “Outstanding”, whatever that really means – it’s important to me. I have a 10 year old and a 12 year old and I wonder if I want them to be in mainstream education. I couldn’t give a monkey about Sats; I want children to leave my school confident and independent. I don’t think I’m normal. But is anything more important than relevant education?
As told to Lucy Denyer
Matthew Jessop is the headteacher of Crosthwaite Primary School
