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Last weekend’s homework for my sixth-grade daughter included questions about the subjunctive, past progressive, modal verbs, and a few other silly, nearly useless grammatical terms.
He is a pupil at the small rural primary school in Cumbria that I head. And yes, his teacher is completely right to start preparing him for his Sats exams next term, but wow, our national curriculum and assessment systems are full of completely useless nonsense.
We don’t teach skills for the future; When we are no longer in the Victorian age, we teach the Victorian curriculum. I’m tired of the challenges we face and what’s being forced upon us, so I’m happy to speak out, but I don’t think we should fight the system.
Take the exam system for example. Second Year Sats are now optional and have been replaced by core tests at the end of Reception. We have abandoned Second Year Saturday exams as soon as possible because we do not accept subjecting children to such strict testing conditions when they are six years old. They produce pathetic reports that tell us nothing.
In Year One there is the Phonics Screening Check test, which asks children what is nonsense and what is real; This is so weird. We only have just over 100 children in the whole school, and like all teachers in all schools, we know the children better than a test result.
In fourth grade, children take multiplication tests online. Again, this doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know; most kids pass this. However, this is not a paper exam; I am grateful to see some aspects of our education system catching up with the modern world.
There are also Sixth Year Sats, which are standardized assessment tests; But these are not tests. This is one of the few exams that kids have to complete sitting in a room under exam conditions: no pretension, no talking, no help, and it does nothing for the kids or for us as a school.
As a school principal, I don’t value them at all. Secondary schools here don’t use them specifically to keep students flowing, and the kids and their families don’t pay much attention either because we look down on them. But around this time of year we start working on the format because ultimately we are held accountable by the Government and Ofsted. By the time our Sixth Year children leave us they have become confident, expressive, independent children with a wide range of digital skills, initiative and work ethic: they are much more important than what Sats have labeled them as.
I’m certainly not against testing; At my school we are constantly testing kids in different ways. However, the national curriculum is unfortunately overcrowded and completely unfit for purpose. And the picture of education in this country is very bleak.
For example, a third of children in this country fail Sats and GCSEs. These exams test things they may never need to know, but are still a path to higher education.
We are not meeting the needs of businesses or our economy with what we teach in secondary schools. Someone needs to connect the dots. There needs to be alternative pathways, which may include exams. I have a child who is about to go to secondary school, he is a very resourceful and intelligent child; I’m not advocating that they shouldn’t go and do GCSEs, but they should also be given the opportunity to learn more actively. It’s not like they wouldn’t be helpful – if you can find a decent builder or electrician in Cumbria you’ve done a really good job – and they charge £50 per hour. They earn more than me.
At my school, we enrich the national curriculum to match what we offer. We teach digital skills; We hire someone who comes every week to teach us how to work with robots, various software, and generative AI.
We are embedding digital skills and competencies across the curriculum, and children in Years Five and Six work with and teach other students in the UK, other countries (such as Norway, where we feature on national television) and in initial teacher training (ITT). students. We do a lot of outdoor work, much of which is linked to our farm and polytunnels, and this year our Sixth Form children will be presenting their work to the Princes’ Trust, who have given us permission to become the first primary school in the country. We offer an Ofqual accredited diploma.
Active learning encourages retention, so we focus on play-based learning. Our Fifth/Sixth Form classrooms have comfortable chairs and beautiful oak tables; The children look at them and they are calmer too. The work they produced also flourished in the new environment. We wouldn’t expect adults to sit in hard plastic chairs for five to six hours a day; most could not do this. Why do we expect this from children?
Our last Ofsted inspection was in January 2023. The inspectors loved us; They could see that children were doing well in things like digital skills, but they couldn’t fully report this because it wasn’t part of the national curriculum. They loved the farm we had, the animals, and how the kids took care of it, but they couldn’t report that either.
I am certainly not in favor of “abolishing Ofsted” – there must be some accountability – but there is no doubt in my mind that dramatic reform is needed. My small, rural school is regulated under the same framework as my friend and colleagues’ school in Fleetwood; there are significant problems of deprivation here, and challenges that are very different from those we face; It should not be possible to use the same framework for this school. Check out different settings like this.
The UK spends just 3.9 per cent of its GDP on education, and it shows. Last year, we advertised full-time jobs for two teaching assistants and didn’t get a single person to apply. It’s not unusual; salaries are terrible. Why would they come in and work 32 hours a week for minimum wage as a teacher’s assistant when they could get more than that and more hours at the local shop?
We can’t hire lunch monitors because they are paid less. Teachers up and down the country are leaving in droves because the pressure is terrible and the workload is too great. Leaders leave as soon as they can and no one wants to replace them because it’s a job killer.
Hiring targets have been missed significantly over the last few years, especially last year. We are at a stage where we can no longer staff our schools and the Government has buried its head in the sand: They are proposing a 1.5 per cent increase in salaries this year. But where we are an hour south of Scotland, teachers earn around 15 per cent more. How can you justify this?
There are no special education “departments” as we know them in Singapore, but anyone working equivalently in Singapore must have worked in a school to understand education. In Estonia, they start teaching digital skills in kindergarten. There are no official exams in schools in Finland, but when they take the Pisa exams at the age of 16, they blow us out of the water and we have a much happier childhood. Seven million adults (one in six) in the UK are illiterate. They failed because of our education system. As a district, we are ashamed.
And here you are not talking about a small problem: the entire education system leading to death. There are 1.5 million children who are not regularly attending school and approximately 150,000 children who are home-schooled. I am frightened by the incredible number of people who say that the education system is not suitable for them.
We must sit back and question what is happening. Why do we teach kids facts and figures when they can Google something and get an answer instantly? Instead, we should teach them the skills to find and reference these facts and figures. We need to teach AI bias and develop personalized pathways.
Of course the basic building blocks need to be taught, but checking the subjunctive mood? Can any adult do this? So did that hold them back? I’m not advocating that we should teach how to use the decimal system; This is vital for money; But who uses physical money anymore? We need to teach kids about cryptocurrency, bitcoin, blockchain, data management and decision making.
I’m truly despairing. I’m the principal of a wonderful school that has won national awards and been rated “Outstanding”, whatever that really means, it doesn’t matter to me. I have a 10 year old and a 12 year old and I’m wondering if I want them to continue mainstream education. I couldn’t even give a monkey about Sats; I want children to leave my school confident and independent. I don’t think I’m the norm. But is there anything more important than relevant education?
As told to Lucy Denyer
Matthew Jessop is headteacher of Crosthwaite Primary School