Primary school pupils miss all government targets

Aug 8, 2007

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“Four out of ten pupils could not read, write and add up properly by the time they left primary school this summer, the Government said yesterday.” Times Online

Really, it seems to me that it is about time we admitted that the school system doesn’t work.

I am not necessarily saying that schools could not work, I don’t believe that these figures quite prove that, just that the model we have for how primary schools should be is a dismal failure. Put simply, I am pretty much convinced that you could get a numeracy and literacy rate of 60% at age eleven whatever you did, school or no school. Shouldn’t everyone be clamouring for radical reform and a fundamental rethink? Why is this just accepted?

(Edited to add)

And. I prophecy another year of improved success rates at GCSE and A Level, thanks to the outstanding efforts of annually more dedicated teachers and annually more diligent pupils.

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Comments

8 responses to “Primary school pupils miss all government targets”

Sarah
8 August 2007
It’s ok, they will just change the targets instead.
Reply
Chris (portico)
8 August 2007
I think it’s accepted because people don’t care about population wide statistics. The individual and the family are king; broader society is irrelevant.
So for the 60% of parents with children meeting the ‘standard’ the system works, thank you very much, and good night
Therefore we have a problem for the minority (and we all know how much we care about minorities). I suspect a lot of the remaining 40%, sadly, don’t actually care a great deal about the standards their children meet. Therefore there is only a small number of parents who are probably dissatisfied with the outcome of the system.
It’s all rather depressing but a natural outcome of an insular individual / family focussed society.
Reply
Merry
8 August 2007
And there’s a bizarre point in itself, because my children might not meet those standards, even if they excell in all sorts of others, and i don’t care much either!
Seems to me that the stats point to a wide malaise which, like you say, don’t actually mean a great deal to the individual.
I thought that the remark that 1 in 5 eleven year old can’t read, write or do sums that equip them for life was utterly shocking and means much more to me than a 1% rise in standards. I’d be horrified if my children spent every day in school and couldn’t do that at the end of it, but it doesn’t worry me at all if they acquire those skills slowly, at their own pace and interwoven with all sorts of other interesting to them, useful to them and driven by them bits of learning.
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t-bird
8 August 2007
Actually the fact that we are still gauging education by the 3 Rs at all is vaguely worrying, there was an interview on the TV yesterday wehre the bloke basically said that the indicator for inteligence was literacy in today’s schools. it is indeed time for a re-think although I wouldn’t like to begin to suggest where you would start!
Reply
Gill
8 August 2007
It reminds me of Gatto’s point that literacy rates in some parts of America were nearly 100% – before the introduction of compulsory education, when they quickly slumped to their present 50-60%
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Tim
9 August 2007
It seems to me that it is altogether possible that they are now spending so much time training children to perform in these tests that they have no time left over for them to learn anything.
Chris, sadly, I think you have probably hit the nail on the head.
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Allie
9 August 2007
I’m not sure that you can take anything from the figures. What the tests measure is all rather superficial anyway.
What worries me is that what could be happening is that large numbers of children for whom the whole literacy thing is a mystery still(for example) are being sidelined so that teachers can spend time trying to push a ‘level three’ child to a ‘level four’ child.
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Tim
9 August 2007
I think the figures are very dubious. Everyone involved in their production has a vested interest in making them look as good as possible. The fact that they are appalling in spite of that probably means that the problem is much greater than the is being reported.
The gearing of the whole system toward good performance in tests will have precisely the effect you describe. And the question of whether pushing a child to get level four instead of level three is in its educational best interests will never be asked.
Reply