Yes I trust my sons school to feed him what an odd comment. I see the menus and the types of food they are preparing (the mountain of fruit and vegetables they get delivered every week is massive) Plus my son regularly comes home and talks about the food he has eaten that day. The days of chips, burgers and fried foods are over (except on fish and chip Friday). I’d be quite happy to continue paying for school food after the free school dinners end.
I can’t remember the last time I washed up. Why? Because I have a dish washer. Washing up isn’t exactly an essential life skill and even if it was I wouldn’t expect the school to teach this skill.
I agree with you that cooking and food tech could be a bigger part of the school day but without extending the day what else do you feel should be dropped?
So you expect a visit to a religious building with meaningful conversation to happen within an hour. Interesting.
I don’t resent paying for wrap around Childcare at all. FYI it costs £9.00 (minus tax and NI as I can pay for these costs via Childcare vouchers) for 3 hours at our school and that includes food and snacks and all of the materials for the activities he does within those hours. It’s brilliant, it’s staffed by brilliant people and I have no problem in paying for it because it allows both my wife and I to work AND more importantly my son really enjoys it.
When did I say we need 2 parents working? But well done making that assumption. However lots of families do need two full time working parents just to be able to afford to live.
Why would extending school hours (whilst removing home work) reduce parent/child engagement? We engage just fine with our son, by limiting ‘screen time’ and planning out regular activities. We also take an active interest in his schooling and make sure we attend as many of the school activities as we can. I don’t think we have missed one in 18 months to be honest. Whether that’s one or both of us attending. Again I appreciate this is made possible by having very good employers who are flexible.
Teachers are an important part of a child’s life. I’d welcome a rethink of what they do, how much they do and how much we pay them. We should be creating an environment where teaching is a aspirational career choice and it encourages the best people and candidates into these roles.
Is the negative due to having more hours to do more of the same? Like I’ve said in previous comments I would like to see a fundamental redesign of how we teach and interact with children at school. More of the same simply wouldn’t work as a lot of teaching (in its current format) is boring.
Fundamentally teachers only have a given amount of energy, so if you teach for longer you have to pace yourself, just like you would if you were doing a 1000m race instead of a 100m race. If I taught for one hour less every day it would have a positive impact on both my ability to teach effectively and the ability of students to stay fully engaged.
Also, the more time teachers have to plan lessons during the afternoon, the more time they have to enjoy life outside of work, meaning they go to work energised. Far too many teachers live off adrenaline (or cake) and that can make it very difficult to be relaxed during lesson time.
The problem we have is that academics seem to like lobbying for more and more to be added to the curriculum so they have less and less to do once students reach university. To me this is counter productive, as I think you are eluding to. IMO there needs to be less on the curriculum to enable it to be taught in a more flexible and fun way. If you look at the maths and science curriculum the only way they can get through it all is by rattling through every topic at break neck speed.
The other thing is that we seem to have a system where courses change so frequently that thousands and thousands of teachers are writing the same new resources all over the country. I'm in my 5th year of teaching and I have had to re-write resources for 5 different courses (3xGCSE/2xA-Level). Now there are facebook groups and the likes for people who share what they do but you get the usual people who share loads of work and then those that just leach, so you get less and less people willing to share. To me there should be some investment made for a centralised body to write standardised resource packs that teachers can then modify to suit their locality or cohort of students. That may come across as a bit lazy but what would you rather teachers be doing, writing resources and planning lessons or planning fun/engaging lessons that use modified resources? When you have to do both something has to give so that you can actually get the work done in the limited time you have. It makes it harder to be creative when you have a ridiculous workload and so fun lessons are harder to come by. Happy teachers are usually fun teachers, and I'm sure you all know the opposite side to that coin!
As a side note, a lot of people love the sound of joined learning where you teach one project that includes English/maths/science/engineering all in one go, but to make that work takes a serious amount of work and preparation. The only time I see this work is when it's a one off or it's organised by an outside company who've had weeks or months to plan it. It's a good concept but to get it to work requires quite a lot of people to get together so it can be planned to work from all angles and with the way teaching currently functions, this is almost impossible. To make it work you would need to do something similar to what I mentioned in the last paragraph where you teach less content and have resources planned by an outside agency.
Finally, part of the reason we are where we are is because so many governments try to revolutionise (put their stamp on) education and it never gets the chance to evolve. In my mind the only way we will get it to work is by having a long period of stability where governments leave it alone and allow experts (and I put successful school leaders above raw academics in this sense) to develop something new. Something that has been tried and tested before being rolled out. And when it's rolled out, it should be in a fashion that allows teachers to adapt effectively and efficiently.
