For the past 12 months or so, we have been in uncharted waters with many schools making decisions on the fly on how to best run their schools and the best way to provide an education for their children. There is already talk of how the children will 'catch up' and the proposed 'summer school', 'extra tuition, and dare I say it - 'longer school days'.
Firstly, I wanted to point out that the children don't need to catch up. Who are they catching up? All children across the UK are in the same position so there is no-one I can see they have to catch up. Of course, what people are referring to us the curriculum in schools. The curriculum, which has been a bug bearer of mine for years, is already over flowing with objectives in every subject and had become something of a 'tick box' for many educators to prove how much they can 'teach', but have the children really understood it?
As far as I can see, speaking to colleagues and my own professional judgment, children don't retain as much knowledge as they need to in order to move on to the next small step. Children have cognitive overload when too much information is thrown at them bu an over-hyped adult rushing to get to the next objective to prove how good a teacher they are. Surely we have got this wrong and will continue to get it wrong unless we change, and now is as good a time as any.
We've already seen organisations such as NCETM provide a recovery curriculum, or as they call is 'Ready-To Progress' documentation. This document outlines the key objectives for each year group so that the children can build on their prior knowledge thus deepening their understanding. My argument is, if this works, and I believe it does, then why isn't this something we do anyway. i believe that by teaching key objectives and cutting down objectives lower down the schools, for example in KS1, gives the children time to digest the objectives and really understand the,. This, I believe, will have a greater impact as the children progress through the school, thus covering more deeper.
Now of course, this isn't just in Maths, but I believe that we have over complicated the English curriculum so much that children are now unable to grasp the basics and 'mess' around with language in writing to engage the reader. We are so consumed in getting in the latest 'trick' to make the writing fir the writing examples given to us by the government. Again, having a tick-box curriculum takes away the writers creative ability, to make sure the children 'achieve' the standard grade. If we are not careful, we will lose the next generation of writers.
In conclusion, the way forward seems quite simple to me. Reduce the number of objectives in each subject thus giving greatest gift to educators - time. Time to teach, time to reflect, time to discover and time to deepen the understanding.
