Phoenix

Ooo don't - My daughter is a drama student at Stratford on Avon college - she had a rather long play to learn recently all in shakeapeare, she being younger, got it fairly easy, me - pah ! Tongue tied every time is was my piece to read for her and as for txt spk - I got one the other day from a grown up as old as me saying ''dats ok c u den den''

Whats that all about ?

Someone said earlier about the pressure put on our kids at such a young age to perform taking away the natural enthusiasm for learning - I'd agree with that.

esperanza

Do you mean we get to know which schools have poor teachers from inspections in the UK? No you don't! No inspection will single out teachers and report back saying Mrs Smith is rubbish. It doesn't work like that.
A school can get what seems like a 'poor' report for all manner of reasons - their intake is a big one. Take the teachers from the 'best' public schools in the country and give them a deprived inner-city bunch of kids and they would not look so good any more! Plus schools can get knocked down for lack of sports facilities, lack of school trips, lack of computers - none of which are anything to do with the ability of the teachers.

(Phew, and breathe! Can you tell I'm a teacher?! )

northernbird

Absolutely and on the reverse side of the coin you could have one shit teacher in a great school and that not be noticed either.

NKSK version 2

Sure, reports say a lot of things. But the key to determining how good the teachers are is the value added component. Don't ofsted reports and league tables have a value added component? (rhetorical question because I've just had a look at the BBC website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6250263.stm) which gives the top 5% of schools which add most value to a child's attainment - and if you have a look it isn't the Etons or the St Pauls - there are many tough inner city schools there)

Isn't this all about how good teachers are? Ergo - schools that add least value (or even devalue the performance of kids) surely must have siome shocking teachers (and shocking management systems)

You take kids from a deprived background who would under poor teaching get 1 GCSE and with good teachers and good schools they get 3 GCSEs? Still far below the national average but you know that good learning (and thereby good teaching) is going on.

League tables and OFSTED in the UK are a long way from a perfect system but they certainly inform parents better than anything I've seen over here.

esperanza

Value added scores give more reliable comparison, but they still mask an awful lot of unknowns which a lot of parents may not be aware of or consider.
At the end of the day, the overall school results are academic anyway as what matters is what is achieved by your child(ren) - and you can influence that an awful lot from home. Parental support, or lack thereof, can make or break a school. Also the results are always at least 5 years out of date - your 11 year old will not be going through the same process as the 17 year olds who sat last years GCSEs. There are so many flaws in the whole process that it becomes almost pointless, hence I think it is crazy that the UK system revolves around such spurious measurements & comparisons.

NKSK version 2

Indeed it is. The rights and wrongs of the use of a conjunction to start a sentence might be subjective and contextual but obvious spelling errors and poor sentence construction leads me to think that it is simply the result of a poor education. Excusing obvious poor grammar and spelling (and I'm not saying that you did) due to changing attitudes or fashion sounds like a cop out or a laissez faire approach to standards.

We do have to accept that writing changes with the times but the key is what is generally acceptable to the population as a whole. It may be acceptable to write "wot u want?" in an SMS to a fellow teenager but is it acceptable to the wider, general population on a sign in a shop?

The Scottish dialect example is interesting but again I would argue that it is a personal piece of work which is an art-form expressed however he wants to express it.
You could hardly argue the same point for someone employed by the government to write a bus stop place name or a caption writer at Sky News doing the ticker-tape (although shock horror, I did see a spelling mistake on the BBC ticker-tape the other week (must have been a bloody foreigner (probably an East European scrounger) that they've employed below market rates)).

NKSK version 2

Well, bearing in mind that education is a long process, there is necessarily going to be a time lag between what children were benchmarked at aged 11 and what they scored at aged 16. I'd disagree that the figures are at least 5 years out of date though.

Isn't that a bit like saying "I measured my plant today and found out that it has grown from a seed to a height of 50 cms in 3 years but the measurement is irrelevant because the figures are 3 years out of date"?

Gibbo

Scots is a language not a dialect.

fnord

Excellent post. Its always been my feeling that EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is underrated and IQ is overrated in the UK, especially at primary school level. Too many tests, too much much emphasis on the academic. My 3-year-old was given cursive writing homework I chucked it in the bin.

At university level, IQ should be the focus and the UK it is and its world class. However, for a person to succeed in life, being an academic alone isn't enough IMO. I have known a surprising number of British people who are certainly intelligent but have issues dealing with real life. For example, we had a lodger who has a PhD in computer science and has been unemployed and living with his parents for the last 7 years after trying work for a year.

Maybe I've just meet the wrong people!

To add to this perception, I used to work at a University in NZ (assistant lecturer), which is surely a place I'd be more likely to see an IQ/EQ imbalance. In fact I didn't find any significant imbalance except in one lecturer, who was originally from the UK and Oxford educated. I should add, for the sake of balance, that the HOD was very well rounded and also from the UK (Cambridge educated, though).

MartinLuther

Jade Goody

Hutch

Scottish Gaelic is the language. Scottish as spoken by most Scots and as written by Danny Boyle is a dialect of English.

grunty123

I'm no expert, and god knows I don't believe everything I read on Wikipedia, but it appears you are both right. I refer particularly to the second paragraph.

esperanza

Not sure I see the relevance of that comparison - the figures are out of date in terms of using them to judge a school's future ability to educate your child.
Eg the latest figures available now are 2006 exam results. Those 16 year olds were at school Sept 2001-July 2006. The education they got will not be the same as a child would get who attends the same school Sept 2007-July 2012. All kinds of changes may have taken place in the school as a whole, without even considering the huge importance of the individual child's background & parental support.
In addition, a school with a 30%A-C average at GCSE (not good but not outstandingly awful) could still have dozens of kids come out with all A&A* grades. The child does not get a certificate with the school average on, they get the results that they have achieved themselves, with their own hard work and support from their parents. A high-ability pupil might rarely even come in to contact with pupils at the other end of the spectrum because of being in setted lessons a lot of the time. What I'm trying to say, in a very longwinded way, is that you can't use average results & league tables (which are all hugely flawed anyway) to judge how an individual child might perform at that school in the next five years.

ShozInOz

As a former "top 8" University lecturer in Aus, my experience is that Australian school leavers really do lack (even quite basic) writing skills. If language were not so fundamental to thinking more generally, it would not be such a big deal. But even a good argument looks shoddy when expressed badly. My view was that Australian university students were around 2 years behind British university students in terms of expression. I have to say Australian students also seemed less willing to do a bit of hard work. BUT in other important aspects Australian school leavers were better equiped for life than British school leavers, particularly in terms of confidence, self image, 'citizenship', and other non-tangibles. I also had a feeling that the less able children were more included in Australian education compared to British education.

The main people affected by the acamemic disparity (assuming it does exist) are perhaps immigrants with academically bright children, who may find that their child is a year or two in front. But on the whole, I'd rather my daughter were educated in the Australian system, because on the whole I think Australian kids turn out to be happier, if less bright academically, and some part of this must be associated with schooling.

esperanza

I think if schools have to concentrate more on EITHER academic skills OR social/personal skills & development then they should focus on the latter.
It is much easier and more feasible for pupils to pick up academic knowledge outside of school or later in life if they have already been supported in becoming 'good citizens' - confident, happy people. Better that than schools that persist in being strongly academic and the kids turn out to have no social skills at all.
If it has to be one extreme or the other, then give me happy, helpful, teenagers who still have learning to do.