The long summer holidays will soon be upon us. But those endless warm afternoons of childhood may conceal a hidden menace – ’summer learning loss’.
Policy wonks have found that summer learning loss, an established side-effect of long school holidays, is particularly pronounced in some groups:
…children from the poorest backgrounds suffered most with ’summer learning loss’ because they were the least likely to practise reading and writing during the six-week break.
TheEducation Guardianhas reported on plans from think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) to shorten the long summer holidays. This should interest parents from any wealth bracket – without the right attention even the most expensively educated can suffer.
…A bold claim from The Daily Telegraph.
So have a look and (in a Geordie voice) you decide.
But as it’s all in a good cause – raising money for the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY) – I suggest you watch, enjoy, and check out the charity’s good work.
The video was made at Surrey’s Amesbury School, with the help of students, teachers, and parents.
Good show!
A test administered by researchers for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme found that:
Only four out of 10 teachers could work out that 2.1 per cent of 400 is 8.4. Only a third knew that 1.4 divided by 0.1 is 14, and less than 50 per cent could work out that a half divided by a quarter is 2.
As The Telegraph points out, ‘The material covered in the Dispatches test is contained in the primary national curriculum…’. And this chimes, rather sadly, with our long-held assertion that most adults have a maths age of 10 or 11. This is late Key Stage 2 – primary – maths, never mind GCSE.
In itself that might be worrying, but that we only ask a C-grade maths GCSE of new Primary school teachers implies that pedagogy and method is more important than knowledge and the confidence that comes from skill.
The God of Maths is a firm believer in the idea that you don’t have to know everything to teach excellently. Just as a good manager should always hope that he promotes his subordinates’ skills above his, a teacher should hope that his charges eventually over-take him. He just has to light the fire.
Despite this, something you cannot fake or rationalise away is a basic confidence and competence in a subject, and if significant numbers of primary teachers really are failing questions like these below, we ought to worry:
1.4 ÷ 0.1
2.1% of 400
ABCDE is a pentagon. Name all its diagonals
7/16 + 3/4
The mean height of a group of 4 people is 2 metres. One more person joins the group and then the mean height is 1.9 metres. What is the height of the new person?
This year’s primary school league tables have produced a flurry of news reports which the Whizz blog has pretty much ignored. But this piece in the UK’s Independent caught the God of Whizz’s eye:
We can’t argue with the sentiment, as it is one of the key principles that has informed Maths-Whizz development – if you do something you enjoy, you’ll do it well, even maths tutoring. It’s just up to the educator to help make the subject engaging. The Independent took a closer look at one of the country’s most ‘value added’ primary schools – Blue Bell Hill, in Nottingham – that seems to have taken this maxim to heart:
“We take them ice-skating or to a pantomime – or do dance and drama with them,” said headteacher Jo Bradley. It is not the usual recipe for ensuring good performance by 11-year-olds in national curriculum tests. But at a time when a growing number of schools are recording figures showing that more than half their pupils fail to reach the required standard in maths and English – 885 this year compared with 798 in 2008 – it is surprisingly effective.
