Peers call for urgent overhaul of secondary education in England

Comments

• fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m sure they could do without the overhauls every few years, but this one’s important. Gove’s removal of “learning around a subject to understand a subject” and replacing it with “memorise and repeat a list of things you’re told are correct, without thinking about them” was bad for pupils, bad for teachers and bad for the future of the country.

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  • Jho@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m sure they could do without the overhauls every few years, but this one’s important.

    Agreed.

    Overhauling shouldn’t be taken lightly, it has a negative effect on the students who have to adapt to these changes suddenly (whilst sitting exams which can/will affect the future course of their lives).

    But this past decade of overhauls has absolutely put secondary education in a worse state than it was in before. This needs to be corrected.

    Pre-2013 secondary education already had a big issue with “just memorise it” in my experience of doing exams back then, to hear it’s only gotten even worse the past few years is very distressing.

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• Jho@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There definitely needs to be an overhaul just to undo the nonesense meddling that has happened during the last few years.

  I was doing my last exams just as the Tories started to mess with them back in 2013/14 and, from what I’ve heard from my younger cousins, nieces and nephews, they have just continued to make them worse than they were before.

  I thought I was hard done by during those early reforms but hearing what my younger family members had to do during their GCSEs and A-Levels… I do not envy them one bit.

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• autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is the best summary I could come up with:

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  Published on Tuesday, the report also calls for the English baccalaureate, introduced by the then education secretary Michael Gove as a school performance measure to encourage the uptake of a narrow suite of academic subjects, to be scrapped.

  The criticisms by the Lords education for 11- to 16-year-olds cross-party committee echo many of the concerns raised over the years by school leaders, academics and unions in response to the series of changes introduced by the Conservative government.

  The committee recommends instead that schools and teachers should be allowed to offer a more varied range of learning experiences, to help pupils develop a broader set of skills that will better meet the needs of a future digital and green economy.

  “Change to the education system for 11- to 16-year-olds is urgently needed, to address an overloaded curriculum, a disproportionate exam burden and declining opportunities to study creative and technical subjects.”

  However, without addressing real-terms school funding cuts and tackling the intense workload of staff, which drives our serious teacher recruitment and retention challenge, the changes needed have little chance of materialising.”

  Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, added: “Government policies have prioritised a set of academic GCSEs, and increased the time students spend sitting exams as well as the amount of information they must memorise.

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  The original article contains 702 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

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