Cameron: Hold failing pupils back.
David Cameron seems to be releasing proposal after proposal, all interspersed with hard nosed and uncompromising language that paints a picture of a UK dystopian novelists can only dream of: “Vomit and broken glass in town centres, graffiti and litter and urine in the stairways of blocks of flats, fly-tipping in country lanes, aggression and foul language on the train and bus.”
To manufacture moral panics such as these, through the application of inflammatory and provocative language, are a means of David Cameron now defining himself as a man tough on social disorder; a proper Conservative who the voters and backbenchers alike will laud across the land with applause.
There is one key problem with this, however – his policies are becoming centred about punishment, and blinkered punishment at that. Just as we have seen with his statements on youth crime, David Cameron has announced that children could be forced to retake their entire final year at primary school should their educational progress fail to meet standards.
The Conservatives are completely justified in drawing attention to how writing standards among seven-year-olds has fallen by a percentage point for the second year running. All the same it is equally important to recognise the 85 per cent of our childhood population who are successfully achieving the stringent targets as laid out by Labour education ministers, leaving primary schools with solid foundations in literacy and numeracy.
Clearly the system isn’t perfect, but it’s far from defective having made gains and improvements over the previous decade. Certainly, using figures released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, more must now be done to raise standards even further.
For Cameron the learning of children falling behind can be improved by holding them back an educational year. First and foremost this will alienate and estrange pupils through the erection of physical boundaries that will separate them from their friends and social relations as well as leaving them open to harassment by fellow pupils and creating a two-tier classroom society. The children will have their failure candidly inscribed upon their identity, potentially harbouring a loss of self-esteem and a sense of failure and disappointment.
Holding children back is not the answer as it fails, as with many of David Cameron’s proposals, to assess exactly why some children are slipping through the system. To keep them in the same class and run things through a second time does not consider whether the child’s ability to learn does not fit in with that of the curriculum.
It is now widely accepted that some people’s minds work better with the use of sounds, pictures and colours as a means of memorising and gaining knowledge. This was an issue broached on the Channel 4 programme The Unteachables whereby a teacher Phillip Beadle successfully managed to educate a class of ‘difficult’ children by taking into consideration their different intelligences.
Obviously and unfortunately not every state school has the time or funding to take on this level of individual commitment, but smaller changes can be made instead, especially within primary schools.
As a consequence of a state recognition toward the issue of different intelligences, and meeting much criticism at the time, the English primary school curriculum has included phonics since 2003, a process involving the learning of words and letters through sounds. Boys, known to have particular difficulty in learning through conventional means, are now catching up with girls’ achievements with their writing ability aged 11 having improved considerably in only five years.
Already changes are being made that are due to come into force this coming term that place a greater emphasis on mental arithmetic and the teaching of times tables a year earlier than previously. In addition, Sir Peter Williams, former master of St Catherine’s College Oxford, is said to now be undertaking a review of primary school maths, an area where underachievement has been most prevalent.
What we need are more solid and diverse building blocks for children’s education, not the blocking of children from it.
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3 Responses to “Cameron: Hold failing pupils back.”
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Bah. ok.
1) It is becoming increasingly hard to defend Mr Cameron.
2) In the Independent today a VERY interesting article (which is rare for the indy) all about David Cameron’s political advisors. And as any avid West Wing viewer knows, that is where the real power lies.So here is the jist:
Cameron’s main man has been Steve Hilton he is described as of the ‘Clinton/Blairite’ school. He engineered the green approach and the hug a hoodie business. But then Camo hired a second guy. Former News Of The World editor Andy Coulson. He is far more right wing and his advice started to become important to Cameron after Brown took office. Cameron’s poll numbers fell around this time - obviously in part because of the Brown bounce - but also perhaps because of the new approaches encouraged by Coulson.
But then disaster. The floods. Cameron was booked to go Africa to highlight their development policies. The floods came and Steve Hilton told Cameron to go to Africa anyway and Coulson told Cameron to stay and put his wellies on. Cameron went to Africa and got savaged in the press for it. So Cameron fell out of love with Hilton and has since become a keen follower of Coulson. And Coulson, as we have all seen, has pursued a right wing agenda, looking to rally the Tories base instead of fighting for the middle ground (WHERE ELECTIONS ARE WON!!!!).
So that’s the story. Cameron’s anger at finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time has led him to listen more to Coulson then his old ‘green’ buddy Hilton. Disaster.
However:
Having read all that in the Independent one question still bugs me. Cameron has been in the news lately with various policies attached to his name - scrap inheritance tax and hold back failing pupils etc etc. Yet none of these are ACTUALLY Tory policy. They are what a group of Tories, who have studied the problems for six months, think should happen.
Since these policy groups were established last year it is tricky to see how Cameron has decided to announce these policies now in order to rally the base. Surely he is subject to the whims of the policy groups, of course he can spin and emphasise certain bits of the reports, but he still doesn’t control their findings. Or does Cameron pick and choose when the policy groups report back? Who knows.
Anyway. I thought it was interesting.
If you’ve still got the newspaper lurking around, do you mind finding out the title of the article in question? I want to have a read of it myself and am wondering if there’s an online version (no doubt requiring a subscription of some kind).
A similar article of discussion around the Tory’s demotivation and lack of faith in Cameron who is, allegedly, positioning himself as the new Tony Blair who in himself is old hat. The Tories are said to be a political generation behind the race for dominance, again.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2883825.ece
This is actually a policy I agree with - rare for… well, Politics in general at the moment - though it doesn’t work on its own. A lot of Eastern governments with strong education systems implement this, and it’s extremely effective, but it only works if the family backing the child are dedicated and bothered.
And that’s something that’s almost impossible to touch, with any policy.