SCHOOL CURRICULUM

Half of teenagers face a "bleak future" because they are failing to achieve basic standards in the three Rs. Despite rising GCSE performance, around 50% of 16-year-olds failed to achieve five passes at A* to C, including English and maths, the Government benchmark for secondary school achievement. David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said thousands of school-leavers are being consigned to the job scrapheap because grades are not improving quickly enough.

They will find it "almost impossible" to gain employment unless they return to school or training to brush up their skills. He said, "The world has changed dramatically. There are no longer opportunities for unskilled work in factories. We are a service economy and that requires skills including English and maths. Unless we improve the performance in schools, the future for those half leaving without qualifications is quite frankly pretty bleak."

Bosses are now choosing to hire workers from Poland and other countries because immigrants are better prepared for work than home-grown school-leavers. He added, "Employers are employing them in vast numbers because they have better skills than school-leavers and actually want to work. Employers want recruits with strong communication and team-working skills as well as mastery of the three Rs." (Source: Daily Mail, Aug/07)

The school curriculum is dominated by out-of-date Victorian values and should be reformed to give children the skills they need in the 21st century, according to leading academics. The old ways, such as rote-learning of facts in maths, science and history, are not enough to prepare them for the demands of contemporary life, said a group of experts at the Institute of Education, University of London. The national curriculum, introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government in the late 1980s, and largely retained under Tony Blair, was essentially the same as the grammar school version introduced in 1904 for a middle-class elite, they said.

The academics have contributed to a new book entitled 'Rethinking the School Curriculum', edited by Professor John White. They have called for radical reform of music, science, history, maths, religious education, art and PE lessons in response to the curriculum "aims" that the Government introduced in 2000. When Mrs Thatcher said former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker introduced the national curriculum, it had no stated purpose beyond "bland" assertions such as the need for children to be turned into adults, said Mr White.

Now schools are supposed to teach what the Government, via the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, has laid down with broader social and cultural aims in mind, he continued. Among these goals were that children should enjoy learning, that school should contribute to their sense of identity and their knowledge and understanding of their spiritual, moral and cultural heritage, be enterprising, and be equipped to be responsible citizens in modern, cultural Britain, he said. But the delivery of subjects such as art, music, history and science had not kept pace with these aims, Mr White claimed.

On the contrary, a kind of what he dubbed "school music" and "school art" had developed, distinct from what was going on in the real world. Science lessons were all about laboratory experiments and have been since 1900. Children learned next to nothing about the great scientific advances of the past 500 years and their impact on society, the professor said. Art lessons forced the whole class to draw an object like a sliced pepper according to precepts laid down for the craftsmen of the 1870s.

Music lessons were a "turn-off" because children could not see their relevance to what they listened to outside school. "There's an activity which has its own rules and rationale called school art which isn't at all in touch with the professional world of artists," he said. History was all about rote-learning of facts, figures and dates, based on the Victorian idea that the subject should be a kind of moral training in patriotism. Maths, meanwhile, was taught as if all children needed to know the intricacies of geometry and trigonometry, when what most people needed was a grasp of basic numeracy and some understanding of practical applications such as statistics.

The emphasis had to change "if we accept that what we want is education for a liberal democratic society", said Mr White. "The evidence is that the subjects are pretty good at producing specialists in their own fields. What they are not so good at is providing a general education for people who are not going to specialise in that subject," he added. The current Government deserved credit for saying the curriculum should have a social purpose, he went on. But he added, "What I'm concerned with is whether the new aims will affect the curriculum or simply be the mission statement at the front of the volume, as the attachment to Victorian values."

Schools are teaching children as young as four about same-sex relationships to comply with new gay rights laws. They are introducing youngsters to homosexuality using a series of story books in preparation for controversial regulations coming into force. Fourteen primary schools are already taking part in a £600,000 Government-funded study aimed at familiarising children with gay and lesbian relationships. The research team behind the project intends to post the findings on national websites to help all schools use the books in their literacy lessons.

It also revealed it is leading workshops for local councils across the country which are asking how to implement new laws banning discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation. The academics working on the study say showing children that homosexuality is part of everyday life helps reduce homophobic bullying in the playground. They claim schools need to ensure they are serving the needs of gay pupils and parents to comply with the Equality Act. However the scheme sparked alarm among Christian groups who fear the legislation could leave schools open to lawsuits if they refuse to use books with gay characters.

There are also claims that new gay rights laws will allow schools to be sued if they do not use homosexual texts but the Government insists that schools will still be able to decide what they teach. A spokesman said existing guidance already made clear schools must "meet the needs of all young people whatever their family circumstances or developing sexuality", and in a way that is "age appropriate". Perhaps the government should do something novel like teach the children to read, write and do arithmetic and leave the rest to the parents. (Source: Mail on Sunday, Mar/07)