The New Education Secretary will be a disaster
I recently wrote that the relief I felt after Bridget Phillipson was sacked as Education Secretary might be short-lived with the appointment of Lucy Powell as her replacement.
I was right. The first few utterances of the new Minister have brought home my worst nightmares.
She has claimed the spelling test for primary school leavers is too ‘obscure’.
She then went on to suggest that she would consider changing the spelling, punctuation and grammar exams currently taken by Year 6 pupils.
The SPAG tests were introduced in 2013 and are compulsory for year six pupils at English state schools.
Since the changes in the curriculum under the coalition government in 2014, standards in England have risen. One reason is the testing requirements that were introduced. This is clear from PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings that compare the educational performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science across many countries, that the UK is doing much better due to a more traditional approach in the delivery of literacy and numeracy. It is to be noted that Scotland and Wales are performing poorly, and the highly progressive curriculums they have adopted are likely to blame. I’m concerned that under the new Labour Government, the progressive nonsense we see in the Scottish and Welsh curriculum will now invade the English curriculum.
We should be strengthening the requirements of testing and not weakening them.
Children need to learn grammar, syntax, punctuation, comprehension, spelling and vocabulary skills. Knowledge is as important as creativity, and one without the other will lead to weaker academic performance. You need literacy skills to be creative otherwise the resulting work will be substandard.
We already know that English usage is poor among the general population. This is backed up by the complaints of employers about employees who cannot write anything coherently.
Literacy and numeracy skills must be mastered in primary schools, as it is hard to correct the problems in the secondary system because children are studying around 12 subjects.
Powell has made other remarks that lead me to think standards will fall. There is a bizarre tendency on the left of politics to hold to the view that unless everyone can succeed, no one should. This is a perverse idea of equality where things are dumbed down.
In their minds, by lowering standards, they create more ‘equality’. But equality of failure is no good to anyone.
Powell’s opinion about high standards was revealed in this comment: “My daughter’s awaiting her own GCSE results. My daughter did 25 exams in five weeks, and it’s a lot, isn’t it? It’s a lot of pressure.”
Yes, it is a lot. It is a lot of pressure. There is nothing wrong in pursuing high standards for our children. Why dumb down? Why accept lower standards?
Middle-class children might get another go at exams later in life. For the poorest, this is their ONE chance. Let them be pushed to be the best they can be.
It is a pity that the new Labour government cannot recognise the fact that, due to the 2014 curriculum, many improvements have come about. They clearly don’t know what they’re doing.
ends