Imagine a school that puts its pupils first. The teachers in this school take account of the talents and needs of each pupil they teach, helping them to overcome educational barriers whilst also nurturing each pupil’s personal skills and interests.
In this school, those children who struggle with maths, writing or reading will receive appropriate help so that they can begin to enjoy these tasks and feel that they want to do them. These same children will have the opportunity to demonstrate, show off and feel proud of the things at which they excel, whether football, dancing, singing, drama, drawing, cooking, discovering nature, constructing elaborate models or, indeed, maths and English.
In the current system, those children who struggle with so-called ‘core’ subjects such as maths and English are taken out of the more ‘creative’ aspects of the curriculum so that they can do more of the stuff that makes them feel useless and miserable. All this is done in the name of government targets and school league tables: a system that recognises only statistical data and not the individuals behind the numbers.
Just imagine if David Beckham had been taken away from his football training to slog away at extra reading and writing exercises. Would he have been a better adult? Would he have been a better contributor to society? Would he have got a better job and earned more money?
It’s laughable when you think about it. Who decides that one person’s talents are more important than another’s? What is this obsession with everyone acquiring ‘above the national average’ for numeracy and literacy? (And you don’t need to be a mathematician to know what a load of rubbish that claim is!)
What a boring country this would be if everyone was good at the same things: if maths and English were to remain the only important elements of education. What would the country be like with only mediocre music, acting talent, restaurants, sporting ability and art?
There can be no doubt that numeracy and literacy skills are important, whatever one’s occupation. Both are essential for life tasks: understanding correspondence; making oneself understood; working out the best deal offered by supermarkets; or estimating how much carpet to order. But how many occupations require an in-depth knowledge of trigonometry and algebraic equations? Or the ability to write an essay in 45 minutes on a subject about which one knows nothing? Or the key themes in Romeo and Juliet? A few, yes, but not all, and anyone who struggles with maths or English is unlikely to pursue such an occupation.
There is another worrying side to this, however, that is often ignored. We have schools full of truly gifted and talented academic young people who, because of the system’s obsession with targets and league tables, are left languishing. At primary level, we have children who can exceed the highest expectations of that school. We have children whose maths, English and science understanding is beyond that for which their teachers have time to indulge. As long as there are many children struggling to reach the holy grail of level four, there will be potential level six and seven children left to their own devices and not getting that push, just because that would make no difference to the school’s ranking in the league tables.
Similarly in secondary schools we have GCSE students who are reaching those targets set for them when they were eleven years old, but which they could exceed with extra attention. Because these students are already above the magic ‘C’ grade, they are not deemed worthy of the effort. It’s not that teachers don’t want to help: many do and spend their own evenings and weekends – unpaid – working with such students. However, the pressures under which teachers are expected to work, and the amount of data handling and bureaucratic tasks they must now perform in order to hang on to their careers, makes this an impossibility in most cases.
In this present data-obsessed society, it really is too much to hope that we could have an education system that puts children first; that nurtures the musicians, athletes, sports people, artists, builders, inventors, chefs, gymnasts, dancers and singers on an equal footing with the more academic. We can only dream of a state education system that encourages young people to do what they are good at. Things they enjoy and that make them feel good about themselves. Things in which they can become experts.
But a school that does all this? Well, that would be a start.