Teachers being sent back to school to learn basic grammar and maths

[Bev]

Tens of thousands of teachers will be forced back to the classroom to study grammar and maths because they lack the knowledge to deliver tough new primary school lessons.

Ministers yesterday unveiled an overhaul of England’s ‘substandard’ primary curriculum in an attempt to reverse more than a decade of dumbing down.

English lessons will contain tougher grammar and spelling, while maths classes will put greater emphasis on times tables, fractions, mental arithmetic and long division.


But experts warn many teachers will need intensive retraining to deliver the new lessons.

A requirement on schools to teach a foreign language to all seven to 11-year-olds will entail even more extra lessons.


Under a proposed new curriculum for English, pupils as young as seven will be introduced to conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and subordinate clauses.

Eight-year-olds will study ‘fronted adverbials’ – clauses at the start of a sentence that modify a verb, for example: ‘Later that day, I heard the bad news.’


Nine-year-olds will learn about relative clauses and modal verbs such as can, could, shall and should, and ten-year-olds will cover the use of the subjunctive, the active and passive voice, as well as subject and object.

Ian McNeilly, director of the National Association for the Teaching of English, said: ‘The focus and emphasis on grammar in primary schools will mean that potentially a whole generation of teachers will need some quite intensive training.

‘It’s a big move from what some teachers have been used to.’

Many teachers may not have been taught grammar at school, having been educated in the 1970s and 1980s.

They will need tuition in grammar as well as how to teach it by 2014, when the new curriculum is intended to be introduced.

Mr McNeilly said: ‘Unless there’s a change in Government policy, they are not going to be paying for it. It’s going to be individual schools and maybe teachers that are going to have to pay.’

Similar problems are expected to arise in maths as several concepts taught at secondary school are being moved to primary level, such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions.


And some schools are ill-equipped to meet the demand to make study of a foreign language compulsory for seven-year-olds.

Kate Board, head of languages strategy at the education charity CfBT, said: ‘There’s quite a job to be done both increasing the confidence of teachers to teach languages but also to improve their linguistic competence.’


Details of changes to other primary subjects – and proposals for reform at secondary level – will follow later in the year.

As part of the reforms, the system of national curriculum levels – the eight-point scale that has been used to measure children’s progress since 1988 – will be scrapped, Education Secretary Michael Gove confirmed.

A new grading system will be drawn up for national curriculum tests at age 11, which is expected to mark out more clearly which pupils are falling behind.

In a letter outlining the reforms, Mr Gove said: ‘We will work closely with the teaching profession . . . to determine exactly how the new National Curriculum will be enhanced and assessed.’

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I don't believe this will reverse the "dumbing down" at all. As I've said before, when a large % of the class don't speak English, how are the English speaking kids meant to learn anything? Lessons are tailored to the most needy child in the class and when that child doesn't know what a pencil and paper are, or a chair and table, how are they meant to learn anything? How much time is wasted as the teacher attempts to teach basic words that British children have been brought up speaking?