The reports that children's reading and writing skills, and their mathematical skills are lower now at age 8 than they were in 2000 raises more than the question of what is to be done for such a large tranche of the school population not meeting even the most basic levels after 3 years in school.
Never mind the waste for those who don't make it, what about the children who are meeting and over-meeting the required standards? Classes are still much larger than in comparable European schools, so there are whole groups of children in any class who are being undertaught or failing to thrive , or just not doing a lot.
There are myriad reasons why a class group should include every child, and it is in managing such complexly diverse sets of skills and aptitudes and nourishing every child's abilities that the worth of a teacher is displayed. But that is only possible when classes are smaller than the low 20s that have been reached in too few schools; more than 30 is not uncommon.
The solution to low achievement in schools was staring the state sector in the face: small classes, really small. The money that could have provided this has been spent otherwise; and the years, all 10 of them, have been long enough to waste the prospects of not one but two generations of primary school children.
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Speaking as a teacher, I'd say that small class sizes are made necessary by the undermining of authority. Within many schools, order of a sort is maintained with the help of classroom assistants, learning mentors etc. Teachers spend much time disguising the problems because they fear being blamed for them.
I don't suppose it's possible to quantify the economic cost of similar inefficiency throughout society, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist - I believe it to be enormous. Look at all the helpers, advisers, lawyers - remember Rumpole of the Bailey on how the Timsons have kept him (and the rest of the system) in claret, and multiply that a million-fold.
If every order is subject to question and defiance, the army is at a standstill; and so is our society, which is spending our collective inherited wealth on avoiding dealing with the root of social problems. "Slackness", as they term it in the West Indies, is incredibly expensive.
"Slackness", as they term it in the West Indies, is incredibly expensive.
And it is noticeable, S, that many families with West Indies connexion are sending the children there to receive their education; as are Italians, Greeks, Cypriots, Poles, to their 'other countries' and not just for the acquisition of the children's other culture.
The Italian state school system has a network of schools in areas of heavy Italian settlement(often going back to the beginning of the last century). There the children pursue the standard curriculum, and squeeze it into a couple of evening sessions and saturday mornings. They take the exams and when they reenter the national system at home go into the appropriate year group (provided the exams have been passed, failure means repeating the year even on home ground).
This service was much disliked by the local primary ours attended because it was supposed to be causing the children to fall behind ; so while giant classes of farting about took up from 9 to 3.30, tiny classes taught them literature, grammar, history, geography, history of art, mathematics, English (they learned more English grammar there than they ever did in the primary school) and what can be called rhetorical skills, poems learned by heart and delivered to the class, presentations of individual work etc.
Slackness avoided.
I spent my recent holiday with a youngish but retired schoolmaster. He seemed to balk at the idea of learning things by rote as though this were a form of child abuse.
Slackness is symptomatic of dual income/single parent lifestyles - either way the parents are disinclined to do a hard day at work and then spend time reading with the children. The tendancy so often seems to be to overcompensate on material things rather than give time.
Rote learning: Mnemosyne was the mother of all the Muses.
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