England's young near bottom of basic skills league
Belligerence
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OECD finds 16-24-year-olds have literacy and numeracy levels no better than those of their grandparents' generation.
Ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy. England is behind Estonia, Australia, Poland and Slovakia in both areas.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-young-people-league-table-basic-skills-oecd
Yikes.
Ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy. England is behind Estonia, Australia, Poland and Slovakia in both areas.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/oct/08/england-young-people-league-table-basic-skills-oecd
Yikes.
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Working class youth are looked down on and by default put in the lowest sets where they are usually taught by new, inexperienced teachers totally disillusioned with teaching.
Schools seldom make any real attempt to teach these pupils, rather just putting up with them until they are 16 and they can be rid of them.
The British state education system has become so bad that parents who can afford it almost always choose private schools over state schools because they know that in private schools that standard of teaching is far better.
This is the result of decades of trendy teaching methods, militant teachers, soft governments, and non-interested parents.
Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Let's hear the teachers Unions try and excuse this.
The Finnish came top in this table. Their kids don't start school until they are seven and there are virtually no private schools.
I and many of my classmates came from working class families. Yet we were streamed to the highest sets and went on to do A-levels and go to University.
My son is ten years old. Next September he will go to secondary school, so my wife and I spent time over the last two years visiting the local state schools to look at and monitor progress in teaching standards and results. The teaching methods may be different from my day; there is far more emphasis on the pastoral side of school life now. But there are still equally high expectations of pupil performance and the staff's drive for success. Contrary to your view, those children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds or with sub-par educational standards at the end of Key Stage Two receive additional tutoring to bring them up to standard. So extra resources are allocated to them, not less.
This report doesn't look at the factors that may adversely affect the parent's ability to instill a degree of self discipline to their children, I wonder if , for example, it is common for both parents to work full time, because in England I don't really see it as a choice but a necessity.
Finland generally comes out top on these things because education is held in high regard there (and as someone has already stated, they start later, spend more money on it, carry out clear measures to entice top graduates and don't have a private system)
Pretty well th way it is .The buck lies with the parent - and if they're lazy /stupid /disinterested,then God help the child
A child needs teaching as much outside as inside the school gate .A good education is precious .Come on parents turn off that f-king tv.
More like constant government interference whilst refusing to pay for the cost of adequate education; combined with all the best teachers being creamed off by the private sector for the benefit of those who are prepared to pay for adequate education.
Fine.
So what's your analysis of our appalling performance then?
Maybe our kids are more obsessed with the internet and txting than in other countries, which could have a lot to do with it. There was some "progressive" educationalist on TV the other week saying that teaching handwriting and mental arithmetic was completely obsolete. Says it all, really.
They have a point. Most other European languages are phonetic and their spelling has evolved to mirror how the word is actually pronounced much more than English has.
This results in languages like Italian and Finnish being much easier to spell than English.
Finnish on the other hand is a highly phonetic language in which the words are spelt exactly how they sound.
I would say this goes a large way to improving literacy.
English spelling follows no logic and in most cases has to be learnt by heart.
So howcome English is mastered often to a far higher degree by European kids than our own .Its just pathetic ..as is your embarrassing reasoning .
Still doesn't explain how most kids 50 years ago could read, write and spell English by the time they hit Secondary School and modern kids can't.
It's because a lot of parents don't care about their kids' education. They didn't run through their spellings with them, and undermined the teachers when they corrected little Johnny's work.
This is obviously a massive generalisation, however, it tends to be parents, and not schools, that have the biggest impact on a child's language development.
I suspect that you would find that at least 80% of British Nobel Prize winners have been privately educated, while most European Nobel Prize winners have been educated at state schools.
I find it very hard to believe most Europeans speak better English than British people.
The idea that Europeans speak English better than native speakers is a myth, in reality many Europeans speak very basic English.