Discuss the efficiency of the Whitehall project using the following questions as a guide

1. To what extent do you agree with the Whitehall official that the Performance Indicators will help English schools to come up to scratch?

2. Would you describe the Performance Indicators as impartial and objective?

3. Which factors, do you think, are more/less important in showing the quality of the country’s schools? Why?

4. Are there any points not mentioned in the article that you think should be included into the checklist?

2. Read the supplementary texts “Expulsions from Secondary Schools at All Times High”, “Challenge Churchill! ” and answer the following questions:

1. Do you find any similarities/differences between the problems that British and Belarusian teachers respectively face?

2. Do you agree with the statement that the process of education is an imprint of the society we live in? Give your reasons. What past experience (the school you went to, the books you read, the films you saw) makes you either support or disagree with this view?

3. What from your point makes a good school?

Sum up the problems that conventional schooling in our country faces and discuss the ways of their solution.

Reading two

Slimmed-down School Curriculum Aims to Free Quarter of Timetable for Pupils Aged 11 to 14

A slimmed-down curriculum for 11- to 14-year-olds in England, designed to liberate more time to help students either catch up on the basics or play to their strengths, was unveiled by the government yesterday.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says the new plan will free up 25 per cent of the school timetable.

Sir Winston Churchill – along with Hitler, Gandhi and Stalin – will no longer be compulsory, though William Wilberforce remains.

The new regime does include three new subjects and topics close to ministers’ hearts. Cooking is now an entitlement for all 11- to 14-year-olds, with some doubt expressed by unions as to whether some schools have the hardware to offer the subject to all.

Citizenship education will now include work on British values and national identity. An optional “economic well-being and financial capability” strand, to help pupils understand mortgages, personal finance and business, can be taught throughout secondary school as part of the renamed PHSE curriculum, now meant to refer to “personal, social, health and economic well-being”.

Lord Adonis, the school minister, said: “We asked the QCA to review the secondary curriculum because it did not have the flexibility and space for stretching students or for helping those who had fallen below the expected level in English and maths.

“By cutting back on some duplication and unnecessary detailed prescription in the curriculum, we will free up a significant proportion of the school day so teachers have more time to concentrate on what is vital.

Teachers can use this time to focus on pupils struggling with literacy and numeracy, as well as giving other students extra challenges to stimulate them.”

The changes, in line with the government’s personalized learning agenda, reflect anxieties both about the continuing “ tail of underachievement” in schools, with targets for tests at 14 still being missed and one in 20 youngsters leaving school at 16 with no GCSEs, and about whether the regular annual hoarding of
A-grades at GCSE by top pupils means they are not being pushed hard enough, early enough.

“The development of such a customized or child-centred approach to teaching and learning is not some new-age obsession with making students feel good, or any rejection of the importance of formal teaching, or a drift from a discipline based curriculum,” the QCA’s chief executive, Ken Boston, said yesterday. “It is the internationally proven research-based strategy for improving learning and raising attainment at individual, school and national level,” he said.

Most of what is being lost as a compulsory element remains as voluntary or optional, the QCA said.

The revised history curriculum includes both world wars and the Holocaust, the development of political power from the middle ages to the 20th century, the British empire and slavery; but not – automatically – the Wars of the Roses or Elizabeth I.

But Mr Boston was at pains to emphasise the curriculum’s practical, real-world theme.

Schools will be encouraged to lay on not just European languages but Mandarin, Arabic and Urdu. And they are being urged to offer quick-fire five-minute revision sessions in languages and mental arithmetic, already offered in some schools.

The plans received a mixed response from the teacher unions, partly because compulsory national tests at 11 and 14 remain in place.

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders said: “ This is certainly a move in the right direction. Now is the right time to introduce the more flexible 11-14 curriculum. The advantage of the new framework is that it puts control into the hands of schools, letting them decide when and how to introduce curriculum change.”

By Will Woodward

The Guardian, July 13, 2007

Language focus

1. Explain the meaning of the following words and phrases from the context in which they are used:

– a slimmed-down curriculum;

– to play to their (students’) strengths;

– mortgage;

– to stretch students;

– literacy and numeracy;

– to miss targets (for tests);

– “tail of underachievement”;

– child-centred approach;