Skip to main content

Ebac

Or is it Ebacc? Jury still out. Sounds like an advanced qualification for a Yorkshireman, but the "English baccalaureate" league tables were published today. Mr Gove, the man in a hurry, wants more pupils to learn history, geography and languages, inlcluding Latin and Greek (just how many pupils will learn Latin, but not a modern language??).

Warwick Mansell writes a very clear piece in The Guardian today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jan/11/league-table-secondary-english-baccalaureate

I liked this in particular from Brian Lightman, general secretary of the ASCL (Association of School and College Leaders):

"The white paper says that tweaking things around the edges is not an option. And yet, here we are, with a curriculum review about to start and with no detailed overarching philosophy having been set out, tweaking things in performance tables. Schools are already changing their curriculums and taking reactive decisions, because of league table pressures rather than through a holistic view of their needs.
"This feels rushed. It's not the way to implement curricular change."
Munson says he is confused as to whether the government wants to force pupils to take certain subjects or not, while he also believes the selection of subjects for the English bac is backward-looking.
He says: "If the government believes modern languages should be compulsory, it should make them compulsory, instead of trying to introduce change by the back door like this.
"And, under the English baccalaureate, someone doing subjects such as Latin and ancient history is going to get recognition for it, while another doing ICT and engineering will not. That's a fine example of a modern, forward-thinking government, isn't it?"

This is rushed. It is also unfair to publish league tables based on something we knew nothing about before September 2010. Some school leaders will metaphorically raise two fingers to the system and allow their pupils to keep studying subjects appropriate to them. Others will be running around like Corporal Jones transforming their Key Stage 4 curriculum.

Now, maybe more children should be studying languages, geography and history. But the government needs to make a reasoned case for this rather than coming up with this wizard wheeze of using league tables to twist people's arms. What if we just didn't have league tables?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,