Please Slow down, the Kids are Exhausted!
Why teaching feels so rushed
In the movie National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Chevy Chase’s character tries to drag his family around every site in Paris in a couple of days. As they enter the Louvre, his wife yells at him:
“Clark! Will you please slow down, the kids are exhausted!”
But Clark Griswold won’t slow down. “Honey, it closes in 15 minutes. There are 100,000 works of art to see, come on!”
Then his daughter, Audrey, collapses.
The overwhelming impression I had as a primary school teacher in England for 12 years was just how much I felt like Clark. We were always in such an incredible rush. I was dragging my classes through a whirlwind of lessons, showing them things that were important but which they never had time to internalise, let alone appreciate.
The maths curriculum seemed especially bloated. Despite being given the most frequent and best time-slots on the timetable, there never seemed to be enough time for all the maths we needed to teach.
The only thing that’s given as much attention as maths in primary schools is English, which is split into reading, spelling and grammar lessons. The reading lessons you do in the later stages of primary school are not really about reading, however; they’re about completing long comprehension tests in an extremely limited amount of time. To succeed you need to know exactly how much to write to answer a three mark question in the paper on figurative language and the inferences that can be drawn from the author’s use of metaphor. Children must also complete grammar tests on the correct use of the subjunctive and the appropriate punctuation for fronted adverbials.
Remember, the oldest of these children are 11. They still have five to seven more years of school to go before the majority of them move on to higher education but, for some reason, they’ve already been taught (but not necessarily learned) every bit of maths and English most of them will need as an adult.
As a parent, I couldn’t believe how quickly children seem to grow up. As a teacher, it felt like they were never growing up quickly enough. If it all feels rushed to us as teachers, what must it feel like for children?
If you’ve ever found yourself falling behind on a hike or a run you might begin to understand how demoralising and exhausting it is for children who aren’t ‘keeping up’ with the rest of the class. Those who managed to keep to the pace — the ones at the front — get to enjoy the view and catch their breath but every time you think you are about to close the gap with them, you realise they’ve already moved on. And, as always happens when you rush too quickly, you end up leaving people behind.
It felt like an almost sacrilegious thought in school but I came to believe there are some children, quite a lot in fact, whose brains just aren’t ready for all this information yet. As I said in an earlier article, some babies can walk at nine months whilst others aren’t ready until they’re 18 months but they all do it eventually. In the same way, a sizeable minority of children just aren’t yet ready to learn every aspect of the curriculum that is expected of them by the age of 11.
It doesn’t seem to matter how many maths lessons you give them or how many times you take them out of drama or art to do some extra maths classes, they just don’t seem ready to really understand some of the advanced mathematical problem solving expected of them. Not yet. Give them a year or two — or maybe just a few months longer — and they’ll probably get it.
I’m not talking here about children with Special Educational Needs, although many of these children will end up being labelled as such. And these children aren’t work-shy, although the constant realisation that they have fallen behind may have affected their attitude. These children will all be able to learn what we are asking them to learn, they just need to develop a bit more first. There isn’t anything wrong with them. They’ll get it eventually. We just have to wait for them to catch up. But, of course, we can’t wait can we?
The education train is leaving the station and they have to get on it. They are off to high school now and, once there, they are going to find it even harder to keep up with their peers. They may start to believe they’re no good at maths or reading or writing and never will be. Very often they stop trying and start messing about. They end up hating school and hating learning. We’ve succeeded only in putting them off the very things we spent so long teaching them.
So how did we get into this mess? The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests have a lot to do with it. These tests in maths, reading and science rank nations according to the results of a sample population of different nations’ 15 year-olds. They are widely criticised by education experts around the world but that doesn’t stop the planet’s politicians getting completely obsessed with them.
It’s because politicians want their nations to rank higher in these international league tables — and because promising to improve basic literacy and numeracy is always a vote winner — that we teach so much English and maths to the exclusion of everything else.
The assumption is that if we cram more maths and English into the children at a younger age, they will surely do better when it comes to these tests at 15. So we plan curricula that teach seven-year-olds the things we used to think they didn’t need to learn until they were nine and nine-year-olds the stuff that we used to think they didn’t need to learn until they were 11. We call this ‘raising standards’ and, just in case teachers didn’t get the message about the time deadlines, we introduce PISA-like standardised tests in numeracy and literacy as often as we can through the school year.
I’m not so sure this works. Finland is well known for having an excellent education system and consistently does well in PISA tests but children don’t even start school until they are seven and don’t do any standardised tests until they leave school at 16. English seven year-olds have already done three rounds of national school tests before Finnish seven-year-olds have stepped foot in a classroom.
In England, the politician most responsible for ‘raising standards’ in this way was Michael Gove. In 2013, as education secretary, he proposed a new, ‘more rigorous’ curriculum that demanded teachers teach more to children at a younger age. 100 professors and academics from the education departments of England’s most prestigious universities, experts in their field who had dedicated their lives to understanding how children learn, wrote a joint letter warning of the dangers of the changes:
“Much of it demands too much too young. This will put pressure on teachers to rely on rote learning without understanding. Inappropriate demands will lead to failure and demoralisation.
“The new curriculum is extremely narrow. The mountains of detail for English, maths and science leave little space for other learning.”
Unlike these professors, Michael Gove had not spent any of his life learning the intricacies of how children learn, grow and develop. Neither had he spent any time teaching in schools. But when he was a boy, he had been to a school, which he felt was enough of a qualification to ignore the warnings of teachers and academics. He answered their reasoned arguments by calling them names, labelling them ‘Marxists’, ‘Enemies of Promise’ and, most-curiously, ‘the blob’. Then he went ahead and changed the curriculum.
A decade after Gove’s changes and we should be able to see the fantastic new promise he was talking about. But when a cross party think tank, the Social Market Foundation, launched an investigation looking at how schools were getting on 10 years after the new rigorous curriculum, their first key point was:
‘There is an excessive amount of content in the national curriculum, leading to rote learning and teachers skipping through content too quickly.’
Wasn’t that just what the blob was saying would happen 10 years ago? The House of Lords came to the same conclusion, their education committee recently found that:
‘ The extent of the material to be covered hampers pupils’ understanding of core concepts and stifles engagement.’
But hasn’t all this focus on maths and English at least helped raise the standard in these subjects? Not really. In 2023 about a third of children still didn’t get high enough grades to ‘pass’ their GCSE maths and English, about the same amount as were failing before Gove ‘raised standards’.
What Gove did succeed in doing, however, was exhaust the kids and the teachers. Now two out of three children admit they feel anxious at school, mostly because of pressure to do well in class. Meanwhile, teachers are leaving the profession at a record rate.
This is what really happens when you overfill children’s schedules, try to cram too much into their day and rush them through their learning.
It doesn’t work. Just ask Audrey Griswold.
