Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Streaming in schools is the separation of cohorts into two or more classes of broadly equal ability thus you typically get a low, middle and high ability class in each year. The alternative to this is mixed ability classes. Setting applies at the level of individual subjects thus a child might be in the middle ability class for most things, but move to either the high or low ability class for maths or English.

The advantages of streaming are that it lets teachers adjust the level of teaching to the ability of those within each ability range. Thus, the complexity of the topics will typically be higher in the high ability class than in the low ability one. Generally, the low ability class will have additional support requirements and these will be concentrated in that class. In the high ability class, lessons will tend to stretch the pupils. One downside of this structure is that the distribution of ability isn’t even and, in general, the high and low ability classes would ideally have about 1/4 of the pupils with the middle class having half of them so, in practice, there would be two middle classes. Unfortunately, schools don’t always have enough pupils to do that and would more generally run with three classes at most. The other notable downside of it is that those in the bottom class can get labelled as the dummies which isn’t fair as there are lots of reasons that they can be in that class and also because it’s not necessarily a permanent position for them. Setting is much the same and is essentially a fine tuning of the streaming structure.

Mixed ability classes avoid that stigmatism in that low, middle and high ability pupils will be in each class. Where it falls down is that the teaching tends to be towards the middle which is too high for those who’d otherwise be in the low ability class and too low (hence boring) for those who’d normally be in the high ability class. It avoids the motivation issue of having teachers constantly teaching the low ability class and often working very hard with no real progress from their pupils to show for it.

The kids primary school has been doing streaming and setting for P4-7 for around four years now, so the first of the kids who’ve worked right through that are at the point of moving to their next school. It was introduced by the previous principal and vice-principal (she’s leaving this year) and seems to have worked quite well. Unfortunately, the new principal is quite opposed to it and so they’re dropping it as from September which is a particularly bad time for our second little guy, so bad in fact that we are considering changing schools.

Why is it so bad? Well, the lower class has a tendency to be quite disruptive and that’s a major downside for teaching. Teaching in the school seems certain to end up teaching for the needs of those at the lower ability levels to the detriment of those of average or higher levels of ability.

Why are they doing it? It seems that the new principal just doesn’t like streaming and setting and the teachers lumbered with the lower classes have a hard time. What it doesn’t address are the needs of those of middle and higher abilities, many of whom will either be put off by the disruption or simply get bored.

It doesn’t even adequately address the needs of those at the lower ability or rather lower attainment levels. In the school, their problems include English as an additional language and general lack of parental support and encouragement. In families with English as an additional language it is both difficult for the pupil in school and for the parents in terms of homework and general interaction with the school – mixed ability classes will not help either. Lack of parental support and encouragement isn’t exclusive to immigrants, of course, and the school really needs to do all it can about that but mixed ability classes just average down the teaching and, if anything, discourage those at the lower end of the ability range who can easily come to see any progress as impossible when they’re surrounded by people miles ahead of them.

What really gets us is that they announced the new policy following a consultation where the majority of parents and teachers said that mixed ability classes would be best for their child. Except, that’s not what even their, highly misleading, statistics said. Taking the very same results, it can be argued that the parents and teachers want streaming and setting. And that’s even after an incredibly poor and biased analysis of the consequences of streaming and setting was distributed with the initial consultation questionnaire. Subtract the bias, add in some valid statistics and the result would have been quite different.

They won’t be restarting until 2016 but at least there is now light at the end of the tunnel.

At present they’re planning three:

1. MSc Contemporary Psychological Studies;
2. MSc in Forensic Psychological Studies; and
3. MSc in Criminological Studies.

Which isn’t a bad start and and complements some of their psychology undergraduate degrees though the social psychology and counselling undergraduate degrees don’t currently have a corresponding masters.

No details on pricing as yet but presumably they will be around the £4800 mark of the science masters.

A major downside is that they are not currently planning on having the degrees accedited. Although for BPS recognition as GBC, you only need to have done one accredited degree, for a range of psychology professions you would need to have an accredited masters as well so it would be best to check the requirements of the profession that you ultimately intend to use the degree for before signing up.

The other downside, for the OU, is that in their absence a range of other institutions have produced distance learning courses to address the gap in provision. So, for example, you can do the accredited MSc in Health Psychology from the University of Ulster for around £4000 (ie probably cheaper than the OU).

Last Monday was our first visit to Campbell with James as a pupil.

Slightly confusingly, since it’s a boys school, there were girls as part of the welcome party, basically on loan from Strathearn, the sister school. The headmaster kicked off the evening with his standard welcome speech (much the same as on the open night) highlighting the heights to which the boys should be striving. Then it was on to more prosaic things like the interaction they’d like between the parents, pupils and school before the boys were taken away with their tutor for an initial meeting and to see where they will need to go on their first day in August.

The tutor meeting was just a short get to know you meeting with their personal tutor who’ll be the person who’ll look after them for the next seven years. After their tea and bikkies, the parents were led down to meet the tutor and collect their sons. There’s not really that much that they have to say at this point and in reality it’ll be the first proper meeting with them in early October where we’ll really start to build our relationship with James’ tutor.

We just had a glance at the prices for the school uniform and, surprisingly, they’re somewhat lower than most of the local shops although that’s without counting the customary early summer discounting.

As far as official homework goes, we’ve several booklets to read through and need to enrol on parentmail as well over the summer. Unofficial homework includes increasing the amount of reading that James does and we’re hoping to work through the remainder of the maths workbook that we bought last year to make it an easier start for him.

With the end of primary school just over a week off, you’d think that things would be winding down but, if anything, they’ve been picking up the pace lately.

The P7 project is finally complete bar a couple of small spelling corrections so that’ll be out of the way tomorrow. It’s taken up quite a bit of time over the last few weeks as James has gotten fired up with a number of aspects of it. He wrote the text (just over 4000 words!) but I’d to gather together the photos to illustrate it which was fine for most of them but a few took quite a bit of time to track down. We printed it all out for the first time yesterday and it looks really good.

Alongside that, in school he’s getting ready for the school play which is Friday week. That’s supposed to be quite a big production so it’s keeping them quite busy during the day.

The P7 pupils are having their visits to their new schools at the moment. Priory (one of our fall-back choices) had theirs a few days ago and seems to have created a good impression on those that went along. We’re off to James’ new school next Monday evening.

The other little guy managed to spill custard over his hand on Monday and has had to be taken to the nurse every day to get the dressing changed. He’s also supposed to be getting ready for his part in the other school play so had to go to school today as otherwise he’d not get to do that.

The presentation on Cancer Research: Advancing Patient Care was a quite fascinating overview of the kind of things that Queen’s get up to in the area of cancer research and treatment.

You might have expected that it would have become quickly very apparent that the various speakers came from different outfits within the university but in fact it wasn’t clear at all. Their work is so intertwined that the speaker from the School of Pharmacy could easily have been thought of as from the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology and for that matter the clinical talk could easily have fallen into the realm of the research talks.

As they pointed out, that’s just how it should be. Cancer isn’t defeated yet and so patient treatment is driven by the research done in the centre and in related centres of expertise in the university. Related centres even includes the physics and engineering departments as they provide input into the design of the various scanners and radiation therapy devices.

The line blurs even between the university, the hospital and the health trust with each needing to work closely with the others. It was good to see that InvestNI was putting money into a project that not only should help the local economy but which will also help those who need cancer treatments.

Much as I’d prefer not to be needing their help, it is reassuring that they pull together so many experts for every case coming along at their joint meeting. Actually, it was quite a surprise to see just how many people would be there to discuss possible treatments for each case that comes to them. I know that some people would feel a bit intiminated by having so many people discussing their medical condition but, given the stage of cancer treatment, it seemed like a very practical way to ensure that each patient gets the most appropriate treatment. It was also good to see that in the Q&A at the end that it seemed very much that any of them could have answered any of the questions ie they have a good knowledge of each others fields.