From concerns the ‘three Rs’ are being neglected to a school that gives pupils different coloured uniforms based on their academic abilities – see what’s got people talking this month in our offbeat look at education news in the media. Join us, and have your say.

Carol Vorderman campaigns for maths

Celebrity numbers whizz Carol Vorderman has authored a report calling for a radical change to be made to the teaching of maths, and for the subject to be taught up to the age of 18, according to a BBC News article.

Apparently almost half of 16-year-olds are failing to achieve grade C at GCSE, and just 15% are studying maths beyond that level.

In her report, which was commissioned by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Prime Minister David Cameron, the former Countdown star claims more than 300,000 16-year-olds complete their education each year without enough understanding of maths to function properly in their work or private lives.

Read more…

France may be one of the world’s top holiday destinations, with more space and fewer people than the UK, but what’s it like to actually live and work there, and what are the opportunities and challenges for Brits? We spoke to Dr Steffen Sommer, headmaster of the British School of Paris (BSP), to find out more about his school and about working in France generally. Read more.

Could you start by giving us an introduction to The British School of Paris?

The BSP is a co-educational British school based just outside Paris in a prestigious western suburb close to Versailles in Croissy sur Seine, on one of the most beautiful stretches of the Seine outside of the city centre.

We are a high achieving school – if we look at examination results we consistently achieve GSCE and A level examination results that are comparable to high achieving independent selective schools in the UK, yet like all British international schools we’re not selective.

We’re catering predominantly for the British expat community in Paris – or that was certainly very much the case up until nine years ago. But the expat climate and community has changed quite significantly because the major employers are employing fewer Brits, which has had an impact on the BSP. However the result is simply that we are more ‘international’ than we used to be.

The crux is that we are very proud of the Britishness that we uphold here: we teach a completely British curriculum, and what you find at the BSP is exactly the same as you’ll find at any independent or state school in England, but the cohort we have is very international: we’re 38% British with 50 other nationalities represented. We start at the age of three and go up to the age of 18, and we have one big campus and two sites – one for the junior school, and one for the seniors, which shares with administrative offices in the oldest part of the school in a château. There are roughly 400 children in each school.
The campus is breathtakingly beautiful!

How are British schools recognised and monitored?

We’re one of the biggest and one of the very oldest British international schools, and we’re a founding member of COBIS – The Council of British International Schools. We’ve been fighting hard to get the level of recognition by the British government that we are now enjoying. Now we have statutory inspections in all British international schools, whereas previously the label ‘British’ seemed to be available to anyone founding a school, regardless of the kind of place that it was.

Now the British government, very much like the Americans and Australians, actually say “No you can’t call yourselves ‘British’ unless you do all of this”.

What opportunities are there for UK teachers?

The vast majority of our teaching staff are from the UK. However our staff turnover is minimal. The reason is that it’s a fantastic place to work, in one of the most beautiful areas you can imagine. The school is also extremely well appointed, with state of the art facilities. I wouldn’t ever say that teaching is easy, but one can live out one’s professional ambitions completely without having to focus on mundane things like discipline! The students are extremely well behaved, and we uphold British standards, with a uniform code and so forth.

We’ve fought very hard within COBIS to be able to accept newly qualified teachers, and I think that before too long it will be possible. We’ve also had very close relationships with British universities, and have accepted students for work experience.

Although we’re in France, we’re very conscious that with the train link between Paris and London, we are actually much more conveniently placed for insets and so forth than many schools back in the UK. So all our in-service training and examination training takes place in the UK. No one coming to Paris to teach would miss out on anything they have in the UK.

It sounds very competitive because it’s such a great place to work!

Well our documentation is very upbeat, in our adverts we say who we are, where we are, that we are a high achieving school, that our class sizes are very small, and that our students are very well behaved, so yes – even for shortage subjects like maths or physics: for example this September we had a physics post going, and I received 74 applications, out of which 10 were appointable.

That’s not the case all the time: we had an ICT vacancy recently and there weren’t many in the cohort applying, and they weren’t of the calibre that we normally get. But certainly our location is a major attraction.

Could you tell us about the opportunities in France more generally for UK teachers?

There are two British schools in France: the BSP, and the Mougins School, which is a fantastic place to be, very close to Nice and Cannes. It is a smaller but very popular school in a more rural and exceptionally pretty location.

There are a fair number of international schools: here there’s the International School of Paris, and the American School of Paris which tends to employ American teachers who understand the American programme. The International School would be more generally focused, and you’d end up with ‘the international experience’. It’s a different environment of learning, which is less formal than at the BSP. But they also employ British teachers, who would be in a staffroom comprising many different nationalities. You’d have a melting pot of all kinds of experiences of different teaching and education systems, which comes along with its own complexities and difficulties. Here or at Mougin, by contrast, you’re more likely to have predominantly Brits and some other Anglophones.

Are there many particular bureaucratic hoops for UK teachers wanting to work in France?

There aren’t any particular stumbling blocks. France like the UK is a member state of the EU, therefore you have freedom of movement, and freedom of employment – there is no problem at all. If you apply for the job and get it, you’re there. But I always ask at interview of our many applicants what they know about France. They don’t have to speak French because the lingua franca is English here, but living in France is different from being on holiday in France. It is not as easy a country to live in as the UK. Bureaucracy is rife, it always takes time, and it is very very difficult to lead an adequate life – although it is very pretty and very nice – without speaking French.

Having said that, at BSP we have our own community: many of our parents are expats, who may only come for a year or two, and our community is a bit of an enclave. So not only are we a school, but we also provide opportunities for parents to take part in activities – including learning French – and we involve the whole family, providing opportunities for them to meet each other, to speak English. And those who are not British join in with this: they choose British education because they like our values.

What would you say is the biggest attraction for someone in the UK trying to get a job in France?

It is ‘widening the horizons’, while having the comfort zone at the BSP of ‘knowing the system’; there’s nothing here that would be alien to any British teacher. At an international school, a lot of things would be alien. So if you come here you have the added complexity of being in France, so it’s a challenge for your own personal life to live outside the UK, but there’s the comfort zone that the job offers.  We also help with finding accommodation and ‘setting people up’, but then they lead their own lives. So for those who haven’t worked in another country before, it’s quite a nice thing to do, to have a comfort zone, and also opportunities to ‘have done something else’ – the opportunity to have lived in France for some time.

It’s also a valuable experience for teachers who come from areas that aren’t highly urbanised and who aren’t used to teaching a mixed national group… and our students come from all kinds of education systems: they might have spent two years in an American school in Houston; they might have spent a couple of years in a local Vietnamese school for example.

It’s also good for teachers to see first-hand that the majority of our students are at least bi-lingual; some are tri-lingual or speak four or five languages. That makes these students very different kids: not more intelligent than others, but they just come with a ‘worldliness’… they have travelled the world. They go about life with ease – even if they don’t speak French that well because they’ve only just moved here – but they go about with an ease that inspires teachers. Nothing ever really stops them – they are quite prepared to make the very most of life in a global environment. Because they are living global lives.

Walking, skiing, water-sports, amazing beaches and a beautiful countryside of contrast and extremes, New Zealand has plenty to boast about. We spoke to Bernie Feehan, manager of the Eteach New Zealand office in Wellington, about living and working in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

What’s the big attraction of New Zealand for UK early childhood educators looking to work overseas?

New Zealand has a unique appeal based on its location as one of the most isolated westernised countries in the world. It is a land of contrast – from beautiful sandy beaches to snow capped mountains, from large cities to small rural communities, and from modern sophistication to old world charm. There are two main islands, the north island and the south island, which are very different.

The north island has the largest population and the largest city Auckland which is the major business centre of the country. The capital city is Wellington, at the bottom of the north island, home to the government and its many departments and civil servants. Despite this, Wellington is regularly referred to as the culture and the cafe city of New Zealand. The coffee here is fantastic!

The south island features rugged mountains and beautiful scenery and is the main area of the adventure tourism industry; it offers a huge range of outdoor activities from outstanding skiing, to bungy jumping and jet boating. It’s been likened to a combination of parts of the Scottish highlands and parts of Switzerland. Large parts of the film trilogy ‘Lord of the Rings’ were filmed on and around these mountain ranges and there are some excellent tours that run to these locations.

New Zealand has a first class education system and is a world leader in early childhood education with its Te Whariki national curriculum. This is an outstanding, set curriculum highlighting activities and outcomes for the 0-5 age group, and there are excellent opportunities for UK trained candidates to work within it. This link will take you directly to the informative Ministry of Education website, and you can download a PDF about Te Whariki here (494 kb).

New Zealand also enjoys a safe and secure living environment and has a healthy culture of sporting, outdoor, cultural and artistic events. No matter what type of leisure activities you enjoy, you’re likely to find them readily available in New Zealand.

What do you think is the value for teachers of taking on an early childhood education post in New Zealand?

  Read more…

Attendance certificates often penalise children who have absolutely no control over whether they can attain the required standard, and perpetuate a gung-ho culture, argues Annette Jenkins.

I asked my daughter’s friend when she came round for tea what she’d done at school that day. The almost inevitable “Nothing much” was the reply!

With a little coaxing, however, she revealed that attendance certificates had been given out, but reported that she hadn’t received one.

What had prevented her attending, I asked. It seems her family had taken some extra holiday, so of course her attendance record had not been up to par.

Unnecessarily penalising children

Now most of the school children I know have little or no say about when their parents or carers choose to book their holidays, and many families need to take some of their holidays outside of usual school vacation periods to be able to afford one at all.

Likewise, children don’t have much input over when they fall ill, and have to remain at home or even in hospital, and therefore have no opportunity to win the dangled carrot. To lump a child who breaks a limb – or indeed has had to take time out for any other illness – with the kids who skive, is unnecessarily penalising them.

But the premise of attendance certificates, which is presumably that the more children go to school the more they will ‘achieve’, is questionable. (Others would go further, and suggest that the ‘reward culture’ of certificates, stickers and charts, and even positive reinforcement, is generally detrimental to development.)

Gung-ho attitude

Attendance certificate culture also perpetuates the gung-ho attitude that people should struggle in to school or work, no matter how terrible they’re feeling, dosed up to the eyeballs on Lemsip or other drugs and ready to knock out their peers by spreading their lurgy to all and sundry; how that might affect overall attendance isn’t widely mentioned.

One website reported that when a school sent a child home for looking ill, it then said she’d missed a day and couldn’t have her certificate! There are other extreme reports of children prevented from attending an awards disco with their peers because they’d had time off – because a parent had died.

The small proportion of people that this system is presumably designed to motivate – the malingerers, no-shows, runaways, shirkers, skivers and their families – probably couldn’t give a fig about Gold, Silver or even Bronze attendance certificates. 

It’s true that in life not everyone can win every prize, but to create a system of prizes that many children have no hope of winning through no fault of their own seems particularly pernicious.

Wellington College threw open its doors to the cream of the education world over this weekend and welcomed all those that support and work in the profession. Eteach was there in force to speak with teachers and heads and discuss ways in which we can help with recruitment.

From Secretary of State Michael Gove to Sir Bob Geldoff, Sir Robert Winston and David Starky (to name but a few) the programme was packed with superb speakers. It was such a hard decision to decide which sessions to target and which to leave out, that one visitor admitted to starting in one session and sneaking out the back half way through, to visit another.

Credit must go to Anthony Seldon, Head of Wellington College, in organising a festival which featured an open forum to discuss and debate a range of topics across education. These included Free Schools, the current pension situation, what makes for a good education, how to turn schools around and various developments in different curriculum areas. And these were just the tip of the iceberg!

I was fortunate enough to hear Anthony Seldon outline in his opening presentation the vision and aspiration he has for all his students at Wellington College and the importance of developing the whole student, not just the academic aspect. He also spoke of his commitment to Wellington Academy in Wiltshire, where they are working hard with the state sector to give students there the grounding and aspirations that students at the College already experience. Best of all was hearing from the students themselves, who talked about their experiences at Wellington and what they felt was important in their own education.

Another session was led by Peter Hyman who originally started as a strategist to Tony Blair. He has since trained as a teacher and is shortly to head up a Free School in Newham. When questioned by the audience whether he would have advised the PM in the same way, now he has experienced teaching for himself, he replied that the outcomes would have been the same, but that maybe the methodologies would have been less prescriptive. He was also pressed by several attendees from the Newham area, where his Free School will be based, as to why he felt he could only achieve his aspirations for children via a Free School and not through the LA. If the legacy of Labour education was so good why wasn’t he supporting it and working within the government sector dealing with all the never-ending initiatives and red tape they had to work through? He replied that he wants to work alongside these schools and look at good practice and learn from them too. However, he wanted to focus on English Language as ‘the driver’ for all things and a set of skills that would infiltrate all aspects of a child’s education. These include teamwork, problem solving, confidence, interpersonal skills, self-awareness, resilience, initiative, commitment and motivation. Nothing different then to his ‘state’ colleagues down the road!

The final keynote speech of the day was a question and answer session with Michael Gove. Generally people were polite with their questions, the toughest ones being about the pensions strike and why does education always have to be driven by politics, whoever was in power at the time? Why were successive governments always changing what was being taught and why couldn’t they just leave teachers to do their jobs? He said it was the government’s responsibility on behalf of the electorate to hold teachers accountable, to focus on continuing to raise standards and to move back up the world education ranks rather than continuing to sink lower. Politics needs to drive education, to ensure our education system keeps up with a changing world where economics, social and technological developments are evolving all the time. This final question seemed to link back to where Anthony Seldon started that morning: What are we educating our young people for? Is it to fit neatly into society? For business and the economy? Or purely as learners of knowledge?

Tell us your ideas: What are we educating young people for?