• Contact
  • About
  • Authors
DONATE
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
Yorkshire Bylines
  • Home
  • News
    • All
    • Brexit
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Health
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
    The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

    Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

    schools bill

    Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

    Emmanuel Macron

    French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    cost of living march london

    Trade union movement marches to demand better

    European Union

    After the seismic shocks of Brexit and Covid, what next for the European Union?

    Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

    What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

    Refugee Week

    Refugee week: a chance to celebrate refugees

    Yorkshire cows

    British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

    Trending Tags

    • Johnson
    • Coronavirus
    • Labour
    • Starmer
    • NI Protocol
    • Brexit
    • Culture
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
  • Politics
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Culture
    • Dance
    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Recipes
    • Sport
    Nostell Priory, Wakefield

    Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

    Headingley Cricket Stadium

    A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

    Bettys' Fat Rascals

    Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

    'Woke' beliefs

    Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

    Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

    What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

    Red Ladder

    Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

    Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

    Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

    Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

    Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

    Queen cakes fit for a Queen

    Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Sport
  • Business
    • All
    • Economy
    • Technology
    • Trade
    Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

    International Women in Engineering Day 2022

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    conservative party

    The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

    Yorkshire cows

    British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

    cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

    Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

    Money on the floor - £20 notes

    The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

    Financial problems

    Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

    An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

    Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

    Jar with money cascading out of it

    Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

    Trending Tags

      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
    • Region
    No Result
    View All Result
    • Home
    • News
      • All
      • Brexit
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Health
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
      The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

      Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      Emmanuel Macron

      French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      cost of living march london

      Trade union movement marches to demand better

      European Union

      After the seismic shocks of Brexit and Covid, what next for the European Union?

      Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

      What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

      Refugee Week

      Refugee week: a chance to celebrate refugees

      Yorkshire cows

      British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

      Trending Tags

      • Johnson
      • Coronavirus
      • Labour
      • Starmer
      • NI Protocol
      • Brexit
      • Culture
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
    • Politics
    • Opinion
    • Lifestyle
      • All
      • Culture
      • Dance
      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Recipes
      • Sport
      Nostell Priory, Wakefield

      Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

      Headingley Cricket Stadium

      A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

      Bettys' Fat Rascals

      Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

      'Woke' beliefs

      Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

      Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

      What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

      Red Ladder

      Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

      Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

      Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

      Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

      Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

      Queen cakes fit for a Queen

      Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Sport
    • Business
      • All
      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
      Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

      International Women in Engineering Day 2022

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      conservative party

      The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

      Yorkshire cows

      British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

      cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

      Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

      Money on the floor - £20 notes

      The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

      Financial problems

      Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

      An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

      Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

      Jar with money cascading out of it

      Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

      Trending Tags

        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Region
      No Result
      View All Result
      Yorkshire Bylines
      No Result
      View All Result
      Home News Education

      Learning in the time of covid and beyond: a reflection

      Education specialist Dr Pam Jarvis looks at how a strict view of education is letting down children during the pandemic.

      Dr Pam JarvisbyDr Pam Jarvis
      19-01-2021 08:00
      in Education
      Image by ernestoeslava for pixabay

      Image by ernestoeslava for pixabay

      42
      VIEWS
      Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
      ADVERTISEMENT

      In summer 2020, I suggested in a Yorkshire Bylines article that the government would be best advised to prepare for the new school year in a way that did not presume that children would be able to attend school in the normal fashion. I was surprised, in the week following publication, that this article became a focus for anger from a small number of teachers on social media, which appeared to emanate from a misunderstanding: that I was criticising their practice, rather than commenting on national policy.

      As the 2020/21 school year has unfolded, events have vindicated my prediction. English schools have experienced a great deal of difficulty due to the government’s insistence that children return to schools running on pre-covid conventions: large groups of children in crowded classrooms being lectured by a single teacher. For example, due to the organisation of teaching in secondary schools, some reported having to create ‘bubbles’ of several hundred.

      The impacts have been heavy; not only on the children themselves in terms of infection spreading through their families, but also on education staff, for example in Leeds where Covid-19 rates among teachers just before Christmas were calculated to be 333 percent higher than those in the general population.

      So, exactly what did I suggest in the summer that so enraged my critics? I called for a suspension of statutory assessments, to instead pursue a project-based model of teaching for children under 14 who were not yet subject to the restrictions of the current GCSE and A-level syllabus. This would have been far more robust in the event that schools needed to close in response to a second/third wave of the pandemic (drawing on the events of the pandemic of 1918–20). And children could more easily have transferred their learning between home and school with online and parental support.

      I listed the following benefits:

      • Giving schools the flexibility to create smaller ‘bubbles’ in which the children’s work could be facilitated by teaching assistants under the guidance of the class teacher.
      • The potential to bring some adults into temporary work in schools, particularly those who had been laid off during lockdown – such as actors, chefs and artists who could additionally share their specialist skills in some contexts.
      • Giving children more flexibility to pursue local topics, particularly in the outdoor environment.
      • Online lessons facilitating project work could be more engaging and of shorter duration than teachers going through their usual lessons on webcam.

      I suggested that instead of giving £4m to one academy chain to video teachers going through their usual lessons and set up online quizzes, the Department For Education (DfE) could work with experts in online teaching and learning to convert their practices and resources to a programme that would be suitable for children working at home with parental support.

      Why would anyone be hostile to such ideas? The answer lies in the quasi-philosophy of education that Michael Gove introduced into schools during his time in the DfE (2010–2014), which has been further perpetuated by his successors.

      Gove and Cummings’ revamping of the English national curriculum was rooted in their perspective on the theories of American education academic E D Hirsch. Hirsch’s claim to fame is that he created a list of “what Americans need to know” in the appendix of his book Cultural Literacy (1988) and proposed that this should be used as the basis as the school curriculum in the US. How directly the list is related to what Britons ‘need to know’ is a question that has never had any satisfactory answer, or indeed, if ‘Britons’ can be lumped together under one umbrella in this manner.

      Hirsch’s theory received a significant amount of criticism in the US when it was first launched in the late 1980s. The schools minister Nick Gibb connects the strategy to “a society in which we all understand each other better”, but this too is somewhat problematic, given that Hirsch’s list overwhelmingly references traditional Western culture.

      The mode of teaching that is intended to inculcate this bank of knowledge in children’s minds is via a memorisation process guided by ‘Cognitive Load Theory’. This was drawn from early psychological experiments on memory processes relating to adults rote learning experimental materials, principally word lists.

      The resulting practices are useful to teachers in some circumstances – as a psychologist as well as a teacher, I frequently used them with students in exam revision before it became fashionable to do so. But this is not all there is to teaching and learning. As Brian Cox explains, “the whole point of science is that you have to be prepared – and delighted – to change your mind in the face of new evidence”.

      Human minds evolved to learn not only through instruction but also through personal discovery. Experimenting with and researching ideas is what project-based learning is principally about. Unfortunately, this is not the way that Nick Gibb views the situation: “Teachers attempt to inculcate creativity and problem-solving as if these skills transcend domains of knowledge … this view is deeply misguided”.

      It is certainly true, as our Victorian ancestors realised, that rote learning via sitting in rows in large groups with one teacher at the front is one of the cheapest ways to provide state education. This strategy produces students who can reliably give accurate answers to narrowly framed questions, during the period that follows sustained practice. Whether they fully understand what they are regurgitating – or whether they later retain that knowledge, or become lifelong enthusiastic, inquisitive learners – is another, very different question.

      Our immediate problem, however, is that the DfE’s slavish adherence to this very fixed construction of teaching and learning has led to the fear of children ‘falling behind’ in their preparation for the next fixed response assessment, and thence to an insistence that children must remain in school to the point at which the evidence of schools as a source of infection became so overwhelming that the government was forced to U-turn.

      The DFE’s subsequent tactic has been to urge families to reproduce a school ‘face the front and listen’ learning environment in the home, spending “up to five hours” a day (according to the instructions of the current secretary of state for education) watching teachers go through lessons on webcam/video. This has added to the significant stress already impacting on families.

      My 9yr old is in tears this morning as she doesn't want to do another live Teams. She's not had a break all week, hasn't had time to go outside, & if she'd done all her live Teams would only have time for a 15 minute lunch break.
      Business as usual @educationgovuk ? https://t.co/4ccxDXJPzp

      — Kerry Scattergood (currently away, not ?ing) (@KMScattergood) January 15, 2021

      Many parents, co-opted into the role of enforcers and quasi-teaching assistants, have taken to social media to express exasperation.

      I wonder how many kids will need glasses after all this online education up close to the monitor 5 hours a day and more

      Isolation from social contact and friends will create even more mental health issues
      I hope the Drs and NHS are ready for the oncoming issues that will arise

      — The Power of One1 (@IMS899) January 6, 2021

      Some of my parent friends are feeling enormous pressure to do hours of home learning with their children because it is what school is providing, although feeling as if it is impossible as they juggle siblings, work, and normal family pressures…

      — Esther Cummins (@EstherM_Cummins) January 7, 2021

      So where to now? I suspect the time has gone for the government to make any great changes to learning in lockdown. There were certainly many missed opportunities in summer 2020. How the current chaos will impact on the nation’s long-term mental health remains to be seen.

      Tags: Coronavirus
      ADVERTISEMENT
      Previous Post

      Has Robert Jenrick nothing better to do than fan up culture wars?

      Next Post

      Are you in line for the covid jab?

      Dr Pam Jarvis

      Dr Pam Jarvis

      Pam is an author, chartered psychologist, historian, researcher and grandparent. Originally from London, but based in Leeds since 1986, she taught and researched across community education, schools, colleges and universities between 1994 and 2019, publishing many academic articles, books and chapters. She is currently a blogger and conference/training presenter, and has recently published her first novel “On Time”.

      Related Posts

      schools bill
      Education

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      byDr Pam Jarvis
      27 June 2022
      William Gomes with Chris Nicholson at his graduation ceremony
      Education

      My road from refugee to university graduate

      byWilliam Gomes
      29 May 2022
      Child playing
      Education

      Children first: a challenge for Wakefield parliamentary candidates

      byDr Pam Jarvis
      23 May 2022
      Image of children's learning blocks.
      Education

      No place for family and community in Johnson’s England

      byDr Pam Jarvis
      30 March 2022
      Yesterday, the Beatles
      Education

      Get back to play: concerns that children’s lack of unstructured play leads to social anxiety

      byDr Pam Jarvis
      17 March 2022
      Next Post
      Photo by Prasesh Shiwakoti (Lomash) on Unsplash

      Are you in line for the covid jab?

      Want to support us?

      Can you help Yorkshire Bylines to grow and become more sustainable with a regular donation, no matter how small?  

      DONATE

      Sign up to our newsletter

      If you would like to receive the Yorkshire Bylines regular newsletter, straight talking direct to your inbox, click the button below.

      NEWSLETTER

      LATEST

      The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

      Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

      27 June 2022
      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      27 June 2022
      Conservative Party Meeting

      Hypocrisy, desperation and excuses: Conservative Party clutch at straws over by-election losses

      27 June 2022
      Nostell Priory, Wakefield

      Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

      26 June 2022

      MOST READ

      Conservative Party Meeting

      Hypocrisy, desperation and excuses: Conservative Party clutch at straws over by-election losses

      27 June 2022
      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      27 June 2022
      10/05/2022 Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the House of Commons. Picture by Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street

      The country needs more than just ‘Booting Boris out of Downing Street’

      26 June 2022
      Photo credit Robert Sharp / englishpenLicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

      The Davis Downside Dossier

      1 January 2021

      BROWSE BY TAGS

      antivaxxers Charity climate change Coronavirus Cost of living Creative industries Crime Cummings Democracy Devolution education Equality Farming Fishing hgv History Immigration Johnson Journalism Labour Local Democracy Mental Health mining money NHS NI Protocol omicron Pies pollution poverty PPE Public Health Review shortage social media Starmer tax travel Ukraine Yorkshire
      Yorkshire Bylines

      Yorkshire Bylines is a regional online newspaper that supports citizen journalism. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in Yorkshire and beyond.

      Learn more about us

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Contact
      • About
      • Letters
      • Donate
      • Privacy
      • Bylines network
      • Shop

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Home
      • News
        • Brexit
        • Education
        • Environment
        • Health
        • Home Affairs
        • Transport
        • World
      • Politics
      • Opinion
      • Lifestyle
        • Culture
        • Dance
        • Food
        • Music
        • Poetry
        • Recipes
        • Sport
      • Business
        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Donate
      • The Compendium of Cabinet Codebreakers
      • The Davis Downside Dossier
      • The Digby Jones Index
      • Newsletter sign up
      • Cartoons by Stan
      • Authors

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      Welcome Back!

      Login to your account below

      Forgotten Password?

      Retrieve your password

      Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

      Log In