ASCL conference hers that Internet makes teaching children harder

8-3-2010

ASCL conference hears that Internet makes teaching children harder

Children are harder to motivate with traditional teaching methods in the internet age as they expect instant results, a head teachers’ leader said yesterday.

Websites and computer games have over the past decade made children impatient with the pace of steady learning, John Dunford, head of the Association of School and College Leaders, said.

He added that children spend on average 1.7 hours a day online, 1.5 hours on games consoles and 2.7 hours watching television.

“They live in a celebrity-dominated society where success appears to come instantly and without any real effort,” Mr Dunford told the associations’s annual conference.“It is difficult for teachers to compete. Success in learning just doesn’t come fast enough.”

Michael Gove, the Conservatives’ schools spokesman, was challenged at the conference over his plans to recreate a traditional curriculum. Sue Kirkham, a former head of Walton High School in Stafford, voiced scepticism over the lesson plan for a typical school day proposed by Mr Gove in The Times on Saturday, comprising: double chemistry, history of the English civil war, modern poets in literature, perspectives in drawing for art, stastics, French prose and England’s counties and their industry for geography. She told him that she had been taught such a curriculum in the early 1960s. “It didn’t equip me for life in the 20th century and certainly didn’t for life in the 21st century,” she said.

Mr Gove also said that he wanted to see a reduction in the number of children taught in independent schools, as more parents opted for state education. He said he hoped many prep schools, former direct grant schools, schools with fees such as those of the Girls’ Day Schools Trust, and Montessori schools would scrap fees and selection and become academies under his planned school reforms.

“I have absolutely nothing against anyone who makes a decision to spend money on their child’s education,” Mr Gove said.

“But I would like to see more children educated in the state sector. I would like to see some schools now in the independent sector become state schools.”

About 6.5 per cent of British children are privately educated. There are 2,600 independent schools with 628,000 pupils, although about 0.5 per cent live abroad and are sent to school in Britain, according to the Independent Schools Council.

A handful of independent schools have already switched to the state sector as academies: Belvedere, Liverpool; William Hulme’s Grammar School, Manchester; and Colstons Girls’ School and the Cathedral Choir School, Bristol. (Times)