27th March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I was interested this week to see the Ofsted report which criticised the progress made on literacy in our primary schools. I might be remembering my childhood badly, but I’m sure that I was taught to read and write by my family more than anyone else. Not that my school didn’t make us practise, but I don’t remember doing phonics at school, but I do with my mum. In fact, I often see parents sitting reading with their kids, and asking them to sound out each letter when trying to read. I have a friend, who is very liberal, and not xenophobic at all, but believes that a major issue for young children today is that there are often many foreign students in a primary school, and this doesn’t only harm the literacy for the foreign students (who can speak in their own language if their peers can too), but harms the native English speakers who will have fewer English speaking peers and/or friends who speak poor English. It’s difficult to see a quick solution to this, and I don’t want to sound like a Tory (which I’m not!), but surely there should be some restriction on immigration if the result is worse literacy for everyone.
As for me, this week I’ve started categorising all the base disciplines for our new qualifications system. There are over 3,000 base disciplines in total, which is a little intimidating, but when I look at how many of those are regularly used everything seems a bit more manageable; we have only about base disciplines 200 which are related to more than 5 qualifications. Once I’ve linked these 200, everything else should be easy to categorise. The first step though is some clever code to input all the categories, so hopefully that will be done by the end of the week.