When things aren’t how we’d like them to be, we blame others. That’s life. Infant teachers do it to nurseries, Junior teachers do it to Infant teachers and Secondary teachers do it to Juniors. I imagine university professors just sit there and mutter expletives about the lot of us. And it’s fair play.
It’s not unreasonable for secondary teachers to expect that children leave primary school being functionally literate. Many primary schools manage to achieve that for all their pupils, in extremely deprived areas against huge odds.
But not all schools are good schools. And until that point, we all have to simply teach the children we have in front of us. I have to teach the children Year 5 gave me. Secondary teachers will have to teach the children I give them. They’re imperfect because my school is imperfect. But we have to teach them anyway – at their level, not at the level we wish they were at.
So when a few of my school’s children go into Year 7 with Level 3s in Reading and Writing, what level of support meets them? In Year 6, we teach discretely for spelling, grammar, guided reading and writing, as well as having silent reading time and story time during the day, and ensuring the children read daily at home. It comes to around 11-12 hours of literacy a week in school, plus homework, spelling practice and home reading.
Yet in Year 7, these Level 3 kids can expect to get 4-5 hours of generic English a week. So, despite the fact that they haven’t yet reached the appropriate level, the schools seem to say ‘Oh well, that was primary’s job!’ and stop doing everything that the children still need – the grammar, the spelling, the daily guided reading sessions. Why? Are these schools teaching the children in front of them, or the children they want to have?
So the blame game helps no-one. Primary schools must be good schools (duh) which children leave functionally literate. But until that glorious day, secondaries need to simply give the children what they need: if your children aren’t literate, teach more English! If your children aren’t numerate, teach more Maths! It’s really not rocket science.
And, if you feel that a child in your care is not ‘secondary ready’, why try and teach them as if they were? Teach the child in front of you, and teach them like they were in Year 6!
Primarily Teaching 