Showing posts with label Elizabeth Truss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Truss. Show all posts

Saturday 24 October 2015

UK Schools Adopt Chinese Style Lessons

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A study conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found out that school children in the UK had stagnated in recent years as compared to China and other east Asian countries.


Chinese Schooling System :


Chinese education system believes in evening classes, curtailing the lesson break to indulge more in the key subjects and also to encourage serious measures to stop children from bunking STEM subjects.

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Elizabeth Truss in a speech said, “Teachers need to learn from the Asian tigers to ensure pupils catch up with their peers in top-performing countries.”
International League urges that the UK kids are up to three years behind those in the Far East.

Addressing the Oxford Conference in Education, Mrs Truss said, “We need to be much more ambitious. Our ambition must be to out-educate the rest of the world. Until we agree that doing well is an unequivocally good thing and that it is attainable by all, we will continue to waste talent.”
In order to upgrade the quality of the global students and focus more into education, the government should adopt measures like staging an hour-long after-school classes in place of homework tasks and eliminating time-wasting during the day and converting that into an additional half-hour “enrichment” lesson.


Check out the opinion of various educationists and student counselors on the merit system of China.


The Change :


The UK Government organised a paid trip for a team of leading teachers of UK to China, last year to find out how schools in China have successfully improved the standards of maths and science and indulged the young minds into them.


Depending on the Chinese curriculum, a report had been prepared to reform the UK education system. These are few amendments suggested:


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1. The “slack time” on the day sessions should be cut down. The wasted minutes are cumulatively converted into a 30-minute “enrichment session”.


2. Teachers could utilise the “enrichment session” to squeeze in additional “fast learning activities” for pupils in maths.


3. To utilise the evening timings effectively, schools have to introduced a series of hour-long after-school maths classes – in place of homework.


4. The report also suggested additional changes such as including advanced maths topics for younger primary school pupils, focus on mental arithmetic and also providing in-service training for teachers.

Mrs Truss said, “Our ambition must not just be to catch up with Germany and Poland but to overtake them,” she said. “Not just to learn from the Asian tigers but add to it – do it better, smarter, more creatively.”
UK schools should engage more into running a longer day session and teaching into the evenings and weekends to raise standards. The new rules unveiled last year, get the privilege to purge out the traditional schooling system and offer extended learning modules to all primary and secondary students.


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A Department for Education spokesman said: “In 2010 only a handful of schools were allowed to offer a longer school day. The government is giving all schools the freedom to set the length of the school day and term to meet the needs of their parents and pupils.Teaching children in high-quality lessons after school mean pupils have access to the excellent facilities and teaching available at the school, with clear benefits to children’s attainment.”

The Bottom Line :


The growing IT skill gap among the younger generations in the UK, have raised the eyebrows of many. In order to tackle the further skill gap in the UK economy, the education system needs to re-restructured to bring in the interest of younger minds in science and maths.


Source: bit.ly/1f7IYub