VIEWS & OPINION


As we begin the new academic year let’s prepare


young people to be ‘life-ready’


Comment by FLEUR SEXTON, joint managing director, PET-Xi


We all spend a lot of time ‘getting ready’ – in the last few weeks alone those of us working in education have been preparing for ‘back to school’, getting ourselves and our children ready for the new academic year, new courses and sometimes new surroundings. This autumn term always brings an


understandable focus on the new curriculum – we are all still getting to grips with new, tougher and linear GCSE courses for example. But amid all the necessary focus on this I would like to make a plea that we all spare some time to think about helping our pupils and students to become ‘life-ready’ as well. What does life ready mean? Essentially it’s linked to character education


and ensuring that our young people have the necessary resilience and grit to keep working towards their goals – whatever the adversity or knockbacks they face along the way. We get a four-year-old ‘school ready’ by making sure they are in a routine,


don’t nap in the day, can put on their shoes etc. Then we get school leavers ‘college/university-ready’ by making sure they have the necessary qualifications. But we seem to forget those youngsters who don’t want to continue their studies past 18. A one-size fits all academic approach is no good for them, yet they still need support, be it of a different kind. The recent healthy debate around university versus apprenticeships has


been very helpful in highlighting alternative routes to work. At PET-Xi we are heavily involved in apprenticeships both as an employer and a provider, but we also go a stage further and offer traineeships too for those who still need to gain skills and experience before they can apply for an apprenticeship or job. Our mission is to help build the foundations so that all youngsters enjoy


engaging opportunities regardless of their abilities and circumstances. Unfortunately some young people in modern Britain lead chaotic lives – they could be carers or dealing with substance misuse, physical abuse, or pregnancy for example. These youngsters have bigger issues to think about than examinations, which simply don’t seem that important to them. So helping these children to be ‘life-ready’ involves supporting them and ‘breaking down’ the multiple and complex barriers they face. Helping a young person become life-ready also means ensuring they have


confidence and high self-esteem and are equipped with social skills to improve their communication and with a wide range of ‘soft skills’ including time management and knowledge of how to work in a team. McDonalds researched the value of ‘soft skills’ and found that they


contribute £88 billion to the UK economy today, with this contribution predicted to increase to £109 billion during the next five years. But they also discovered that by 2020 over half a million workers will be held back quite significantly by a lack of said soft skills, which will in turn affect all sectors of business in the UK. We need to produce life-long learners because it seems as if the ‘job-for-


life’ culture is coming to an end. People ‘might well have 40 jobs in 10 different careers in the future’ as leading futurist Rohit Talwar, chief executive of Fast Future Research predicts. Mr Talwar cites studies suggesting that between 30%-80% of all jobs that


currently exist could disappear in the next 10-20 years, largely through automation. So perhaps it would be useful to add a ‘life-ready’ qualification to the set


of exams currently featuring in Progress 8 calculations! Schools and teachers do a massive amount of amazing work to help their students. But I think we also have to give the message that, important as they are, exams are not the be all and end all. It’s better to produce happy, well-balanced individuals who are ‘life-ready’ before they are ‘exam-ready’.


14 www.education-today.co.uk


Getting grammar right


Comment by REBECCA COSGRAVE is the Lead Primary English Adviser with Babcock LDP and author of No Nonsense Grammar and No Nonsense Spelling (for Raintree Publishing)


In terms of grammar knowledge, the National Curriculum 2014 has set the bar at an all-time high, with children expected to master challenging terminology such as active/passive voice, modal verbs, and relative clauses, whilst also demonstrating effective use of these features in their writing. So how do we get grammar right? It is easy to view grammar as a dry, archaic subject: parsing


sentences and declining verbs. However, modern grammar teaching is a far cry from all that; it can be exciting, engaging and enlightening. Fundamentally, grammar is about learning how to communicate clearly and effectively using language. It is about understanding the many ways that the core unit of meaning in our language, the sentence, can be flexed and shaped to create different effects on the reader. Understanding what you can do with words, phrases, clauses and sentences opens up a range of choices for you as a writer. To get grammar right in the classroom, our work with teachers


has shown that there are two essential areas to develop. The first is teacher subject knowledge of the core elements of grammar. You can’t teach what you don’t fully and deeply understand. Many current teachers have had limited grammar education themselves and either just don’t know enough to feel confident, or are carrying misconceptions. As a result, a starting point for any school when developing the quality of grammar teaching has to be supporting teachers with subject knowledge (see babcock ldp website below for further support). The second area to develop is effective pedagogy for teaching


grammar: without this there is a tendency to fall back on the ‘exercise’ approach to teaching, which won’t open up possibilities; it will shut them down. Both teachers and pupils need to see grammar in context and understand why it is important to learn and apply this knowledge. To do this, teachers need to use real examples from high quality texts rather than dry exercises and contrived language. They need to explore grammatical features and play with them by copying and patterning. At the heart of all grammar work has to be consideration of meaning and the impact of the feature being explored. For example, it is easy to teach children what an adverbial is (a string of words that functions as an adverb and tells us where, when, how, why or how much, often in the form of a prepositional phrase), but it is much more interesting to explore how writers use adverbials. Consider the immensely well-known story ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak. Here is a great example of how chaining adverbials together can create a sense of distance and the magnitude of his journey:


Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and almost over a day and into the night of his very own room


Getting grammar right isn’t easy and it isn’t a quick fix, but if the approach above is taken, it will be worth it.


October 2016


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