You are going to read a newspaper article on education. Read the text and answer the questions that follow. Decide whether each statement is True or False and provide your arguments drawn from the text to justify your choice. The proof should be given in your own words.
Teachers in Great Britain are threatening to boycott “meaningless” new tests for primary school pupils.
One of the initiatives the Ministry for Education is introducing is a national assessment for four- and five-year-olds at the start of formal schooling. Teachers, however, argue that children in early years education – from the ages of three until seven – learn better through the use of informal play and would be harmed by the early imposition of formal teaching. Stephane Bernard, a teacher from of Lambeth, said, “What our four- and five-year-olds need is not another large number of tests but emphasis on the child’s personal, social and emotional development, communication and language skills. They need nurturing and their physical skills developing. All these things are key.”
Ministers have also introduced a reading test to be taken by six-year-olds. This uses phonics, a system that encourages children to use sounds to decipher words.
Other plans involve a reconsideration of the curriculum in their last year of primary school. Since 1995, children have been required to sit literacy and numeracy tests but this year the tests include a spelling, grammar and punctuation paper.
Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said the tests would leave many children feeling a failure. “Primary school teachers are desperately concerned about what the school day will come to mean for their pupils,” she said. “The proposed primary curriculum will set education back generations.”
Primary school teachers believe children’s lives are being impoverished by the government’s insistence that schools focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of creative teaching. Ministry for Education failed to tackle decades of over-prescription in the curriculum and added to it with its own strategies in literacy and numeracy, which take up nearly half the school week, the Cambridge University review of the primary curriculum found. Children are leaving school lacking knowledge about the arts and humanities having spent too many years “tied to a desk” learning times tables, the head of the review, Robin Alexander, said.
The report says schools should be allowed to make more decisions about what and how they teach. The review accuses the government of attempting to control what happens in every classroom in England, leading to an excessive focus on literacy and numeracy in an “overt politicisation” of children’s lives. Despite this too many children still leave primary school having failed to master the 3Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic). The compulsory daily act of worship should be reviewed and a curriculum that values knowledge and understanding as well as basic skills should be brought in, it says.
Independent of the government and funded through charitable donations, the review is based on three years of academic research, 29 research papers and dozens of public meetings around the country. It marks 40 years since the last wholesale review of primary education and presents a blueprint for a curriculum that would give teachers control of 30% of their time to teach what they want.
Primary school teachers claim that the initiatives would damage pupils, force schools into competition and distort teaching at a crucial stage. Joan Edwards, a primary teacher from Birmingham, said, “We as teachers want a more balanced education for our children. We want children to develop a love of reading, not reading for a test,” she said.
1-5. Choose whether the statements are True (T) or False (F) and, to justify your choice, provide your proof from the text in your own words.
Example : (0) The statement is true because the narrator has never read a single book in the original and has not demonstrated any interest in the subject.
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1. Teachers disapprove of the assessment of young pupils because tests are not based on a natural learning environment, which is of vital importance in primary school.
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2. The new assessment system in primary school has decreased the number and the range of skills tested.
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3. The new assessment system in primary school is viewed as a progressive step forward by the majority of teachers.
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4. The leaders of the National Union of Teachers are alarmed by the fact that teachers are deprived of the right to determine what primary school education should be like.
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5. The introduction of the new assessment system hasn’t contributed to the improvement of the skills taught at the primary school level.
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