Wasted Years? Review

by Andrea Burrell,
Student Teacher in English

Ofsted’s ‘Wasted Years’ document highlighted the concerns of the HMCI and sharpened many a secondary school Head Teacher’s mind on the 11-14yr olds in their schools. Sir Michael Wilshaw has reiterated Ofsted’s keen focus on Key Stage 3 under the new framework and the blogosphere is awash with stories of schools falling from Outstanding and Good to RI as a result of too great a focus on pastoral, rather than academic continuity at this transition point.

It would be naïve to imagine that it is easy to address the problem of achieving a seamless KS2-3 progression. There are distinct differences for many primary and secondary schools in their approaches to pedagogy, curriculum design and assessment. Primary teachers tend to have a greater holistic understanding of the children in their class, borne out of spending the majority of their working week with one class; knowing each student’s strengths and weaknesses in depth and forming excellent partnerships with their parents. Secondary schools lose much of this intimacy in favour of increased structure, variety of subjects and specific subject knowledge.  Secondary schools, however, are not taking advantage of the knowledge and experience of their primary colleagues, often seeing Year 7 as a ‘fresh start’ and, at worst, discarding previous assessment of a child’s performance as unreliable. There has been some justification for this scepticism in the past and the uncertainty caused by life after levels is fuelling secondary schools’ anxiety over students’ prior attainment on entry. 

Anyone who has taken more than a cursory glance at the KS2 English curriculum will know that it has the potential to strike fear into all but the most expert of English Language specialists. Despite Ofsted’s report, this matter isn’t as simple as castigating secondary schools for their failings. The concept of a Year 7 dip is also not unique to England. In their research the NFER confirmed that the dip happens but also that this is a common issue in many jurisdictions around the world, many of which are often used as examples of education systems that outperform the UK in PISA tests. This research would suggest that it is not merely a fault of the system, rather that there are also significant human development factors to consider during this period of middle childhood.