Here is another collection of links to the latest education news stories:

• SATs for 11 year olds have too high a margin of error to be used to compare schools in league tables, according to the NUT and ATL, who have urged the government to scrap the tests for Year 6 pupils. The leader of the NUT has given hints that there could be another boycott of the SATs next year, although more notice would be given this time around.
• Trade Unions were outraged by the £200,000 pay package of a primary headteacher in south London. Michael Gove has written to the School Teachers’ Review Body to say that he wanted no headteacher to earn more than the prime minister. The TES have published a related article which explains that rocketing headteacher salaries are justified by the ‘mammoth pay packets of singers and footballing megastars’.

Image – Decus Et Tutamen

• Michael Gove has also published the Department for Education’s key policy commitments and invited the public to hold them to account on delivery.
• The chairman of Ofsted has explained that it is not ‘an absolute disaster’ if schools contain bad teachers.
• The scrapping of school building plans has cost education authorities at least £160m, according to the Local Government Association.
• Empty shops could be converted into schools, saving a third of the cost of starting a new building. Meanwhile, a report from the Auditor General for Wales has said that that school buildings in Wales are in a poor state and there is a long way to go before all of them will be ‘fit for purpose’.
• Reforms that will allow every school to become an academy will be rushed through at a pace usually reserved for emergencies such as anti-terror legislation. However, the Director of Education at Civitas has explained that academies are failing to teach traditional subjects in favour of less challenging qualifications in an effort to drive up results.
• Students will have to pay more for university, possibly through a graduate tax, according to the Business Secretary Vince Cable. University students will also be able to take low-cost two-year degree courses in order to save time and money before entering the world of work.
• Thousands of people could miss out on a university place in the UK this year after 660,953 people applied to start full-time undergraduate courses. The Lecturers Union fears that up to 170,000 people could be disappointed.

Image – Graduation Cake Guy

• The debate about school lunches continues as the chairman of the School Food Trust has criticised parents for filling children’s packed lunches with junk food.
• A Scottish government pledge that all school children receive two hours of physical education a week is not being met, according to new figures.
• A group of primary school children have been honoured by the Royal Society of Chemistry for disproving the theory that spiders are afraid of conkers.
• Do you want to get your children more interested in Maths? Why not find out more about the maths buskers who want to communicate the wonder of maths to people in the street!

ICT Goodies is a free resources sharing community setup and run by teachers. The creator of the site, Andrew Clarke, strongly believes in a culture of sharing good practice. He says:

“If I’ve created some great resources that the kids have enjoyed working with and have clearly made good progress, why would I want to keep them to myself? There are too many teachers out there who have a futile stance about keeping their resources to themselves; yes, you’ve spent lots of time making that PowerPoint, so why not let somebody else get some use out of it?”

www.ictgoodies.com

The site does require you to register, but this is free and easy. Why not sign up and share some of your resources? You can also visit other sites in the ‘Goodies’ franchise… Media Studies Goodies, PE Goodies and Business Goodies.

The World Cup has now started and lots of schools are using the event as a starting point for their lessons. Here are links to a selection of my favourite World Cup resource sites:

• Teaching Ideas – This is my own collection of lesson ideas, resources, display material, videos, links and more, which also includes lots of contributions from other teachers. This page is currently the most popular one on Teaching Ideas!

• Primary Resources – As always, Primary Resources, offers a huge collection of wonderful resources for you to explore.
• Communication4All – Bev Evans makes amazing Powerpoint presentations and display resources and she freely shares them on her website. This is well worth a look!
• TES – Lots of teachers contribute to the resource library at TES Connect, making it a great place to search if you’re looking for World Cup resources.
• Literacy Trust – Download lots of free World Cup resources from the Literacy Trust. You can also read a new chapter of a football story each day.
• TeachersTV – The team at TeachersTV have created this useful collection of videos and resources, linked to South Africa and the World Cup.

• International Education Sunderland – Clare Seccombe has produced this amazing site which has loads of freely downloadable content to use in your classroom. Thanks Clare!
• BBC – The BBC have lots of World Cup resources, including football training videos, class video clips about children in South Africa and an interactive wall chart and team tracker.

These are the sites that I will be using most over the coming weeks. What are your favourite World Cup resource sites?

QuadKids is a new athletics concept designed to give more children the opportunity to participate in and enjoy the benefits of track & field athletics and also to identify the stars of tomorrow. The scheme aims to be inclusive, competitive, quick, fun and simple to run. It is a team based quadrathlon competition where each athlete does a sprint, a middle distance run, a long jump and a throw, and it is primarily targeted at pupils aged between 7 and 13.

www.quadkids.org

Find out more about the scheme in the ‘About‘ section of their site, or register to download information about running a Quadkids event at your school.

Finally Gordon Brown has done something that I think is good – he has said that competitive sports will become the norm in all schools again.  He said:

"We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the ‘medals for all’ culture we have seen in previous years. It was wrong because it doesn’t work. In sport you get better by challenging yourself against other people. A lot of sports are team games where people have to work together but they play against other teams."

He also said in an attempt to encourage more girls to take up sport, female Olympic stars, including Dame Kelly Holmes, Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington, Victoria Pendleton and Beth Tweddle, would head up a new taskforce promoting sport to girls.

He announced that plans are also under way for a new website for school sports where teams will be able to compare their performance in nationwide league tables – is this instead of the SATs league tables?

Five schools in Worcestershire have used Wii consoles to get children who consistently missed PE lessons exercising. The scheme has been praised and there is the possibility other schools may follow. A spokesman for Droitwich and Worcester City School Partnership said:

“The use of computer games to increase physical activity levels and raise attainment to some would seem contradictory but with rigid structures in place and by using specific games students soon found themselves being active and engaged almost without realising it.”

However, Nick Seaton of the Campaign for Real Campaign has dismissed the idea that the Wii promotes fitness by stating pupils would be far better off in indulging in serious competitive sports rather than ‘this sort of thing’. He went on to say it is pandering to the views of the physically idle and looks like another gimmick. He said:

“Pupils would be far better doing serious competitive sports and games than this sort of thing. It looks like another gimmick. It’s pandering to the views of the physically idle.”

Last week an osteopath said he had seen a rise in the number of people with back strain from playing the consoles too much over the Christmas holiday. Martin Davies said he had 20 patients with “Nintendo Wii Syndrome” pass through his Cheshire practice in the fortnight after Christmas alone. Nintendo say it is easy for players “fully enjoy their games without causing injury to themselves” as long as they follow the safety guidelines.

However maybe we need more Wii’s in the classroom. A third of teachers struggle to use the technology schools are equipped with and want more support and training according to the NFER’s Teacher Voice Omnibus survey.

According to OFSTED primary schools may need to consult local mosques and involve families in their efforts to get all children in England swimming. Although most 11-year-olds did now reached the target of 25 metres some groups of pupils were missing out, including ethnic minorities with little experience of swimming. In a quarter of the 12 local authorities visited, the way that swimming facilities had been centralised meant pupils spent more than twice as long travelling to the pool as they spent in the water.

Most teaching of swimming was classed as good, with teachers often being qualified swimming instructors and good attention was paid in most instances to ensuring that appropriate account was taken of cultural issues, the report said. With regards to the lack of progress in ethnic minorities they said:

“Evidence from this small sample of schools suggested that pupils from some black minority ethnic groups often started with less experience of swimming than other groups and made the least progress. Providers did not always recognise or acknowledge this in their planning. Instances of good practice included consultation with a local mosque on how to improve participation of Muslim pupils, and family swimming programmes to involve parents from black minority ethnic groups.”

Gifted and talented swimmers were often not well catered for, the report said. And the tracking of the individual progress made by all pupils was generally not well done. Teaching was often less effective with pupils with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties. The swimming teachers lacked experience and confidence with these pupils and sometimes resorted to excluding them from lessons in the absence of other strategies.

My experience of swimming has been really mixed. Some authorities that I have worked for have really impressed me (Trafford) whilst others I feel let the children down (Warrington). In all of the schools I’ve been in apart from Manchester the travelling to the pool has taken longer than the swimming lesson which is awful!

The 2006/07 School Sport Survey found that 86 per cent of pupils now participate
in at least two hours of PE and school sport per week, meaning that the
Government has met its target – for 85 per cent to do two hours of PE and school
sport per week by 2008 – a year ahead of schedule.

Other key findings from the report, based on a survey of more than 21,700
maintained schools, show:

• Competitive sport is on the increase – 98 per cent of schools reported
  that they held at least one sports day during 2006/07, while a further 58 per
  cent of schools hold other intra-school competitions. Meanwhile, more than a
  third (35 per cent) of pupils were involved in inter-school competitions last
  year. Participation rates in inter-school competition vary by age, reaching a
  peak of 61 per cent among 10 to 11 year olds. All comparable figures show rises
  in the proportion playing competitive sport.
• The variety of sports offered at schools is rising – the average range of sports offered by
  primary school has increased to 16.0.
• Many schools are embracing non-traditional sports – the proportion of
  schools offering golf (up from 23 per cent to 31 per cent), cycling (up from 34
  per cent to 42 per cent), archery (up from 16 per cent to 22 per cent), canoeing
  (up from 24 per cent to 29 per cent) and orienteering (up from 55 per cent to 59
  per cent) have risen significantly over the last twelve months.
• Familiar sports remain pre-eminent in schools – the five most popular
  sports offered by schools are football (98 per cent), dance (96 per cent),
  gymnastics (95 per cent), athletics (93 per cent) and cricket (90 per cent).
• Schools are building more links with local clubs – schools now have
  links to seven different sports clubs. Two years ago, the average was just five.
  The most common links are with football clubs (78 per cent), cricket (56 per
  cent), dance (45 per cent), rugby union (44 per cent) and swimming (42 per
  cent).
• Schools are getting better at identifying sporting excellence – the
  proportion of pupils registered gifted and talented has more than doubled in
  four years – from 3 per cent in 2003/04 to 7 per cent this year.

Well done to us all!

A £100m campaign to give every child the chance of five hours of sport every
week was announced by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown on Friday.

He called for a ‘united team effort’ in the run up to 2012 to make sport
a part of every child’s day to build a greater sporting nation and a fitter
nation. He wants schools, parents, volunteers, coaches and the sports world to
offer the equivalent of an hour of sport to every child, every day of the school
week.

The plans include greater emphasis on competition within and between
schools, a network of competition managers and a new National School Sports
Week.
The new funding will provide:

• up to five hours of sport per week for all pupils, including two hours
  within the curriculum, and three hours for young people aged 16-19;
• a new National School Sport Week, championed by Dame Kelly Holmes where
  all schools will be encouraged to run sports days and inter-school tournaments.
  This will build on the success of the UK School Games and its impact on
  motivating young people to take part in competitive sport;
• a network of 225 competition managers across the country to work with
  primary and secondary schools to increase the amount of competitive sport they
  offer;
• more coaches in schools and the community to deliver expert sporting
  advice to young people.
  The Government will also challenge the sporting bodies to develop modern
  school sport competitions leading to local, regional and national finals.

The new funding builds on the £633 million already committed to creating
a world-class school sport and PE system over the next three years.

At present, 37 per cent of pupils take part in sporting competition between
schools, and 71 per cent within their own school. The measures and investment
announced today aim to ensure that all children get the opportunity to take part
in competitive sport, whatever their ability.

Mark Lupton has written an interesting article for the Guardian
on how sports have helped improve the SATs results in St Leonard’s
primary school, Lancashire.  It’s an interesting article, and certainly
one that you may want to read if you’re thinking about how your
playground could be used to it’s full potential.  The headteacher
finishes that article saying:

"The impact this has had here is remarkable – it’s a completely
different place now, it’s colourful and bright, it’s a vibrant and
dynamic place to learn. It has improved behaviour, our results are
better, the children are more confident and they have higher
aspirations, and we have far fewer cases of absenteeism in both staff
and pupils. Bullying is not an issue here.
 

The children are still coming in to the school at the same low baseline,
well below national expectations. The difference is they are leaving well above
those same national expectations."