So the new timetable…..

I finally got my letter inviting comments on the proposed timetable changes. It’s somewhat ironic that the letters were issued to pupils at an assembly as one of the first things I noticed in the proposal is… no more assemblies!

One has to wonder how school-wide stuff is going to be communicated in the future since also missing is… registration!

I don’t think I’m being cynical when I say that there’s no way pupils will hit the ground running straight into a lesson at 08:55 every morning. Who will issue exeats? Who will process absence notes or requests? Who will hand out vaccination letters? A different teacher every day? So you tell one teacher you will be off the next day and a different teacher will acquire  this information telepathically? They will just know why you’re not in their class at 08:55? Your classmates won’t know since it will be a different class and I’m not banking on SEEMIS suddenly acquiring a degree of reliability. If you get a vaccination authorisation sheet from one teacher one morning in Chemistry then hand it back the next day to a Maths teacher, or maybe a French teacher the following day, or whoever, since every morning will begin with a different teacher,  with a different set of pupils, who will keep track of who has handed in what? Or not?

Who will announce special assemblies? Oops silly me no assemblies. So how will pupils hear about special events? Charity days? Sports  and other club announcements? Where will pupils get together to hear and celebrate school-wide success stories and initiatives? I appreciate the DIS has all this information (at least I hope it does and I assume it’s on a website somewhere in the seventh level of GLOW, on a URL that just rolls off your tongue… quite) but relying on pupils to seek it out and engage with it is just daft. They are teenagers, the don’t seek out their own clean socks. But I encourage them to wear clean socks and similarly they need encouraged to engage with the life of their school.

There are only two options. Either all this admin and ethos building just stops or the period 1 teachers have to do it. And from the teachers perspective that’s administrating and engaging and encouraging a different set up pupils every day with no opportunity to get to know any of them or what they are up to!

What a crock.

Over the years my children have often made good use of registration/assembly time chasing up a myriad of administrative titbits, handing in trip monies or permission slips, arranging guidance meetings, delivering letters to the office. It’s sometimes the only time of day they know where teachers are going to be. And yes they have also spent countless lunch hours, or should I say lunch 50 minutes, wandering the length and breadth of the school failing to find a teacher they need to see. Often about rather important stuff.  Mornings are not the only time they can do any of these things but it’s often the most successful.

I think daily contact with one teacher and the same groups of peers is valuable. It doesn’t have to be scheduled first thing, but I think it needs to happen at SOME point in the day, to touch base, facilitate communication, provide some degree of consistency and  build a lasting relationship with at least ONE member of staff, a relationship that doesn’t require time out of lessons to be pursued (i.e. guidance… where DO guidance teachers go when they’re not guidancing? Is there a secret guidance lair in the basement where they hide? Are the walls papered with ignored meeting requests and anti-bullying pamphlets? What sense have they evolved that means they always know when to retreat there? And did anyone tell Flakey where it is? Probably not….)

Talking about consistency. What a mess of a timetable! Two different morning interval times, two different lunch hours (sorry 50 minutes) and stupid stupid stupid period finishing times in fractions of a 5 minute slot. That’s all I’m going to say on that. It’s messy.

And the electives?

As I understand the current proposal, three extra periods a week are to be allocated to each year as follows:-

• S1: 1 period of Art, 1 period of Tech and 1 period of Personal Support (S1 already have electives timetabled)
• S2: 1 period of Business and 2 periods of electives
• S3/4: An extra subject (they will now choose 9 rather than 8 and have no electives or Personal Support timetabled)
• S5/6: 1 period of Personal Support and 2 periods of electives

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

In its first incarnation, when this was presented to parents, the S5/6 electives were wonderful. Practical, healthy, arty crafty, socially responsible, work ethical, you name it. Originally three periods a weeks, with the (suggested) choices of dressmaking, knitting, photography, cooking on a budget, driving school, community service (I think that means charity work and not actual community service), work experience and keep-fit. It sounded fabulous, my children were enthused and I was ready to tick the YES box whilst retaining a degree of scepticism regarding who was going to agree to deliver all these  courses.

My children are now of the impression that what will actually be offered for senior electives is two periods from SE, PE, RE, self-study, community service (little criminals again) and work experience.

1-nil to my scepticism, but I’ll be happy to hear otherwise.

Starting at the bottom, Work Experience. With the best will in the world no pupil is going to be able to get to and from any work placement in the space of a 50 minute period, never mind a 48 minute period or a 47 minute period. Not without being beamed there and back. They’d even be struggling if they were granted two periods back to back. I’m not anticipating many employers considering this for many pupils to be honest.

Community Service (no orange jumpsuits). S6 has traditionally been the year when senior pupils were able to dedicate some time to fund raising activities and organising senior social events. It’s kind of like a reward for lasting six years isn’t is? Other than each house’s chosen charity fund raisers (which amounts to 1 non-uniform day each), fundraising events attached to Perth Academy this past year have been skewed towards 6 pupils who are going to Peru in June with the Vine Trust. There’s a limit to how much everybody else’s parents are willing to pay for other people’s kids to travel the world for a spot of poverty tourism. The next World Challenge group are about to start rattling their cans. This issue is a whole other post but suffice to say my definition of charity is somewhat at odds with all these groups. The current S5/6 cohort is big. Getting that number of pupils involved in external volunteering or community projects is not going to be easy and will be restricted in the same way as work experience, there won’t be  enough time.

Self-study. At the moment S6 pupils following a rigorous timetable including Advanced Highers are permitted to have a column dedicated to self-study. I have no idea what the uptake is but again, with ALL S5/6 pupils having this option for even 1 period a week I’ve got to wonder where they’re going to go. Timetabling is a nightmare, but fundamentally it’s built around the subject choice columns and I am dying to see how many of the S5/6 pupils will be out on self-study at the same time….. going to need a bigger library?

PE/RE/SE. No. Just NO. Please let them be wrong on this.

So it’s not really looking as good as it did a few months ago. And now I don’t even have a YES box or a NO box to tick.

One final thought…

What exactly IS Personal Support? And why are S3/4, the pupils seeing the biggest increase in their academic workload, deemed not in need of it?

Hurry Up And Wait

It’s been almost three months since the rector at Perth Academy first presented selected parent groups with proposals to change the subject choice and times of the school day effective with the new timetable at the start of June 2012. As far as I know only S2 and S4/5 parents have heard officially which makes some sense as those are the years picking subjects.

But since then – nothing.

No consultation, no meetings, nothing.

If, as I suspect, PKC have given the proposal for varying length days and varying finish times the big heave, shouldn’t the parents who were fleetingly presented with all these options be told?

As things are we’re all sort of twiddling our thumbs waiting on the next move. We don’t know what the heck is going on and neither do our children.

All talk and no action is getting to be awfully predictable.

CfE and all that

I’ve been scared to go near Curriculum for Excellence as the situation seems to be changing daily.

Ultimately I only have one question. Why the bloody hell are school’s not ready for CfE?

It’s not as if the new curriculum has sneaked up behind them and shouted BOO!

It’s been YEARS in the planning.

YEARS!

For crying out loud how long do these people NEED?

You’d think with Perth Academy “going for it” with regard to Nationals I’d be cheering them on…

However, the real changes Curriculum for Excellence can bring about are not the exams. It’s all the rest,  the broad, multi-disciplinary education up to S3, new and innovative ways of delivering that education, new focus on what education is actually FOR and how it is DONE.

And taking 9 subjects in S3 rather than 8 doesn’t strike me as meeting the challenge.

And surely that’s all dependent on the new timetable being approved anyway.

And maybe they will decide to delay and go for Ints now they have that option.

Who knows?

It will all work out in the end. It always does. Standard Grade did. Even comprehensive education was once new and scary….. mind you it hadn’t really caught on at Perth Academy by the time I left in the mid 1980s so who’s to say, maybe the place is just too conservative.

My kids want me to vote in favour of the new timetable. They want a Friday afternoon off and are (allegedly) willing to rise earlier each morning to get it.

I’ll believe it when I see it. They are children and often what they think is best for them isn’t.  And them getting up earlier is really just me getting up earlier and shouting at them to get up for longer.

Could be fun I suppose.

Talking of fun, I think I could run a book going on what the S2s will have sat by the time they reach S5.

I predict that English will be a mix of fast tracked SGs and Int1 and Int2s, Maths will be Int1 or Int2 and the rest are screwed.

Actually I think most subjects would be able to accommodate Int1 or Int2 should that be the decision. They already use them as an alternative to sitting Highers in S5 so I assume there’s nothing new there.

But someone has to make the decision now.

Not soon.

Now.

It’s roughly nine weeks until the timetable changes.

Might want to get that timetable vote going or delay Nats and change to Ints or go back to 8 subjects or something.

Disturbing

Apparently the senior management team have spent the last few days going round classrooms telling pupils to undress. Not completely of course, but I have to ask why because it’s not just annoying it’s sure to be making some of them downright uncomfortable.

I remember back in primary school there were a few girls who started wearing bras quite young, maybe 10 or 11. Their development was met with a mixture of envy and ridicule by their classmates, both boys and girls. And they were easy to identify and target because you can see through school blouses.

There’s nothing forgiving about a school blouse. Even the ones from M&S are cheap, transparent affairs and not at all pleasant to wear, especially for the curvier girls… of which there are many more now than I remember when I was at school. It’s the nature of white tops and when I was at school I often wore a waistcoat or a pullover because, you know, school’s not the place to display one’s rack. When I discovered that a skin toned bra wasn’t glaringly obvious through my school blouse I tried wearing that but found myself being  pulled up regularly by the deputy head and accused of not wearing one at all!

So why are girls being forced to strip down to their blouses at Perth Academy?

You’d think they’d have enough to do tackling the more flamboyant girls who are happy to hike up their skirts and flaunt it with three button blouses without telling the (I imagine) majority, to get their tops off and… well what exactly? Does having one’s bra on display enhance learning somehow?

This one has me baffled.

Most teenagers are fairly conservative when it comes to their bodies, even the boys. My son wears a t-shirt under his school shirt. I’m not sure what security that affords the skinny boy… oh maybe I just answered that.

This is just plain creepy and the reason my son mentioned it is because the girls in his classes ARE uncomfortable with this demand.

How little understanding of teenagers can one man show?

So why Mr Smith? Why are you forcing your pupils to feel uncomfortable and exposed? And how is this furthering their education?

I just find it disturbing.

The Diagnosis

It appears our school is, indeed, sick.

Results of an FOI request into the number of teaching days lost to sickness show that my children, for once, are not exaggerating.

Roughly twice as many teaching days per teacher are lost at Perth Academy due to illness than at similar sized schools in Perth & Kinross.

It wasn’t always like this. Five years of data show that in the first two academic years, 2006/07 and 2007/08 teacher absence was similar to that at Perth High School, Perth Grammar School and Kinross High School.

But from 2008/09 onwards the figures tell a very different story. Whereas the other three schools maintain similar levels, Perth Academy’s really take off.

I’ve assumed that teaching numbers haven’t radically changed much in the last 5 years and applied the average pupil/teacher ratio of the other three schools to Perth High School’s 2011 roll to arrive at an estimate of 131 teaching staff.

By any measure, Perth Academy is pretty sick.

I’ve been to three meetings now where the rector Andrew Smith has presented tables of figures showing pupil achievement in SQA exams with the same introduction every time

… in the two years since I arrived at Perth Academy

I wonder if he would care to introduce this table the same way?

Somehow, I doubt it.

 

 

Two Tier Education in Perth & Kinross

There are two tiers of education in Perth & Kinross – the have’s and the have not’s.

It’s been the cause of huge personal resentment to me over the years, this inequality.

It’s shameful,

I am sick and tired of reading in the press and council publications about the wonderful education facilities Perth & Kinross provide, when the truth is they don’t.

St John’s Academy, Breadalbane Academy, Kinross High School, The Community School of Auchterarder and Crieff High – the total number of  secondary pupils accommodated in new build schools is 3069.

Perth Academy, Blairgowrie High, Perth High and Perth Grammar – the total number of secondary pupils accommodated in crumbling, unfit for purpose schools is 4369.

So next time you read about the wonderful schools in Perth & Kinross – do the maths.

Perth Academy, on its current site, opened in 1935.  It’s nearly 80 years old and it shows. Most of the classrooms are small, cramped and wood panelled, the corridors are cold and bleak and don’t even ask about the toilets. If you are a parent, next time you are up there at a Parent’s Evening take a look around. Marvel at the yellow windows (they were the cheapest option apparently), and the mish-mash of architecture representing a myriad of decades – the bits from the 1960s or is it the 1970s? There’s definitely some 1980s in there –  shoved on at each end.

But take a really good look at the inside.

See if you can find any open learning spaces, any computers, any colour, any light.

Surely I’m not the only one, who after visiting the Perth Academy, is left with an overwhelming urge to wash my hands?

Honestly – is it somewhere YOU would want to spend the bulk of your day?

I’ve heard Perth High School is leaking to the point where it’s not even remotely funny any more. Perth Grammar is no doubt suffering from similar symptoms of the “chuck it up it’s only got to last 20 years” approach to school building typical of the 60s and 70s.

It might be no worse than what our generation experienced, but THAT’S NOT ENOUGH.

Not when there are 3069 pupils in this authority enjoying the absolute best that can be built, whilst the other half (and more) languish in dumps.

Follow, Follow, We Will Follow

East Renfrewshire??

It seems the Prom Queen of Scottish Local Authorities, East Renfrewshire, has decided to postpone introduction of the new National 4 and 5 qualifications for a year.

It is expected that other authorities will follow, since this is one instance in which they can follow East Renfrewshire with little or no effort.

Perth & Kinross will not find it easy though. In typical disjointed fashion there IS no authority wide diktat on SQA presentation. Each school has been free to try what it likes and we find ourselves in a situation where PKC schools offer a mish-mash of Standard Grades and Intermediates in both S3 and S4.

So what will PKC do?

East Renfrewshire already abandoned Standard Grades authority wide so running with Intermediates for a year before moving to National 4/5 is easy enough for them, they HAVE a policy.

PKC don’t.

It’s going to be very hard for them to tell schools what do to when schools are already making it up as they go, piecemeal.

In Perth Academy’s case, delaying introduction of the National 4/5 exams for a year means the current S2s could, if parent’s vote for the new timetable, face the prospect of nine Standard Grades. That’s a lot of exams, in fact it’s up to EIGHTEEN as pupils usually sit Standard Grade at two levels, Foundation/General or General/Credit.

No pressure then.

I guess we sit on our hands and wait and see……