Margot's visit to an excellent primary school confirms worst fears about what has happened to primary education

Margot James visited Wollescote Primary School and met Head teacher Steve Eales, Chair of the governors Soraya Rowlands and governor Chris Fonteyn.

Margot was given a tour of the school and the chance to talk to staff and children. The children, aged from three upwards were well behaved, motivated and very keen to show off their work.

The school’s intake is 75% from ethnic minorities and 28% of the children have special needs. So the school faces significant challenges. But under the government’s inflexible target and accountability regime it is judged on exactly the same criteria as a school without any of these challenges. And given precious little extra support in the work they do to overcome the hurdles, chief among them being language.

Margot learned that a great many of the Asian children struggle with up to four languages. The spoken language in their home, for example Punjabi, the literary language in their home, Urdu, English taught and spoken at school and if they attend the after school class at the Mosque they will be taught the Koran in Arabic.

After the tour there followed an in depth and heartfelt discussion of the failure of Government education policy. Feelings and experience mirrored exactly what Margot was told when she visited Cradley Church of England Primary School earlier in the year. Issues were as follows:

• An overcrowded curriculum, time taken with subjects like citizenship and later on personal health and social education (PSHE) were squeezing out what should be taught in school and reducing time spent on physical education.
• The pressure on schools to be ‘at the centre of the community’ reaching out to different groups, taking over a social role of what should be the parenting function, and entirely without additional funding, was overstretching the capacity of the school and its staff.
• Despite all the money invested in schools there were no more teachers. The pressures on existing staff are intense as they cope with initiative after initiative that comes down from the Department of Children, Schools and Families. These iniaitives appear, several at a time, sometimes with money ring fenced for three years which then dries up.
• The ludicrous policy of every child having its own learning plan, the teacher having to prepare detailed plans for each lesson starting out at different points for each child. It is not necessary and creates an absurd and unachievable goal for teachers.

Margot said of her visit “I was really very impressed with the ethos of the school, the dedication of Steve, the governors and the teachers I met, most of all the children were quite adorable and it was a most enjoyable visit. However it brought home in a very daunting way how much needs to change in our schools. Bringing up children is the job of parents not schools, the government’s insidious blurring of the lines between family and school is undermining of both. It is terrible that children are not getting enough PE, hardly any time for art and music because schools are under the gun all the time from the government doing things that should be done in the home and focussing on a very narrow curriculum that limits a child’s educational horizons.