Michael Heylings wonders what pupils have to catch up on,
Maureen Bell points to the enormous task facing schools and
Toby Wood says Marcus Rashford needs to be in charge. Plus letters from
Helen Walker,
Tony Roberts
‘Do young children need to be competent in long division or tricky computation with fractions, or name esoteric grammatical terminology?’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
‘Do young children need to be competent in long division or tricky computation with fractions, or name esoteric grammatical terminology?’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
Letters
Thu 3 Jun 2021 13.41 EDT
Last modified on Thu 3 Jun 2021 13.43 EDT
Regarding the government’s catch-up plan for schoolchildren (Pupils in England to be offered 100m hours of tuition in Covid catch-up plan, June 2), no one seems to ask what is being caught up. Primary schools already have an overloaded curriculum; let them shed some of it. Do young children need to be competent in long division or tricky computation with fractions, or name esoteric grammatical terminology? Not teaching these and other abstruse points will save weeks of effort and tears. The government has sensibly abandoned Sats in primary schools in 2021. Let it now reduce the content of the unnecessarily burdensome curriculum.