Arithmetic out, climate change in — to protect students' mental health
Multiplication table tests a 'waste of time'
One of the goals of former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had a successful career in the financial sector before entering politics, was to obligate all students up to the age of 18 to study Mathematics and English. In a press release issued in 2023, his government stated that an “overhaul of the system” would be undertaken,
... to give young people the skills they need for the future and revolutionize how Mathematics are taught in our schools. Under the new plans, every student will for the first time be required to study some form of Mathematics and English to age 18. This will help reverse the long-term trend whereby too many students — particularly the most disadvantaged — leave school without achieving the minimum standard in literacy and numeracy.
Sunak’s plans never came to fruition, and now, with the Labour party in power, the pendulum seems set to swing drastically in the opposite direction.
The Labour party is heavily supported by labor unions, and recently, a senior teachers' union source told The Telegraph that the unions want to see compulsory testing on multiplication tables for elementary school students scrapped.
We are not saying children shouldn’t learn times tables. They are really helpful. But the need to have the times table check is a bit of an unnecessary waste of time.
Responding, Prof. Alan Smithers of Buckingham University told The Telegraph:
If the government wants to give children the best possible start in life in the fundamentals of Mathematics and English, it should politely turn aside these requests.
Given that PM Keir Starmer has already bowed to the unions several times since taking office, and handed out pay rises even while slashing winter fuel grants to old-age pensioners, it seems unlikely that his government will find the courage to face up to the powerful teachers’ unions.
No more emulating Singapore's successes
The Multiplication Tables Check, as it is called, is an online test that all Year 4 students (aged 8 to 9) take. It includes 25 questions on the times tables, with a 3-second pause between each one. It was introduced in 2018, and last year, 29 percent of students scored full marks.
According to the UK government’s website, the Times Tables Check was one of several educational reforms instituted by the Conservative party during its time in office, “reflecting international best practice from countries such as Singapore and China,” after years of mounting concern that the UK was falling behind internationally.
Then-Conservative Schools Minister Damian Hinds insisted that the Check was important in ensuring that children gained basic skills as building blocks for later achievements:
Every stage of school is an opportunity to set children up to succeed and ensure they are learning the skills they need for life.
Mastering times tables by age 9 will make sure children can tackle more complex Mathematics later on in life as well as help them with everyday adult activities.
That is why it’s so exciting that these checks show more children are learning their times tables in primary schools alongside our phonics screening check which has seen an increase in results since last year. Together our reforms are driving up standards in our schools hand in hand with the hard work of teachers.
Homework set to be scrapped too?
Teachers, however, insist that the tests, which take mere minutes to take, are an “unnecessary” stressor for children. Another “unnecessary” stressor, in the eyes of many, is homework.
Nadeine Asbali is a secondary school teacher in London.
I’m a teacher and believe that homework should be banned.
Asbali claims that “parents are fed up with the amount of homework their children are expected to do,” and that they struggle to find time to fit in other activities and “simply spend time together as a family.”
It feels like homework is leaving less and less time for children — and their parents — to have a life beyond school.
She notes that the State of California is poised to pass the Healthy Homework Act, which will limit the amount of homework that can be assigned, and insists that this reflects a worldwide anti-homework movement.
Asbali complains that homework takes an “emotional toll on children with developing brains and bodies that need nurturing (and resting) rather than overburdening,” and that last year, “almost two-thirds of children reported feeling anxious due to school and the most prominent factor in their stress, experienced by 55 percent of children, was homework."
She also notes that homework stress can be most acutely felt by students from poor homes where housing is cramped and children often have more responsibilities than their wealthier peers, as their parents are overextended and often not present.
In an ideal world in which every young person had the same resources at their disposal, maybe homework wouldn’t be so bad. But we live in a system on its knees thanks to the economic policies of successive governments that have made life progressively harder for the most disadvantaged.
If we really care about tackling inequality, we need to realize that it is unfair to assign a portion of our young people’s daily learning to be done at home. We forget that “home” looks so different for each child.
Unions: Exam results irrelevant to future employment?
While Asbali makes some pertinent points, she omits to mention that education can be a pathway out of poverty for disadvantaged children who would likely benefit greatly from gaining competence in basic Mathematics and English. Homework has traditionally been a key method of helping children to consolidate their knowledge in after-school hours. And while “spending time together as a family” could be a pleasant alternative for some children once freed of homework obligations, the disadvantaged children she claims to be so concerned about would be unlikely to reap any benefit from the free time — and would no longer have the excuse of “sorry, homework” whenever asked to do yet another a chore.
Of course, virtually no students like homework and teachers don’t like having to impose it. Apparently, teachers don’t like administering tests either, and some think that the whole notion of testing should be rethought. While school-leavers’ tests at age 16 and 18 aren’t under attack by the teachers’ unions yet, Year 6 examinations (taken at age 10 to 11, at the end of elementary school) are.
According to Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, exams cause anxiety and have minimal benefit for both students and future employers:
[We have] high levels of anxiety in young people because they sit so many exams. Exams are a good way of testing what you can remember and a good indicator of academic skills, but they are not necessarily the skills employers are crying out for.
Daniel Kebede, the general secretary of the National Education Union, England’s largest teachers’ union, agrees that testing “worsens” children’s mental health, and insists that elementary schools should “prioritize the education and well-being” of pupils and “put an end to high-pressure government testing.”
Tests are often designed to hold schools to account rather than support teaching and learning, and place intense pressure on children, families and school staff. Children should not be losing sleep in the name of holding schools accountable.
Replacing grammar with 'greenskills'
Union leaders and teachers’ representatives claim that they are not seeking to eliminate examinations entirely, but only to “simplify” testing, for instance by removing “complicated” grammar questions from Year Six tests.
We are not saying let’s abandon knowledge. But there is an awful lot in the primary curriculum.
Do we really need primary children to know about modal verbs and fronted adverbials? Why don’t we strip that back? Let’s do fewer things, but better.
Curiously, the unions are simultaneously calling for “fewer things” to teach and more alternative-style topics to be added to the compulsory curriculum — such as climate change.
[We should be] teaching about climate change, nature, and greenskills [sic.]
Don't worry about Mathematics — but do worry ... about the world
While teaching “green skills” (whatever they may be) to young children sounds relaxing and beneficial to their mental health and emotional wellbeing, surveys and reports show that encouraging awareness of the so-called climate crisis has the opposite effect. According to Save the Children UK, 70 percent of children are “worried about the world they will inherit.”
In a report compiled by Save the Children in 2022, they quote one child as saying,
A lot of the time we can feel powerless and out of control and people tend to be scared of things that they can't control. The heat waves and storms really worry me because they are a clear sign of the consequence of inaction or action by humans.
Save the Children surveyed 3,000 children prior to COP27, a meeting of world leaders to discuss environmental issues, and found that 75 percent of them wanted the government to take “stronger action” on the “climate and inequality crisis.”
The survey also found that worries about the climate are negatively impacting children's emotional health:
Some 60% think climate change and inequality are affecting their generation’s mental health in the UK. More than half (56%) believe it [sic.] is also causing a deterioration in child mental health globally.
Climate anxiety is good anxiety!
Caroline Hickman of the University of Bath, who describes herself as a "climate anxiety expert," justifies the state of alarm and seems to actually welcome it:
Why wouldn’t children worry when they look at the state the world is currently in? An increase in climate disasters, on track to become worse, and deepening inequality. They are aware this is the world they are growing up in, and it seems no one is taking their concern seriously.
Children care about the world and what is happening — these figures reflect exactly that. Their response is natural, in fact, healthy. The solution to ease climate anxiety is actually quite simple: taking urgent action on the climate crisis and inequality [emphasis added].
Apparently, there’s healthy stress and unhealthy stress. And only the government and its minions know how to distinguish between the two.
