No more Dick Turpin teaching

Much has been learned about the way children learn over the past decades and the concept of rote-learning has been fairly well demolished as a strategy, even if many of us worry slightly that a slide away from traditional learning methods may leave students short in something, somewhere. 

When my youngest son started at his primary school, I, like many of my co-parents, was slightly aghast that learning was not undertaken in what I would consider to be a structured manner. 

The school heads, Neil Hopkin and Kate Atkins, set out a strategy document outlining their approach: “The new generation of interdependent learners are rejecting the bells, whistles and fixed schedules of mass instruction, are rejecting irrelevant, unapplied knowledge, are saying a resounding ‘no’ to Dick Turpin style stand-and-deliver teaching, are questioning the logic of copying swathes of writing in class while being banned from ignorantly copying from the web at home and are refusing to be complicit in a model of learning that is ‘delivered’ rather like milk once was.”