Pastoral Care Matters in Primary and Middle Schools

Tony Charlton, Kenneth David

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9781138162679
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134787043
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This wide ranging book offers a fresh survey of the pastoral needs of primary age pupils, and pupils in early adolescence for both trainee and practising teachers. This book is divided into four main sections:
* Principles considers the future needs of children, learning processes, the planning and implementation of a pastoral programme, and the co-ordination of personal and social education
* Aspects of Pastoral Care develops six specific pastoral approaches: welfare and liaison, health and medical services, life crises and counselling, managing behaviour, bullying, and starting secondary school
* Viewpoints has three personal statements: television viewing, core values for teachers and parents, and the professionalism of teachers
* In An Agenda for Discussion the editors comment on the various chapters of the book and add extra material on pastoral care and personal and social education

Part I
PRINCIPLES

1

EDUCATION IN THE MARKET PLACE

Kenneth David

This chapter attempts a personal reflection on the world our young pupils may be living in as adults. As well as dealing with the immediate horizons of our daily work, teachers have an idealism obligation, and we can perhaps peer ahead to guess at the relevance of what we are teaching now.

INTRODUCTION

We have to sell our educational planning ideas in the market place characterised by a very critical public opinion nowadays, and hopefully those plans are focused on what our children need from us for their future lives. We can reasonably be questioned about what our aims are. A lot of people talk of living one day at a time, coping with the problems of the moment; teachers can argue, ‘It’s enough to do to deal with the load of this school day, and yes, maybe the week ahead, but that’s my lot. Don’t expect me to talk about twenty-first century needs’. Memory and attention spans have great limitations, and even among professional workers imaginative planning ahead can be one burden too many. Perhaps planning for the future is the job solely of senior leadership, though that seems a reduction in individual professionalism. When visiting schools I used to worry about head teachers and their staffs who were immersed always in detailed daily chores, and who never seemed able to stop to plan much ahead. Well, someone in every school must keep asking, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘How?’ and, even more so, ‘For what end?’, ‘What exactly is this school selling?’

In less developed communities abroad that I once knew there were few such questions. A child learned what was necessary for survival from his or her family, then, after initiation rites, from the peer group and finally from the discussions of the tribal elders. The Why? and How? were obvious—self survival and the preservation of the clan. The future meant a day ahead. I spent absorbing years in Africa introducing education in one such area, and shaping education in neighbouring districts which were far more advanced, some with growing urban development. The purpose of all that education was a constant question. What were the basic necessities for a remote and simple village, and for a sophisticated town setting with growing industry and an increasing demand for university graduates? We were trying, with African colleagues learning to replace us, to forecast the future needs of their people. Was it to be academic, agricultural or technical? Were they heading for farms or factories in twenty years’ time? Sadly, what we did not prepare them for was civil war.

In Britain now we have in one primary school class children destined for prosperous professions and others apparently destined to be unskilled and unemployed for at least part of their lives. What are the educational needs of both kinds of children, and how best do we prepare them for life?

FUNDAMENTALS

The fundamental Why? is fairly obvious in a modern society. Children have to be able to read and write and be numerate. There is an obligation in primary schools to teach fundamentals well, better than in the past few years. We have modern resources in the form of well-educated teachers, books, reading schemes, and TV and computer technology. There is no excuse now for failing. There may be difficulties, particularly in family and community support, and in meeting special educational needs, but there is no real excuse for finding many children unable to cope with fundamental skills. And those skills need constant renewal and practice for they fade if left unattended. Included among such skills is speech, a sometimes forgotten part of being literate. To chat about things, to put words together clearly, to discuss an idea, to put a point of view, to give an opinion and to learn to listen are as essential as reading.

With so many passive leisure pursuits, and with democracy disappearing into pressure groups, perhaps being articulate is a fundamental survival skill. The Why?, therefore, is fairly obvious in primary education. We are providing foundation skills, and continuing to practise them well into secondary education, to ensure they last into the adulthood of every child. The How? also seems reasonably obvious, for we surely have competence in imparting such skills, and splendid technology and materials to help in motivating and interesting children, despite the competition that sometimes emanates from their backgrounds. In a parallel competence one thinks of the considerable skills of the armed services in educating recruits, not only improving their literacy but then giving them impressive skills with sophisticated weaponry and apparatus. Surely we must be good at basic teaching? Are teachers not the experts in these matters? When we extend the How? into subjects other than basic literacy skills, the expertise should follow. After the interesting debates over the content of the primary and secondary curriculum we seem to have settled to an acceptable range of selected knowledge, and there should be no difficulties in our methodology in other subject areas in primary and middle schools. The content has been endlessly argued; perhaps more thought has gone into lists of themes than into the fact that good teachers’ enthusiasms can usually capture the imagination of most children. Creating enthusiastic learners seems the major task—an enthusiasm for varied interests. I sometimes think it is almost as important to produce an enthusiastic recruit to a lifelong hobby as it is to shine in test results. There is so much knowledge available that our job in schools is to create curiosity about the vastness of information, and to begin to give pupils the skills of managing and gaining access to the particular knowledge they need, as well as remembering the outlines of subjects. We are only offering ‘tasters’ of different subjects, rather than pretending to equip them with a life’s supply of facts.

Setting aside the personal factor of special educational needs, failure in the teaching of the fundamental skills, as in the teaching of the whole area of primary and lower secondary curricula will probably lie in one of three areas: an uninterested family or community background, a lack of commitment and enthusiasm in the teaching, or a failure of the school leadership to provide the right ethos and setting.

FOR WHAT?

For What? takes more thought for we may have to look far ahead. We can deal with the foundation skills and the imposed curriculum of the primary and middle school, but as educationists we will be considering cross-curricular matters, some of them themes listed in this chapter. We can consider other dimensions of our teaching and of the knowledge we are putting over, give children differing emphases and implications of the facts we are using, encourage new or important interests as we range over the classroom lessons, use examples even in the simplest subject teaching which serve more than one purpose. This ‘matrix’ thinking is the way cross-curricular teaching becomes effective. We are teaching pupils the straightforward curriculum programme, but are always considering the background of cross-curricular demands, with our agenda of ideas of health education, community values, moral and social education, and perhaps some of the following aspects of the future of our pupils.

Passivity

We are seeing the watching generation, the passive cohorts, the couch potatoes of the brave new world, in many of the pupils facing us in the classroom today. Tony Charlton reflects more deeply on this in Chapter 11. This passivity is likely to grow as television expands with satellite choices, and with little likelihood of effective regulation. A headline in my newspaper today reads, ‘75 per cent of schools skimp on sport’, a passivity caused by classroom demands. The following page has an article saying, ‘Television has made [children’s mental] problems worse by killing communication in the home’. A report from the Henley Centre for Forecasting recently claimed that middle-class families were only (sic) watching twenty-three hours of TV each week, and lower-income families thirty-four. The first TV game show for 3-year-olds, ‘Fun Games’, is in production in 1995. There are constant reminders, admittedly alarmist at times, which point to some isolation or passivity factor among pupils. In the USA a recent book by Lasch (1995) published posthumously, argues that the lively and intellectually active elites are convinced that they have brains and that ordinary people have none. The new elites are mobile, cosmopolitan, ambitious and contemptuous of Middle America, of home, family and neighbours. The passive majority and the active minority exist in our own classrooms, and our own society perhaps? Presumably some answers lie in lively teaching, though I recall exhausting myself and my primary school class once years ago, with something called, I think, ‘Activity Maths’, which was a grave mistake. Lively and interesting teaching, trying to fight passivity or tiredness (and not retreating to the enjoyment of concentrating on the brightest pupils) is very hard work, but it is part of our professional task in fighting lazy thinking. So is team teaching, and specialised subject teaching in primary schools, so that the pupils face the challenge of differing personalities. We can challenge children intellectually far more than we do in many schools. We do mollycoddle pupils at times. I knew an educational psychologist once who argued fiercely that it was quite possible to teach philosophy to infants. I am not sure about infants, but I am sure that we often underestimate the capabilities of primary children, and, in passing, one pictures an even more youthful version of Jostein Gaarder’s adventure in philosophy, Sophie’s World (1995).

Violence

Whether there is in fact more violence in our society than in the past is constantly debated, though a recent British crime survey indicates that there is. There has always been city violence and the violence of wars. But the majority of parents and teachers that one meets still appear to think that we live in a harsher world, if we exclude wartime, and one with more assertive and overt crime, and much less respect for authority. There is evidence of this in schools also, and teachers may face violent pupils from the infant school upwards. Christ Church College, Canterbury, conducting a survey for the government, points to more than 10,000 expulsions a year, for varying reasons, from primary and secondary schools. Some 15 per cent of these are from the primary sector. We also meet with confrontational and sometimes violent parents.

The challenge of drugs in our society and in our schools adds to violence and crime, and reveals an emptiness in the lives of the apathetic and the inadequate, as well as among pupils from more prosperous and intelligent families. The Economist in December 1994, under the heading ‘There are no children here’, suggested that gangs have turned America’s inner-city streets into war zones, with the drug trade and the spread of powerful guns commonly blamed, but with teenage nihilism as possibly the most lethal factor of all. One state authority in Germany, alarmed by a sharp increase in classroom violence, plans to send teachers on judo and martial arts courses (including the use of an umbrella in self-defence). The drop-out rates for teachers—once one of the highest rated professions in Germany—are now among the worst in Europe. The complaints procedure of the Children Act (1989) alarms our teachers, who may face more unjust accusations from pupils. Dyfed Education Authority’s recent Stress Report for School Staff (1984) reveals the authority’s anxiety over stress levels among staffs. Jack Dunham (1992) points out in some detail that change has been rapid since 1988, and teachers in primary and secondary schools are now doing what in some ways can be said to be a quite different job. Stress itself is a kind of violence, and surely behind all the other management reasons for teacher stress lies our own unquiet society and its children.

So, we are obliged to warn children they are eventually to manage a potentially violent world? (A world, by the way, in which there are now some 200 disparate states with only twenty or thirty peacefully well-governed.) Or perhaps we just work harder to give them a peaceful school setting as a contrast to the world outside, a peaceful setting in which we actually emphasise for the children how to cope with the violence of others, how to discuss instead of argue, and the drills of conflict resolution. After we have done all that we will constantly fail. Should we persist in trying?

Work

There is an increasing gap between rich and poor in our society, even though the poverty is relative compared with the past. In 1977 the income of the richest 20 per cent of Britons was four times that of the poorest 20 per cent, but by 1991 the multiple increased to seven. At the same ti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface by Professor Ronald Davie
• Introduction
• Part I Principles
• Part II Aspects of pastoral care
• Part III Viewpoints
• Part IV An agenda for discussion
• Index