Are our Children Learning the Right Things in School?

The primary school curriculum in its present format won’t lay the necessary foundations for the smart economy that the government sees as fundamental towards preserving our competitiveness and enabling us to climb out of recession. In addition Principals are being denied a unique opportunity to lead by the imposition of antiquated systems that limit autonomy and innovation. So states Mr Seán Cottrell in his address to over 400 Deputy Principals at the annual Deputy Principals’ Conference of the Irish Primary Principals’ Network (IPPN) in Citywest Hotel, Dublin, today Friday 14th May.

‘What children are taught should be relevant to their lives and their futures, but does the revised curriculum in its present format meet the actual needs of children in 2010?’ asks Mr Cottrell, the Director of IPPN.‘In a worrying trend, some school leaders report a decline in standards of literacy and numeracy in the last decade which does not bode well for this much-hyped smart economy.

The revised curriculum has yet to deliver improved outcomes in these two most important of areas, and this will have a significant impact on our ability to produce graduates of the highest quality in future’, continued Mr Cottrell. ‘The time has now come to re-evaluate our overloaded primary curriculum in the light of multiple economic, social, cultural and technological changes in society which now determine that schools must prepare children for jobs which have not yet been invented.’ The Director also states that if education is to be relevant to children’s futures, schools must equip them with a far broader range of inter- and intra-personal skills to enable them to think critically, analyse, discern, communicate, solve problems and learn new skills. Success in these areas will be a measure of how our present curriculum is meeting needs.

The President of IPPN, Mr Pat Goff is critical of the government’s disjointed and underfunded National Strategy for ICT in Education and calls for an ICT infrastructure that enables children use technology to access the curriculum. ‘If technology is to be harnessed appropriately in the classroom, it can make the curriculum come alive and enable children learn at their own speed and challenge level with materials that are appropriate to their needs’, he states.