My Primary School work experience- Day 1 and 2

In preparation for my PGCE, I am doing a week's worth of work experience in two different Primary Schools. Ones is a small village school a short train ride away with only four classes and the second one is the local town school in which there are eight. While the first one is Church of England 'owned' which means that the church only owns the building, the second one is (confusingly enough) 'aided' by the catholic church, which means that the church pays for both the staff and the building. I was actually only suppsed to work in the first one, but as it turned out that there are very few language lessons on offer, I decided to search for a second primary school to have a comparison and experience more mfl teaching.

So far, so good. Since this year, it is compulsary for primary schools in the UK (catering for Year 1 to 6) to introduce one modern foreign language from Year 3 onwards. This has both advantages and disadvantages. While it is great that children are exposed to mfl from a young age on, the school can choose which language they would like to teach and as such this might result in students arriving at their secondary school with different stages of knowledge of different languages. Secondly, almost none of the current primary school teachers are trained to teach a foreign language and many are scared to learn and teach something they have no experience in. With only 25% of GCSE students this year taking one mfl, this trend will only worsen in the next years.

Due to this reason, many teachers completely rely on pre-made books and resources. In a French lesson I watched in the local school today, the teacher proudly showed me how there was no further need to prepare lessons at all: you open the teacher guide book, start the smartboard and download a video from the internet. Very scary. But even worse than this was the horrible disciple in the school. Children were constantly shouted at ('Do what you are told, not what you want!'), bombarded with useless questions ('Why did you drop that pensil? Why? Why? Answer me!') and their spirits were constantly diminished by the teacher ('Don't stick up for your friend, it is not worth it!' and 'I don't want you in my class and I bet the teacher next door does not like you either'). One girl who had started crying because somebody else had hidden her shoes on the corridor was screamed at to pull herself together. Nobody listened to the children and frankly I was more than posivily surprised that they even participated in the lessons at all.

My original school however, Barrington Primary School, is a lot better and in my opinion that has very little to do with the fact that the school and the classes are smaller, but primarily with the staff. Every teacher addresses all of the kids with their names and they are always treated with love and respect. Even when they do something wrong, they are not made to feel that they are unwelcome but they are gently corrected and no big drama is made of the small mistakes. The whole learning environment is just completely different. The rooms are colourful and children are given time to complete their tasks at their own pace. There are still some questionable reward/punishment ideas going on (writing lines and gold stars) but i would much rather send my children there than to the other school!