In my opinion there are three major problems with education within the United Kingdom.
As parents, especially first-time parents, we are concerned with the development of our children. Are they late learning to crawl, walk, talk, read, and so on. Except in circumstances where there is a contributing medical factor our children end up being able to perform these tasks by the time they need them. My child may have been late learning to walk, but by the time she needed to walk to school she'd been capable for years.
With this natural desire to ensure our children develop properly it is easy to get into the pattern of wanting them to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I feel that this obsessive focus on certain areas causes us to neglect the most important lesson that children should be learning at such a young age, social skills. At a very young age I believe that children should spend far more of their time learning to interact with each other, resolve conflicts, help each other, etc. Teaching our children how to be nice people at such a young age will surely help them throughout their entire lives, and will hopefully also result in them being more social towards others as they grow older.
Not all people who go to school have academic minds. I believe that English and Mathematics should always be mandatory subjects at school but why should a child, when choosing their subjects, be made to choose a science subject for example when their aim in life is to be a car engineer?
Children know what excites their own minds. It's hard for a child to sit through years of lessons on subjects that not only bore them, but that they cannot see helping them in life. I believe that students should be able to choose their lesson options when entering their 3rd year of senior school (year 9). There should be many more practical lessons available such as brick laying, gas engineering, electrician courses, car repairs, and so on. When a child chooses their subjects of interest they should be able to spend at least 3 days of each week focusing solely on the subjects in which they have a special interest.
In my case school would have been a fabulous place to go if I could spend a whole day each week learning to write computer software. For my brother car repair lessons would have done the trick. For a friend of mine any kind of engineering would have fascinated him. With the mandatory lessons taking place every day after lunch time we could provide 2.5 days per week for special interest lessons, where the student would study a specific subject for the rest of the day. I believe that truancy would fall dramatically if students actually looked forward to going to school. Truancy could further be reduced if a student was made to catch up with any work missed in mandatory lessons instead of their attending their subject of interest lesson whenever they are absent without authorisation.
Enthusing children to go to school will not only increase attendance, it would also make students more keen to work hard in their mandatory lessons in order to attend their lesson of interest in the afternoon. If students had a daily quota of work to meet in the morning in their mandatory lesson before being permitted to attend their special interest lesson I believe it will not only encourage students to work harder in their lessons, but also teach them more responsibility for their actions.
Ultimately children will think of school as a great place to be, somewhere where they get to participate in activities that genuinely interest their minds. Children will also be more likely to leave school with a skill they can take into the workplace, into an apprenticeship, or in to further education.
Most tests for children are simply there to measure how well the teacher is doing, how well the school is doing, and how well the education authorities are doing. This top-down pressure makes its way down to our children, with teachers telling children under the age of 10 that they have "a very important test" coming up. I've even heard quotes such as "could affect the rest of your life!" Can you imagine an 8, 9, or 10 year old doing a test that could affect the rest of their life? It is ridiculous!
Quite simply all of this testing should be stopped. It puts a lot of stress on our children and makes them unhappy. Even if we did continue to have a yearly assessment test for our children I believe that teachers should not be allowed to make children aware of these tests until the morning of the test, there should be no possibility of putting pressure on children to do well in tests just to make the education authority look good.