Choosing your secondary school

This is the time of year when the tours around schools have either happened or are happening. The schools put their best shows on and they spend money and time making themselves as appealing as possible. It's all show and most of it goes back into the cupboard at the end of the evening; I know, I did it for nearly 30 years.

So how do you really know what is going to be the best place for your child to go, and how do you know whether they will fit in, settle, learn and succeed? How do you use the Open Evenings to inform you rather than flatter you with the glamour and panache?

To be able to make decisions you really need to sort out what you are deciding upon; what are the criteria you are looking for. Think about it, no child is the same and you are looking for a placement where they will be able to maximise their potential; if they are in a place where the style of teaching and routine does not suit them, will they make it?

So here are a few categories to think about;

• what type of learning style does your child have? Does he like quiet, small classes or is he/she happy to be in the crowd and taught in large groups? (some schools teach lessons in groups of 80 so be aware and ask)
• is your child sporty? Ask whether there are facilities for a child who has a speciality in say cricket or tennis. What opportunities are there, what clubs are there for a sporty child to develop that side of their skills range?
• Is your child academic and after the after school clubs such as Chess or Science? Ask whether these are on offer and to what year groups - some are restricted to certain year groups so it is worth knowing.
• Does your child flourish in the Drama department? If so does the school do any drama productions year 7 pupils can get involved in? Is there a strong drama department and does it offer more than just the drama GCSE?
• Does the school have a policy of streaming or banding or what to separate the weaker ones from the quicker ones? If not does it teach in full mixtures where they are all taught at the same time and the work differentiated afterwards? If this is the case, would this style suit your child or would they respond better to a class where all the pupils are about the same skills level? If that's the case then a fully mixed school would not necessarily work for you.
• What are the results like in the various departments? How many pupils make it to the top grades and what is the most common grade they achieve? Not all departments do as well as each other, its dependant upon the staff and facilities, so ask and make sure the ones where your child is good will get the opportunity to get the good grades.
  How many of the pupils get more than the statutory 5 GCSEs at grade C or above; after all you want to aim for higher don't you?
•  What happens to those pupils who are very gifted in a subject, is there somewhere for them to excel? If so how does it work and how has it helped the pupils who have gone through it already?
• Is there an A level component to the school and if there is how many courses or on offer? If they only have a few subjects it may be worth thinking about college unless the choice is OK for your child. 
• Do they have a connection with a local college and if so how does that work? Do they have courses available for year 11 to go to study at the college? If they do what subjects are these?
• What type of GCSEs do they do? Some now do the iGCSE, this is worth checking as this is far harder in many ways and is a good course of study. Really stretches them and prepares them well for the A level courses which follow.

 So there are a few criteria to think about and look for in the school; what about the availability of food at break time and at lunch time? What about trips to go skiing or going to nature reserves, do they do trips and if so when do they do them and for which years?


Don't presume this will all be in the prospectus because it wont. Remember, that is a sales document and will have been put together to show the school in the best light it possibly can. The pupils you will see on the night will be the best they have and the staff there will have created the exciting demo's and experiments from their own battery of things that doesn't necessarily happen every day.


So armed with your ideas of what it is you want to now about, the last and perhaps most important factor is whether your child really likes the place. If they do, find out why and listen to the things they say. It is likely they will be won over by the hype, so make your judgements carefully and don't presume your 10 year old knows all the answers which, lets face it, will effect the whole of its life.

And the scores are in......

What a wonderful time for so many pupils in Kent; the scores are in and many are wandering around with big grins because they can go for the grammar they had wanted.
I have had such pride in watching the students I have taught collect their results and smile with satisfaction as they have found out they have passed, some finding they have enough get to the most selective grammars in the borough. To all of you, can I say here, just how proud of you I am and how pleased I am to say, "YES!" and sing the opening lines of the song, Congratulations.

I would also like to say well done to those who may not have passed but have improved their scores by such a large amount they are being moved up sets now they are in year 6. Even if you do not pass the 11+ the work will not have gone to waste and your overall performance in all subjects will have improved. Well done, and enjoy being one of the ones in the top sets when you go to the secondary school!
I won't have a role call of all the names of people who have passed and studied with me here at jobell tutoring, that is up in my Quiet Room, and I wont mention the names of the ones who improved their NFeR scores by over 8 points, but safe to say I am proud of you all and most of all I want to say.......

GOOD LUCK IN YOUR NEW SCHOOL!!!!!!!

What is a tutor?

When a child comes to see a tutor it is important that they do so willingly. To make a tutor time interesting therefore is the most important aspect after deciding exactly what it says the child's needs to learn. One of the easiest ways to make it pleasant children is to create an atmosphere in which they feel at home. A place where they go to study after school, which is neither home nor school, it is something halfway between the two.
The responsibility therefore, for the tutor is to make sure, that the atmosphere fits the bill.
One thing that I have always playing in the background is a radio, quietly tuned in to a local radio station which plays music. If it plays a mixture of modern and may be the last 10 years of music, then the child is attaining the sort of sounds it is most likely to hear in the home. At the same time it is different from school, which is invariably silent.
The next difference is the layout of the room. I am lucky enough to have a dedicated road but many tutor is do not have this luxury, and adapt an area of what is quite often the dining room, into an area where they work with children. So how do you make it not look like a house, not look like your home, but make it homely enough not to be a school?
I use my office. In it there are desks as you would imagine. There is also a filing cabinet and a very large storage cabinet, again as you would imagine. There are also computers, albeit laptops, and the layout of the room is such that on one side of the room there are two desks put together with their own chairs, and on the other side a much larger desk which is invariably cluttered with 'my stuff'. On the walls are postcards, all of which have been given to me by past students, showing all the different places they have travelled. So it is pretty much a classic office; simple, functional, and to the point. But, they have learned to associate this room with fun, excitement, challenges, being stretched, and new things they've never seen before.

I am often asked the question, can anyone be a tutor? And on the surface I can imagine people would think oh yes, anyone can do that, after all, all you are doing, is sitting down with one child, and showing them how to do something.

No! That is not being the tutor.

That is being somebody who does the work for them. In fact, that isn't much better than some of the not so well trained TAs I have seen in some of the school's, when I have gone round doing assessments on support and facilitation.

So what is a tutor?
• A tutor is somebody who knows the subject well, and has at least 15 different ways of explaining the same thing, without at any time doing the work for them.
• A tutor is someone who has access to different ways of approaching a subject, being through games, the Internet, books, pen and paper, apparatus, and just general chalk and talk.
• A tutor must be someone who can listen through what the child is saying and hear exactly what the child is struggling with.


I will give you an example. A girl sat in the class that I was observing. She seemed to be struggling with the work she had been given. She looked at it and played with her pen, but at no point did I see her create an answer for any of the questions. The teacher, being a little bit twitchy because there was an official visit in the classroom observing her, bustled over and asked what the problem was. Being flustered, the teacher wasn't hearing through what the child said, “…but I can't see it!"
The teacher kept re-explaining and re-explaining in exactly the same way each time until the child with great frustration, said," you don't seem to understand I just can't see it!"
Now you have probably guessed the problem was she literally could not see the page because she had a bad headache and it was making her eyesight blurred. The teacher being flustered by my presence was unable to hear through and ask pertinent questions like why can't you see it? If she had followed through logically, she may have got to the root cause. She may not, but what the child said was misinterpreted.
Now this is a very obvious example but it gives you an idea of how children can say one thing, and as you are probably aware, can mean something totally different. This is very true in education, and a tutor must be very aware of this, because it is something that I believe tutors should be able to access; the true area of where the child is struggling. Not, ‘but it can't do algebra’, more that it may not understand the concept of replacing numbers with letters. Not, that ‘it can't do long multiplication’, but that is multiplication tables aren't sound enough for it to move on and use them in a more complex format.
That is what you employ a tutor for.

So you have a tutor.
• What is the atmosphere like at the place your child attends? Is it like a halfway house or is it something else?
• Is your child happy to go there each week?
• Does your tutor break through your child issues, quickly pinpointing exactly where the problem is and giving both you and the child methods of how to eradicate the issue?
• And most of all does your child like to tutor, because if the child doesn't like to tutor, it doesn't matter how good the tutor is, the child will never get as much as it can do from that tutor because there will always be a barrier of, “I don't like them!"

Gaining independant sight

Whilst away in Spain I watched film about a man who had lost his sight by the time he was three years old. When he was in his 30s he was given the opportunity of having an operation which would restore his sight, and after some deliberation he decided he would have a go. As his surgeon said, ‘what have you got to lose’? Interestingly enough he has a lot to lose, and it wasn't until he gained his sight he realised just how much there was he was losing.
One of the first things he realised was he was completely disorientated. He had developed a feeling world in which he could sense rain, size of buildings, position of doors, and other essential things that helped him get around the world. He had no sight and yet he had a rich imagination one that had been fuelled by all of the explanations he had been given by sighted friends and family. But the question here is whether the actual sights live up to the expectations he had inside his non-seeing brain?
When he first opened his eyes, he would have been as a newborn child, with no idea as to what was a face, a body, an apple, or any other object that was in the room at the time. Imagine seeing movement for the very first time. He had no idea of depth of field because he never had to have knowledge of it, and yet the sighted world presumed, wrongly, that now he has his sight everything was fixed. It wasn't. He had gained a sense and in many ways he had lost his others. They were still there, and he could still access them, but this new sense, sight, was interfering with his original brain processes. He was disorientated.
So we present our children with new situations and we wonder why they are disorientated. We give them new hurdles to climb such as 11+ examinations, GCSEs and so on and we wonder why some of them are drawn towards this new experience, some of them hope it will go away, and some of them just accept it and plod on through.
I looked into some early research into corneal replacement surgery and the restoration of the sight in people who had become blind. The first surgery to be recorded was in the 1950s and this was on a subject who when he first saw for the first time, felt really disillusioned and let down by the whole experience. In fact he became so overwhelmed by it all he believed it was the worst thing that ever happened. Now in those days, psychologists were few on the ground and he didn't get the support that really and truly he needed, and as a consequence he found the adjustment to this new world very, very difficult.
If we return to our children for the moment and think of how they adapt, then we can see a potential parallel. We give them new experiences to give them a wider experience base but we must also remember to give the correct psychological backup to make them feel safe secure and inquisitive. If we wrap them up in protection, when do they get to experience the full force of what they will have to live in? When will they have t adapt to a new set of senses they had been protected from. I realise this is a tenuous link but there is one here. The man in the film had been ‘protected’ from the need to understand large aspects of the seeing world and he operated very well in it. He was then thrown in and told to cope. For the first few months he didn’t and that’s a rational 30-something man. Protect our children too much from the world and we are denying them the development of their full set of senses too.

Finding a tutor

It is that time of year again. The children had nearly finished their summer holidays and there is this mad panic to find a tutor. But what sort of a tutor do you look for? How do you know whether the tutor is going to be any good full? How do you know whether the tutor is going to benefit your child?
Finding a tutor is a minefield, and there are plenty out there. Some have come from teaching, some because they have worked with children in other ways and feel that they would enjoy the giving back to more children. Others do it because they enjoy it, but which ones are going to be good for your child and which ones are going to know the most important aspect of tutoring; how to teach, what to teach, what your child needs, and how to convey to your child in the most exciting and enjoyable way.
I was talking to a mum the other day who was going through the 'hunt the 11+ tutor' process. As she so rightly said to me, it is an absolute mine field out there, but what do you do, it would be so easy to pick a name out of the book, but does that mean he or she will be any good for my son?
She related a story to me about a study centre in a local town. As she said, it may have been suitable for some children, but for her son really didn't work. She spent a lot of money, but her son gained very little, so there is another aspect we have to consider and that is value for money.
So what questions do you ask a tutor who you are anticipating using in some way or other?
Well, that will depend upon the subject all subjects you are hoping will be taught to your child. If you are after a practical subjects such as dance, piano, guitar, or any other such skill, then one of the things that you will automatically look for it is appropriate qualification. When you are asking somebody to do a similar job but in maths, English, primary education, GCSE, or even a level why should you not ask for qualification here? If somebody is going to teach swimming they have to be qualified to teach swimming, so to teach maths would it not be sensible to choose somebody who is qualified to teach maths? My first question therefore would be to ask what sort of qualifications this person has that makes them suitable for being a tutor and not be afraid to ask for those qualifications. I have been tutoring for five years in Kent, but I taught in full-time education for nearly 30 years before that, and I taught maths, science, and curriculum support at both primary and secondary levels. In the last five years of teaching I also took on teaching English to GCSE. Does this qualify me to teach French? Well no! But I am qualified to teach the core subjects. What do you'll tutors say when you contact them, have they experience, and will that experience be commensurate with the learning styles of your child? And that is the second question I would be posing to a would be tutor some might child.
I have met many a teacher who has one way of teaching and that is their only style, they have an unbending way of speaking to children and if the child does not understand then the child is lost. Would it not be better therefore for your child to go to a tutor who has more than one way of teaching something? One aspect of education that I worked in, was the teaching and development of teacher skills, especially in the area of developing different techniques for different ways of teaching. And how varied is the way in which they use equipment, games, the computer, the Internet, and other ways of teaching something? There is nothing more boring to a child that continuous pen and paper methods.
So we have looked at two aspects, qualification, and that doesn't necessarily mean they have to be a qualified teacher, the variation in teaching style, but what about the success rate?
If you are going to a tutor to support such examinations as the 11+, entrance exams, GCSE, A-level, would it not be a good idea to have some idea as to how successful these students have been as a consequence of working with the tutor?
When asked this, I am always very proud to say that I have over a 90% pass rate at 11+. Does the tutor you are looking at have similar percentage pass rates? Has this person being recommended to you? And if so why would they recommend it?
I have recently been told that the reason I am being recommended is threefold; I have good pass rates, I have a wide variation of styles which make the children enjoy their time with me, and I am well-qualified. Does the tutor you are looking at have the same recommendation?
As I have said earlier, finding a tutor is a minefield, and in this day and age with budgets being so tight, it is even more important to find someone who is truly good value for money. And this I would suggest is the last question to check up upon. How much do they charge? Once you have an idea of their prices, check, what do other tutors charge? What are people in the area willing to pay? What seems to be be about right price?
I know I could charge a lot more than I do, but my ethos is, I wish to help as many children as I can, and want to set up a long and lasting relationship with the child and the family. Does your prospective tutor had a similar set of values? Or is it truly an industry, where they are only in it for the salary?

Some good places for useful math at primary level

www.mathplayground.com

this website has a section labelled videos and another labelled worksheets. Both of these sections are superb and well worth the exploration. Subjects to explore would be as follows;
• fractions
• decimals
• percentages
• money
• ratio and proportion (video 1 only)
The worksheets are split into grades, and for our age group we want the one at the bottom, called grade 3, 4, and 5. I would suggest you use the ones where you have to ‘fill in’ as these ones will be marked for you. Do the ones labelled #1 first and then move onto #2. They are excellent as a reminder for those who can already do the sums and as a teaching aid for those who are unsure. Supporting videos are available and do show excellent methods which are acceptable in this country.

http://www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/revision_aid_download.php

This is a superb website and has lots of practice for those who are sitting the 11+. I have used a great deal of their stuff over the years and use their computer based programmes in the lessons. The work now produced by a section called Chukka is excellent and I would suggest the ‘once a day’ worksheet. It takes about 5 mins and is a good way of upping the speed of the basic Numeracy.

http://www.coolmath4kids.com/

you want a place where the children love to go and play the games and yet learn at the same time? Then this is it! All of the activities have some mathematical base to them, even the jigsaws I promise you. If you are a parent of an 11 plus candidate then this is certainly the place to rest and play. The games cover all aspects of math including spacial awareness. Warning! some of the games are compulsive, especially things like Bloxorz or Orb2.
There is a very good section on basic arithmetic and some games which compliment it. Have a good look yourself before you ;let your child loose; it maybe the last time you get a chance to get on it yourself!!
Teat the jigsaws as a way of developing the spacial awareness needed in the non-verbal reasoning paper. It helps them recognise shapes, spot connections, understand how colours will flow so it also works to help develop processing skills.

an excellent web site

How many of you parents have found this web site www.miniclip.com/games? It is really good and has a large number of puzzles which will keep most of the family occupied for hours. I would recommend Block Drop and Red Remover as 2 games which support math learning for year 5 and 6 pupils but that doesn't mean it isn't fun for the adults too. I ended up cracking them both, but it took me 'til 1am!