Hugh Reilly: Sadly, there’s nothing new to learn from government’s latest directive

I read the entire document and inadvertently achieved a higher state of Zen than I normally accomplish sitting cross-legged and wheezing like an octogenarian with a chest infection.

Disappointingly, there is nothing new in Raising Attainment for classroom teachers, just platitude heaped upon platitude.

It simply asks dominies to reflect on how their classroom teaching could help improve the life chances of youngsters, ignoring the fact that the concept of the reflective practitioner has been drummed into chalkies during countless in-service training days.

In a nod to equality, the document speaks of raising attainment for all when, if truth be told, a glance at education league tables shows that many schools are doing just fine.

The attainment gap between the richest and poorest pupils – the worst in Europe according to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report – continues to embarrass the nation. Yet the kind of action required to remedy this awful situation is not stated. Teachers are asked to increase the ambition and expectation of young people, an uphill task when today’s kids are living through the greatest level of youth unemployment in decades.

Only a teacher awakening from a 20-year coma will be startled to discover that it is considered desirable to seek opportunities for professional development.

Perhaps the government has provided a comfort blanket of sorts by reinforcing the need for every teacher to take responsibility for literacy and numeracy.

For many parents and teachers, the Curriculum for Excellence has worrying downsides but a definite plus is the emphasis on the basics.

As a teacher of modern studies and history, correcting the spelling and grammar of pupils risked the wrath of the English department – and daring to give a blackboard exposition of how to construct a bar graph had maths staff reaching for the defibrillators.

Responsible teachers must ignore the minority of pedagogues who believe amending a child’s written work drains the creative juices.

At a meeting I once attended, a teacher of English proudly passed round the scribblings of her pet pupil, the heading of which was My Favourite Story’s. When I pointed out the lad’s clanger, she almost had me by the throat.

In the modern era, kids use calculators as a numeracy crutch.My son Martin, 16, was amazed in Costco when I worked out in my head that a tray of 24 cans of Coke at £5.20 meant that each can cost approximately 22p. He looked at me as if I’d solved Fermat’s Theorem.

l Hugh Reilly is a teacher and a columnist for The Scotman