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'Opening Minds" at Quintin Kynaston - Year 7pupils to be taught by just 2 or 3 teachers for allsubjects

Published: 10 September 2010

by JAMIE WELHAM

PRIMARY school teachers are being sent into a St Johns Wood secondary school

under a radical new scheme to drive up standards.

Pupils starting at Quintin Kynaston this week will be taught a narrowed down

curriculum with specialist lessons like geography and history dropped in favour of

broader subject areas to mirror teaching techniques in primary schools.

Under the scheme one of the first in the UK Year 7 pupils will be taught by

ust two or three teachers, rather than having a separate teacher for each

esson.

Headteacher Jo Shuter said theOpening Mindscurriculum will help pupils, many

of whom start school struggling to read and write, adapt to the faster pace of

earning and narrow the gap between primaries and secondaries.

It comes following warnings by MPs about appalling literacy standards among 11-

year-olds, with a reported two in every five children not reaching required levels

n English.

But it has come under fire from teaching unions, who fear it could lead to a

dumbing downof lessons and undermine attempts to boost standards in

perceived harder subjects like maths and science.

Ms Shuter said:This is really innovative. Nobody is really doing it and I got the

dea from my consultancy work. We have been working with local primary schools

to develop it. What we will have is pupils taught by one teacher in a way to make

the transition from primary school to secondary school easier.

What we had before was an over-teaching of pupils when they get here and

that doesnt work. We need to do something to reduce the gap in standards and

I think its up to secondaries to take action and reduce specialist teaching at an

early stage.

For the first time, Quintin Kynaston has three primary school teachers on its staff

part of the eight who will teach the Opening Minds course. Opening Minds was

developed by academics at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,

Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in response to criticism of an outdated

national curriculum that is crammed withcompeting information. It describes

tself as acompetence-based curriculum.

Jeff Bates, head of Westminster National Union of Teachers (NUT), said:It is true

there is a big gap between primary and secondary schools because teachers are

trained completely different. Anything that closes this gap is welcome but I have

never heard of primary school teachers in secondary schools. It doesn t sound

right.

In the longer term, it could be a worry where this kind of thing goes. If we get rid

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