I have been fortunate in visits to Koli, a village in North Karelia in Finland. The village has a population of around 300 people and a school that comprised 22 pupils when I first visited and has now grown to 50. I will write another time of the way the school reflects the openness and respect of Finnish society. Here I will simply express my gratitude for the opportunities to work with the children, and their patience with my hesitant Finnish.
Despite catching COVID while I was in Finland, after isolating I was able to spend time in the school, with some creative writing and ideas projects; writing elfchen (11 word poems), and making Zines.
When I got back to UK, one of my first jobs was to give some oversight of the SATS tests in the local school where I am a Governor. The contrast with Finland could not be more pronounced. In Finland standardised national tests only apply at age 15 and are part of the mapping of children’s aspirations and interests as well as providing some assessment of attainment. There not league tables or school ratings based wholly or partly on results of test scores.
In the UK, the SATS were unbelievably dull.
Is that comma in the right place, BTW? And does this sentence require a question mark?
The tests are overwhelmingly designed as tests of pupils’ memories of technical grammatical terms. Underline the adjective/frontal adverbial/passive verb..
Oh, and the elephant as the biggest mammal in the world was back – remember the frustration about pupils pointing out that whales are bigger? Luckily the examiners had inserted ‘land’ mammal this time.
