Rose Review

Sir Jim Rose's interim report - the Primary Curriculum Review - is due on Monday. and already the press are talking about it. While the the BBC spends time talking about summer born children and the opportunity for part time starts for these children. The Times online has two articles mainly about the curriculum changes.

Under the expansive headline "Traditional subjects go in Schools shake-up" they say "under the plans, information technology classes would be given as much prominence as literacy and numeracy, and foreign languages would be taught in tandem with English."
While the article "Primary School Children 'should be taught technology, not tradition' " It's reported that

" Computer skills should be given the same importance as reading, writing and arithmetic, and children should be taught to use podcasts and PowerPoint presentations in primary school, a curriculum review will say today.

The long-awaited report by Sir Jim Rose, a former schools inspector and senior government education adviser, will suggest that children are so computer literate at such a young age that ICT skills usually taught in secondary schools should begin in primaries.

This will ensure that what goes on in the classroom is “a better fit with children's developing abilities” and will help to ensure that education in England does not get left behind by the global technology revolution.

It's good that it's recognised that ICT, e-learning has an important role to play for the next generation but I do hope that the phrase "children should be taught to use podcasts and PowerPoint presentations" is actually the Times interpretation of something like "children will be able to use digital technologies to communicate, present and create multimodal texts'. I'm sure that a review to influence education now and in the future would not be so prescriptive as to mention specific old technology tools such as PowerPoint!

Let's see what we see