No more poking fun
… at those who have their Christmas decorations up early. I’m just as bad, my own version (sad Christmas music) has been unearthed from the cupboard. We seem to have lost a couple of my fave Christmas CDs in the house move so (ahem – look away, Steve) I went on a little shopping spree to replace them, bought some traditional choral/instrumental ones too, because choral music sounds so damn good on Steve’s system. Ahem. Not only that, I’ve added The Preacher’s Wife to our movie list, Christmas can’t go by without watching that on the big screen. Are we taking the projector with us on holiday, hon? I need a good Christmas movie for every day of our week away, I think – suggestions please?!
On another note, I was seething quietly about this article this morning. SATS tests offering damning evidence that we should all put our children into nursery. Of course nurseried children will do better at school, they’ve been trained in being in an institution for longer, and performing according to expectations. One can’t possibly say they do better until you look at the outcome much later on! By which time these sorts of differences in 7yos will have evened out, if they’ve been at school they’ll all be as institutionalised as the next 16yo … grr!
November 25th, 2004 at 11:47
eer….how about The Bishop’s Wife?
November 25th, 2004 at 11:49
It’s a Wonderful Life, of course.
November 25th, 2004 at 11:51
I like the Grinch and a definite in our house will be National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The Muppet Christmas Carol?
November 25th, 2004 at 16:10
I’m thinking about buying myself the five sets of Cold Feet to see me over Xmas.
November 25th, 2004 at 17:21
I seethed over that article too.
November 25th, 2004 at 17:23
oh, glad it wasn’t just me! I almost didn’t blog it, then I got CROSS enough that I had to!
November 25th, 2004 at 17:24
Nightmare before Christmas; Elf
Some version of the Nutcracker? (Preferably not Barbie, lol! We have Matthew Bourne’s version on video off the telly last year, which I love and will be watching again, but I imagine the crappy quality of video would look pretty awful on the projector!)
November 25th, 2004 at 18:12
hmm, I think that article says it all at the end where it mentions it hopes that people worrying about putting the kids in nursery to go to work feel better about it. After all, isn’t that what they are after? More of us out to work?
Load of crap if you ask me ;o)
November 25th, 2004 at 21:58
Not sure what’s wrong with the article. They looked at two groups – at home and at nursery. On the whole nursery children did better, but they didn’t say that every nursery child did better, nor every at home child did worse. People tend to lose the individual in statistics. It was made clear that parenting is more important, not that at home is worse per se. SATs were only mentioned in passing as the researchers used their own methods. It seems to me that the research points, once again, to social differences (translated to parenting differences) having the big effect on children. No surprises there surely?
November 26th, 2004 at 3:15
I don’t think the results are surprising, no, it was the way it was reported that annoyed me – because whatever the research points to, the emphasis of the article is on nursery being what makes a difference, rather than parenting.
November 26th, 2004 at 11:25
Yeah, it was the reporting that was annoying. It didn’t mention that children attending nursery part-time were no different from those not attending at all. The study also found that the longer a child was in nursery the more antisocial behaviour was likely to be in school!!! The headline could have been ‘Nursery makes kids bad’.
November 26th, 2004 at 17:08
No, Chris, the report (both BBC and EPPE)(http://www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/eppe/press/RBTec1123sept%2004.pdf) says that nurseried children are more socially able than a home kids, but this effect has more or less gone by age 7. It *did* mention that full time made no difference compared with part time, but that there *is* a difference between at home and at nursery – the whole point of the article.
I see what you mean about the reporting, but I think you might be a bit sensitive to it – I still struggle to see any criticism of keeping kids at home. The ‘angle’ was as a counter to other research suggesting that nurseries might damage children in some way. Again, for kids, parents are everything.
The very fact that we take part in such a discussion, that we care, surely defines us as the sort of parent that makes a difference, whatever educational route we take.
November 26th, 2004 at 17:38
Yep, but a lot of people *don’t* take part in such a discussion! They would read the BBC article, and understand ‘nursery is the best way’ and not think about it! I guess as a home educator, naturally there is bound to be some sort of sensitivity to it, but only because in that sort of reporting, school/nursery is usually portrayed as the only way, there is never any mention of there being any other way to educate children. Neither is there any admission that the ‘standard’ at age 7 could be fallible …
November 26th, 2004 at 22:36
I don’t care at all about the actual findings of the report, I am not sensitive to the issues (I am sure Sarah would vouch for my not caring about these things), my comment was about the poorness of the reporting on news.bbc.co.uk, something I have mentioned before.
The antisocial comment was based on their statistics, the following being the number of children showing antisocial behaviour:
Nursery 1-2 years: 5.8%
No pre-school: 6.8%
Pre school for 3 years: 7.1%
I don’t think it is the BBC’s duty to give an ‘angle’ on these sorts of studies, personally.
November 27th, 2004 at 10:27
I can’t find the stats you refer to, Chris, but look at them again. Children who don’t go to pre-school are ‘worse’ (by 1 child in 100) than those who go to nursery for up to 2 years. Children who go to pre-school are ‘worse’ than those who don’t (by a massive 0.3 children in 100). I don’t think this supports either pole of the argument. They are both ambiguous and insignificant. I say again, it is not nursery that makes the difference, it is parents!
And I do think the BBC has a duty to compare new research with previous research.
November 27th, 2004 at 10:52
Rog, I completely agree that it’s parents making the difference, but I still feel that the BBC article I pointed to doesn’t make that distinction.
It says that nursery is what makes the difference, quite categorically, “New research has concluded that children who have good nursery or other pre-school education do better at primary school than those kept at home. ”
Which is precisely the annoying thing – not the research in itself, but the way in which the BBC report it – because while it’s good and right that they *do* report on research, the way in which they do it is important as well.
Anyway, are your girls going to gym today?
November 27th, 2004 at 20:18
Rog, I agree with you, my statistics mean nothing *but* the BBC could, in the way they subjectively interpt reports, have said that the longer you stay in nursery the more antisocial you become.
The headline says ‘go on to do well’ *their quote marks*, is that an acutal quote or are the BBC saying that. And where exactly is the reference to other studies with differing outcomeso compare this with, I maintain this is shoddy reporting.
Here is another example of what I mean:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/3524732.stm
November 27th, 2004 at 23:51
I think this is the last I’ll write on this – don’t want to a) take over Sarah’s blog b)end up causing offence!
Chris, I still don’t see where the report in question says that nursery makes children more antisocial – “children with no pre-school
experience (the ‘home group’) had poorer cognitive attainment, sociability and concentration when they
started primary school.” – from the EPPE press release. The reference to other studies came from Margaret Hodge. I remember hearing about such studies (having both girls in nursery from 3mth I am a bit sensitive to reports of ‘damage’. But they seem to be ok. They still have teenage years to go through with me as their Dad). I agree that BBC could have added a link/reference, but I don’t think they are bound to – they cannot act as a science journal. If they were to do so, every piece of journalism would become hopelessly cumbersome, with a long list of references at the end of the article!
The report shows that at home children did worse than nurseried ones in the early years of school, measured not by SATs but with the researcher’s own methods. I can’t see how the BBC didn’t report correctly – they were reporting what the research found, not on how we experience things, or how our individual children do, or on what makes the difference. Just the research findings themselves. The BBC did mention home learning and the role of parents in a very positive way. What the study didn’t investigate was the effect of Home Ed, so it wasn’t reported on.
I won’t reply, but why is the article you linked to shoddy reporting? I have no ‘inside’ knowledge, but it seems to present both sides to me. Is it perhaps the use of ‘sensationalist’ language like ‘lusty’ that gets you? In which case, I agree. A more sober approach would help. But then again, the term was used by one of the authors.
November 28th, 2004 at 11:22
I understand that Margaret Hodge thinks that having a nanny is the best way to go.
I have given up on the BBC, I think the quality of their reporting has fallen to be on a par with the Sun, or The News Of The World, but without any of their entertainment value.
I think they have been cowed since the Kelly affair and are carefully, politically selective in their coverage. The Indymedia server affair is a case in point.
For anything remotely tech/IT related, I turn to The Register for the vigorous election campaigning by the USMC in Iraq, Al Jazeera is a better bet.
November 29th, 2004 at 11:18
Rog, I think we will have to disagree on this but…..the EPPE report says ‘This report describes the longitudinal research on effective pre-school provision funded by the UK DFES over a six-year period.’ The study is funded, I believe by the DFES. In these instances, the subject of the research being the funder, I believe the BBC does have a duty to be more balanced in its reporting.
What would the reaction be if a study by Glaxo Smith Kline supported their wonderful new drug? The response would be ‘well they would say that’ and one would want, I hope, to see some supporting evidence other than GSKs. In fact I suspect the BBC wouldn’t even report it.
The Oxford article debases a very important study, that showed that Oxford’s admission process for medicine is possibly the fairest in the UK, to ‘lusty’ dons. So the article misses the point in favour of some nonsense. There was another one where the University (in promoting the green strategy of the Council) ran courses for 20,000 staff on cycling safely in Oxford, anyone who has cycled in Oxford would no how dangerous this is. The BBC picked it up under the headline ‘Oxford Dons Taught How to Cycle’…. The article itself wasn’t too bad.
November 29th, 2004 at 11:19
Oh and they bloody report the release of any Apple product as news!!!!