Cambridge Primary Review – Too much, too young

The UK media is covering the release of another part of the Cambridge Primary Review which is researching the issues behind primary school education in the UK.

We have serious literacy problems here in the UK, demotivated and stressed young children, and a culture that seems to be losing social cohesion each year.

The review backs up other experts that say that children in the UK are being tested far too much, receiving formal schooling too early (4yrs in most cases, age 5 by law) and that Steiner schools and home-schooled children are doing much better.

View the BBC TV news report on it

Also listen to the discussion on Radio 4 Today programme this morning - Note the ridiculous comment from the woman criticizing the research, who says that children in home or alternative (i.e. Steiner) schools fare better because they are "middle class". The evidence clearly shows entire countries do better – e.g. Sweden – with this kind of approach. Is everyone in Sweden middle class?

The government seems to be desperately fighting their indefensible corner while they constantly increase the pressure on our children, teachers and schools to "perform" by reaching ever increasing numbers of goals and targets. The government seems to be extremely keen on helping the disadvantaged, by forcing them to give up their childhood early, in under funded schools, with constantly changing methodologies that are effectively experimentation on a national scale. Which of these changes is actually producing better results? Are they not aware of amazing people like Bill Strickland who works wonders with the disadvantaged in America?

If you think the new EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) policy which makes it law to start teaching children to read and write from the ages of 4 years is too much, please sign up to the Open Eye petition on the Downing Street website. Open Eye is a group of academics and childhood experts who are making a stand against the Government’s increasingly testing-led and high-pressure education policies for young children.

If you’re interested in this subject, watch out for the media coverage and see how many times you can count the government ministers or representatives saying how EYFS is "a flexible framework". It’s flexible as long as you work within it.

Our school campaign has taken a new twist, with an almost derisory response from the DCSF (education department) which fails to address several of the specific legal issues we raised in our letter requesting full exemptions for Steiner schools. We are now about to make our next move…

Rejoice! Grails 1.0 is here

Now, if you can reach the Grails website you will be able to download Grails Version 1.0, which has finally "gone gold" and has brought the Codehaus server to its knees already it seems! Give the Codehaus guys some time to rig up something that will oil the wheels a bit, as there’s a definite overload situation going on with the site.

Most people understand that psychologically a 1.0 release is important. It sets the baseline and foundation for what is to come in the future. Grails 1.0 is incredibly rich in terms of core features, and has a growing list of free plugins that add all manner of powerful functionality.

Grails 1.0 has a powerful ORM DSL now for tweaking what Hibernate does behind the scenes in an intuitive way, including index generation. We’ve also now got Hibernate’s second-level caching in there. Not to mention the frankly pretty twisted auto unmarshalling of JSON/xml request payloads into beans, and the withFormat content negotiation stuff.

We have also put together a framework for automatically running functional web tests on "specimen" applications held in SVN as part of the Grails continuous integration builds. There are some teething troubles with the server environment but the whole process is working locally, and we just need to fill SVN with some good test apps with, more importantly, some comprehensive webtest scripts.

This will effectively form a kind of "TCK" for Grails and will ensure stability against the 1.0 baseline functionality – in addition to the large number of unit tests that Grails undergoes constantly as part of the continuous integration build platform (the rather excellent Bamboo as it happens). Contributions of non-trivial applications with comprehensive unit and webtests would be appreciated.

This is in addition to the work Graeme did to tie together Groovy SVN HEAD and Grails SVN HEAD in continuous integration to ensure that we spot any changes to Groovy that break Grails as early as possible, as well as giving the Groovy team a great stock of code to run their changes against.

We’re looking forward to talking to all the new Grails users that this 1.0 release will bring!