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Published: 10 September 2010
by JAMIE WELHAM

PRIMARY school teachers are being sent into a St John’s 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 just two or three teachers, rather than having a separate teacher for each lesson.

Headteacher Jo Shuter said the “Opening Minds” curriculum will help pupils, many of whom start school struggling to read and write, adapt to the faster pace of learning 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 in English.

But it has come under fire from teaching unions, who fear it could lead to a “dumbing down” of 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 idea 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 doesn’t work. We need to do something to reduce the gap in standards and I think it’s 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at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in response to criticism of an outdated national curriculum that is crammed with “competing information”. It describes itself as a “competence-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 of specialisms, it means departments will be weaker. In the long run, subjects like maths and science will suffer because primary teachers are likely to teach project-based lessons, which have a bias to the humanities.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of pupils returned to brand new classrooms this week. At St Marylebone School, a new building has been constructed in Blandford Street – part of its £15.7 million redevelopment under the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. At Westminster City School in Victoria, new facilities include a sports hall, changing rooms and music hall. Other schools are due to be completed by September 2011, including St George’s School in Maida Vale, Pimlico Academy, which will get a new library and St Augustine’s School in Kilburn.

Westminster was spared the cuts to BSF funding because the work was already under way.

Councillor Nickie Aiken, the council’s education chief, said: “These new facilities will be enormously beneficial to pupils in Westminster in providing state-of-the-art IT equipment, enviable sports facilities and bright and welcoming classrooms.”