Why Foundational Knowledge Academy?

Some time ago, as an English and Discipline and Guidance team leader, I did an informal study of how much I time I actually spent on teaching related activities, as a proportion of my whole workload. The result?

10%.

As a caveat, this is just an educated approximation, as it was incredibly hard to accurately stop a timer every time I get interrupted with a new task. Most of my day was consumed with following up on discipline cases, dealing with student conflicts and complaints; preparing for parent meetings; liaising with outside agencies for upcoming events (e.g. outdoor camps, educational tours); chasing down notices; arranging duty slots for teachers to ensure everything was fair; exam paper-setting and a whole host of other issues not related to actual teaching. Therefore, the actual amount of time I could appropriate for your child is 10%; or, to put it bluntly, 90% of the school fees you pay do not get spent on your child.

This is why Foundational Knowledge Academy exists.

I think it is time we restore that 90%. As schools are now required to add more and more innovative and lofty-sounding initiatives into its curriculum, with completley unproven results (they usually get replaced by even more innovative and more lofty-sounding initiatives before we can even ask for the results), the aspect of learning which is traditionally associated with schooling is not getting its due attention – namely, the cultivation and acquisition of actual factual knowledge.

In the upcoming series of posts, I will detail the many false assumptions that are running rampant in modern education systems and how not to be deceived by fashionable, but damaging, educational trends.

Stay tuned.