Seventh Form Year Importance Stressed

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32386, 27 August 1970, Page 4

Seventh Form Year

Importance Stressed

Secondary schools should accept more responsibility for ensuring the successful transition of students to university, it was stated in Christchurch on Tuesday.

In an address on the education of senior secondary pupils, Mr B. S. Devonshire, a teacher at Nay land College, Stoke, told delegates to the Geographical Society’s conference that it was becoming increasingly important for teachers to regard the seventh form year as one of transition, and to make special adaptations of the school system accordingly. “Secondary schools sometimes blame the primary schools for the standard of the pupils they teach, and then throw the blame for failure on to the university,” Mr Devonshire said. One of the main aims of the seventh form course, in general, should be to give the student some foretaste of the self-discipline needed to master a successful course at the university, he went on. “There has been enough publicity in the news media in the past about failure rates at the university to suggest that the secondary schools are not doing all they might be doing on this matter at the moment,” he said.

“In most secondary schools, seventh form classes are treated in much the same manner as the rest of the school, and then, in the following year, the student finds himself at the university in competition with others, but in a much freer environment.

“Is there really that much difference between the seventh former and the university student? “Is three months, at this age, between the time the student leaves school and begins his university life going to mean so much of a development of maturity? “I feel strongly that the secondary schools should do something to bridge this gap.” Mr Devonshire said that treating the seventh form

year as one of transition, in which senior pupils developed self-discipline and methods of independent study would assist him to adjust to a system of much greater personal freedom.

Such a system did not mean, however, that such features of the regular school as compulsory classes should be disregarded, but rather that features of the university system should be added, aimed at developing in the student proper attitudes to organising a personal programme of study.