Can’t
fault the latest intel about Charlie’s activities up the Mewrong Delta over at House of
Dumb.
It
seems that the Coalition’s school food advisers are worried about too much fat
at lunchtime for the nation’s tots.
Contrariwise, the DC is quite happy to raise the poor kids’ potential gristle
consumption at bedtime.
Now that the Coalition has recently increased the statistical
probability of, um, innovative adoption , what are the chances that listening to ‘The Adventures of
Little Nutbrown Hare: Guess How Much I Love
You’ will be a longer-lasting experience for Little Orphan Andy when it’s
read to him by one or both of his dads?
Mind
you, if just one child can be saved from the horrors of full-fat Coke served with a white bap full of Laughing Cow and a side order of Walkers
then oceans more government coercion and billions of pounds that we
just don’t need for anything else would be a small price to pay… And at
least the innocent, stylish Bruce and Wayne will be sending
their new ward Robin to Gotham Academy with sustainable
food storage containers packed full of salt
baked sea bass with pesto and crispy pancetta pasta - which should prevent
all kind of digestion problems as he heads off to the school counsellor’s office
for that Little Talk about what
not to wear.
And
just look at The Telegraph’s commenters; they’re in a conservative newspaper?
It looks as though the inter-species
genetic experiments have been successful as Comment is Free ratchet-jaws have been
fused with the ‘graph’s NuTory bedwetters.
There does seem to be an enchanting troll or two adding much-needed irony into the mixture. I especially like the thread about giant pencils ;but then trolls have reason to be sensitive to such matters.
Now children, can you calculate how many billions of pounds and how many years it's taken the British Government to change an education system from an envied model for the world to copy into a crime-riddled joke? And whose idea was it?
I think that the Guardian’s missing an opportunity in its historic mission to explain to the parents of Britain and to counter the malign Right just why the present system of State-funded and State-assigned school places for the country’s children is the best possible one, and one which needs further improvements along the same lines to exceed its present level of perfection.
Children are our future and especially now that (thanks to New Labour’s brilliant economic policy of the housing boom, taxing pension funds, expanding public sector employment, money supply inflation, bank nationalization and increasing public borrowing) they’re going to spend their adult lives gainfully employed chasing fewer and less-well paid jobs which will be provided ever-fewer and progressively higher-taxed companies and paying higher taxes themselves to leave them with lower incomes for their own pensions and personal expenditure on more expensive and narrower ranges of goods than would have been available had not Gordon Brown’s economic genius been in charge from the word ‘go.’
The least we can do for the little ones is to prevent any risk of market-led inequality into the happiest days of their lives.
Ed Balls calls for crackdown on parents lying for school places
The schools secretary, Ed Balls, today called for an investigation into the number of parents who lie about where they live to secure school places for their children.
Lying about where one lives is pretty wicked and I for one am looking forward to MPs framing a new law which makes it a criminal offence across the board to falsify one’s address for personal or family gain. There may have to be a few exceptions to such a law, and the House of Commons is just the right institution to decide what they should be.
Harrow council had taken Mrinal Patel to court for allegedly applying for a place for her five-year-old son, Rhys, at PinnerPark first school using her mother's address last January. The council said it withdrew the action to avoid potentially expensive legal costs.
You see? That right there is an opportunity lost. It’s not just what she did, but that she lied about it that hurts. There must have been a great deal of public expense and effort put into making the council’s choice of primary school for Rhys what it is today and I can understand the hurt feelings of teachers, classroom assistants, governors, cleaning and maintenance staff at that school when they heard that Rhys and his mother had tried to reject them, to turn their backs on their beloved school for another, less suitable one elsewhere.
Harrow was prosecuting the 41-year-old under the Fraud Act 2006, but has now been told that it is no longer clear whether the legislation covers this type of case.
I think the legislation needs amending straight away. If a local education authority goes to the trouble to provide a particular combination of activities, assessment strategies and school yard bullying on the one hand, and then carefully blends its broad subject areas which have now fortunately replaced the old Imperialist academic’ subjects with the latest in educational theories and classroom practice to fit the profile of children in area A, then it stands to reason that little Rhys is not going to blossom so well at school B, where the mixture has been constructed to fit the profile of pupils – sorry, students – in that area.
Mrs. Patel was obviously trying to fit a square peg in a round hole there and most LEAs don’t allow the children to do that until the middle of Year Three when they’ve mastered mud, Basic Running and Introduction to Anthropogenic Climate Change.
Balls has called on the chief schools adjudicator, Ian Craig, to investigate how many parents are falsifying information on school application forms and whether councils have sufficient powers to deter them. The findings of the investigation will be divulged in November, Balls said.
We already know the answer to this one, don’t we? Of course they don’t have enough deterrent powers and only a die-hard reactionary would balk now at the creation of a criminal offence with perhaps a minimum sentence of two years.
It’s bad enough that private secondary schools are still legal, and hence they can act as magnets for all the best teachers and all the best maths (which was invented by Islam) and physics and Shakespeare's best bits, but if private citizens are allowed to use their children to upset these delicate ecological systems at the primary level, then education becomes a consumer choice like a market commodity; something to be bought and sold at the whim of laymen and women unaware of the value that, for example, Rhys would have given to his assigned classmates at School A.
At the very least, his classroom’s population would have become one fewer than the optimum level set for that school by the education authority, and as all enlightened teachers and educationalists are aware class sizes are very important to children’s’ emotional and educational development. It’s important that classes are filled up right to the door.
The Local Government Association has said it is "concerned at the worrying trend of increasing numbers of parents willing to break the law". A study it made of 31 councils 18 months ago found that 24 had seen a rise in the number of parents who had lied on application forms in the last three years.
And it’s a good law that’s being broken – not an evil one like the Poll Tax or the one that tried to protect the imperialist beer drinkers of the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town as they colluded in the British occupation of the north of Ireland.
It’s all very well forgiving and forgetting and later rewarding the occasional technical infractions of unjust laws, but it's a very different thing to allow individualists to treat public services as their own property and thus to bend its provision to their own unqualified and possibly divisive points of view.
Balls said councils had the right, under the admissions code, to withdraw a school place if they thought a parent had falsified information. He said the legal advice he had received was that the Fraud Act did not apply in cases such as Patel's.
"It's never been our intention to make this an issue of criminal sanctions and the use of the criminal law," he said. "It is not a criminal offence in education legislation to give false information in order to gain a school place.
"It is down to admission authorities themselves whether they want to go further on a case-by-case basis, and it is for the courts to set a precedent in wider criminal law."
Balls is weak on this, and the providers of education would be justified in feeling angry that their careful preparation of the finest school system in the world (bar SocialistSweden’s) and expert knowledge is so offhandedly left to the poorly funded LEAs themselves to use the doubtful validity of the law in what is at heart a human rights issue for teachers, caretakers, teacher training schools, and for progressive parents and governors alike
.
He added that it was important that parents who were playing by the rules were not disadvantaged by those who were not.
And the rules are the rules, after all, and they are good.
Patel told the BBC that Harrow's decision to drop the prosecution was "a great relief for me and my family".
There’s no sign, needless to say, of remorse from her for the lasting harm that she was trying to inflict on countless education professionals and children by treating Rhys’ future as if it were her own private concern.
She added: "It's been an extremely difficult ordeal, and I'm happy to put the matter behind me.
"I have, from the outset, denied the allegations, and the council's unconditional withdrawal of the proceedings confirms my innocence."
Patel, who denied the charge, was thought to be the first parent in the country to be taken to court for school application fraud.
And there you have it in black and white. This unjust system has been allowed to persist for far too long because the councils and the education authorities do not have enough power over the school system and the children in their areas.
Mrs. Patel and her mother should have been made aware that justice would be swift and sure if they tried to use fraudulent addressing to steal Rhys a school place that he did not deserve.
There should also be a system of child registration requiring an internal ‘passport’ whereby students could be kept safely within the authority where there family homes are and so receive a level of education uniquely suited for their own and their community’s needs.
This would be cheap to set up and administer, requiring only a small staff to uphold it so that the ideal of equal schooling for all children everywhere could be enforced and so that the individualist/market model that would otherwise produce a postcode lottery in schooling could be escaped.
David Ashton, the Harrow council leader, said local authorities needed powers to deter parents from submitting false information when applying for school places.
He added that authorities could withdraw a place only if they discovered the information was wrong.
"But this is not a punishment," he said. "It is the equivalent of telling a shoplifter to put the baked beans they have taken back on the shelf."
And here we see the wisdom of the council starkly contrasted with the cold and selfish calculations of Mrs. Patel.
CastleCity is in fact planning to establish a progressive system just like this for its grocery services.
We all know that eating is a basic human right and that food itself should not be treated as a consumer good to be bought and sold like footballers or other luxury goods and so a comprehensive feeding system is to be set up in the city based on geographical areas.
Northwester House is in the catchment area centred on its Marks and Spencer store, and so Mrs. Northwester and I will be henceforth entitled to shop there for all our food and drink needs. Previously we had flitted between the Iceland, Sainsbury's, Morrison's and Asda stores and the Co-op and a Booth’s in nearby villages at will; scattering our cash randomly and arbitrarily according to whatever selfish whims, anxieties over pricing and an obsession about the availability of certain brand ranges and specialist products (we are vegetarians and always buy expensive seeded bread for the omega fatty acids that we can no longer get from fish.)
We no doubt created a huge and dirty carbon footprint in the process.
Now, it is true that our Marks and Spencer is actually a longer distance for either casual shopping as we walk home from work each day than Sainsbury’s and Iceland, and there’s no free parking, and they don’t stock dried goods at all or any Quorn (which is not a St. Michaels brand, of course), or many of the cheap household goods that the other supermarkets stock. Oh, and its goods are generally more expensive than the Co-op or the other stores, but the quality is good 9especially the chocolate cakes) and if our choice of vegetarian meals will strictly limited and its fresh fruit and vegetables are less varied and less affordable, then that’s still a small price to pay to prevent people criss-crossing the city; creating more traffic and of course being demanding and whiny with the staff whose welfare we have not been accustomed to regarding as an important part of our shopping duties.
We'll also be setting a good example to less well-educated diners by demonstrating our healthier eating habits, which is a major benefit of the comprehensive shopping system.
Ashton suggested parents should be fined. "We need some sanction that will stop parents from thinking they'll 'have a go'. We aren't asking for something draconian, but otherwise it is open season for parents. Government has failed to give us ammunition to ensure this is fought fairly."
In the academic year for which Patel applied, 2008-09, 411 parents expressed a preference for PinnerPark and 90 places were offered to children living less than a mile from the school, Harrow council said.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that this might just be a case where bringing back corporal punishment for individuals like Mrs. Patel might be required.
The vast majority of excluded pupils are boys - often with special needs
Schools can avoid excluding very young children through techniques to manage behaviour that includes running off, biting and swearing, inspectors say.
I actually know quite a lot about this, coming from a family of teachers and having been a Special Classroom Assistant and later tried - and failed - to join my ancestors’ chalky ranks.
There have always been troubled and troublesome children.
Britain has never been a paradise for kids, even back in the day when the Welfare State hadn’t produced its third generation of fatherless and marriageless ‘families.’
My mother was the deputy head of one of those marvellous special schools that deal with this kind of problem.
I often spent time in these classrooms as a schoolchild too young to be left alone and sometimes later in my school holidays that didn’t co-ordinate with Mum’s term calendar.
There were always those wild kids who had no ‘off’ button nor a ‘slow’ button, either, and who had to be gently talked into moving and acting and talking at subsonic speeds, and they went to the special school – staffed as it was with specialists who had learned (and in some cases actually developed) techniques for dealing with the hyper ones.
Mum taught those suddenly, insanely violent but otherwise quiet ones whose tiny, malnourished figures would suddenly blaze into Tasmanian Devil-like whirlwinds of swearing, biting, gouging aggression as some genetic or historical demon compelled them to fight.
Mum taught kids whose parents just had no idea about anything, and who hadn’t taught them the rudiments of self-control or self-preservation, and sometimes the English as a second language ‘Asian’ girls who’d be bright as the sun, thirsty for knowledge and who’d suddenly disappear to you-know-where, to my mother’s horror.
Then there were the literally lousy and the oxygen-starved at birth mental slow-coaches and the should-have-been-in-Borstals, and even the odd ‘gifted’ child who had grown bored at the local grammar school and cut up rough as there was nothing but mischief to absorb the blows of their quick, inquiring minds.
And last there were the quiet ones whose grief and silence my mother would never explain to me at the time. I’d venture a guess today.
So many different little hellions from different little hells, and Mum’s school and most of her colleagues deal with them; cajoled and herded and quieted and soothed and taught them, and some o them went on to mainstream schools and jobs and marriages and away from the fathers and stepfathers and bottles and needles and neighbourhoods that had made them ‘special.’ Some did not.
But it worked.
Apparently, these schools went from combination LEA dumping-grounds and hotbeds of 1960’s idealism to craft workshops (but never factories) of limited, human-scale success. Think of that; slow evolution, trial-and error, building on experience and cutting away what fails and strengthening and building upon what actually works! I ask you, is that any way to build a good society?
It was still working in the ‘Noughties when I visited a special school for what was then part of my lead up to teaching practice.
This special school had a wire-enclosed playground and security like a political conference, and the teachers were still, 30 years later, bringing damaged and difficult children to knowledge and, despite frequent and spectacular tantrums, teaching them some of it. Some lessons were pretty basic like ‘How not to hit someone back,’ but still the lessons seemed to be going in and there was much good work on display – way above the finger-painting and plasticine dolls you might expect.
And I spend twelve glorious hours per week, paid at another school in the lower juniors in a not-nice part of the city looking after one troubled child.
He went into fugues as if no-one was there, and it took concentration and trickery and humour to bring the mind back to the empty-faced boy. But when it came back, he was ready to learn.
Sometimes I was with him as he mixed in with the other children in routine classes, and occasionally it was alright. But sometimes our work – with me supervising him and encouraging his efforts to keep up – distracted the others. Sometimes I had to take him out to cool down.
And all that disrupted the main lessons and the twenty-something children and the teacher and other classroom assistant who had to put up with him.
And ordinary schools have handfuls of ‘students’ on schemes like this, and they take up so much of the non-specialist teachers’ time and energy that I wondered then how much of a chance the others had to learn as we talked my customer down.
So we get this.
Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: "Exclusion of children aged under seven is still very rare.
"Ofsted inspectors found that almost all children in the schools they visited knew how to behave properly.
"Only a small number of children found this difficult but, with proper guidance and support, the need to exclude them can be avoided."
I worked with teachers of such dedication and skill in both special and mainstream schools that if any schools could have integrated these children with the rest, then these were the ones.
They’d’ have reduced the numbers playing the system and getting special treatment, too, if corporal punishment was still on the menu.
Some kids seek attention and want their own support assistants and play on their untouchable status. I’ve seen it happen – the envy of kids obliged to play outside when they see their special needs classmates kept in the warm and helped and befriended by special adults.
‘Inclusion’ is the buzzword – the New Labour and progressive LEA project that has done much to close or diminish special schools chasing the rainbow of keeping the special children’s needs and problems mixed in with the rest. I saw some of these intensively cared-for children blossom within main schools and get on – but all the while reducing the time and energy left to the rest of the staff to spend on everyone else.
Here’s a secret; sometimes specialist schools work and after a period of intense effort and then consolidation they send their charges back to conventional schools and off they go. Sometimes specialist schools do in fact work and keep their pupils in all the way and give them the best start that they can. Sometimes – often – keeping the hard cases and the walking wounded in with the rest just eats up money, time, and the other children’s lives.
I wasn’t good enough to become a teacher (I must lack my parents’ knack of lighting up enough minds often enough and well enough or something) but I think that after years of being ill-educated and then better educated and then very well educated I know how important some basic level of peace and quite is to everyone’s school day.
I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the thinking behind Ofsted’s report is ideological here, and wrong.
Just like the bright sparks who came up with comprehensive education and the Initial Teaching Alphabet and abandoning academic subjects and standards and chasing corporal punishment out of British education it’s possible; just possible, that Ofsted’s jokers now want to finish what the educational Left has started and close the centres of excellence that the specialists like my mother and her colleagues worked so long and so hard to build up.
Because ‘special’ means different and different means unequal and unequal is wrong.
Throw another generation of the fire – it’s getting a bit too privileged in here.
Cheering BALPA Pilot instructors under fire for chanting 'No more ATPS' during aviation exams boycott vote
By Laura Clark
Airline pilot trainers at the BALPA conference voted unanimously to boycott tests for pilots and air traffic controllers.
Pilot instructors who chanted and cheered as they demanded the scrapping of Airline Transport Pilot Certificate were accused of setting a poor example to trainee pilots.
Cries of 'no more ATPs' rang out as the British Air Line Pilots' Association conference voted unanimously to boycott tests for cabin crew and air traffic staff.
Delegates had earlier staged a demonstration outside the conference centre where they chanted 'no more useless tests' and 'scrap the ATPs'. Some wore T-shirts bearing the logo 'BALPA' and 'No Useless Tests'.
But air safety campaigners said the televised spectacle made pilot instructors appear 'childish' and 'unseemly' and unsuitable role models for pilot trainees.They also speculated that if the trainees weren’t tested from time to time in simulated conditions, the training authorities could not be sure if the pilots would crash on take-off or in flight or on landing.
More than 100 delegates at the conference in Cardiff backed a resolution calling for a ballot of members to boycott ATPs next year if ministers fail to drop them. Speakers were given a standing ovation as the motion was passed and there were cheers and chants of 'no more ATPs'.
As members gathered for Saturday's debate, at St David's Hall in Cardiff, they staged a protest against the tests, which they claim damage pilot's education and lead to hours of needless coaching.
Wearing red T- shirts bearing anti-testing logos, they held a banner stating: 'BALPA say Training Not Testing, No More ATPs.'
Max Hyde, of the BALPA executive, said: 'At best ATPs are detrimental and skew the curriculum. At worst, and particularly for our most vulnerable trainees, they are perilously close to cramming in General Navigation.'
The boycott, which Transport Secretary Ed Balls claims would be illegal, would involve refusing to administer ATPs for pilots and air traffic controllers.
But Nick Seaton, chairman-of the Campaign for Safe Aviation, said: 'The spectacle of pilot instructors chanting about getting rid of ATPs sets a poor example to would-be airline pilots.
'It's childish and unseemly. When the major training union has direct access to senior politicians, you would think there would be no reason to conduct themselves like this.'
The National Association of Senior Airline Pilots, which represents 85 per cent of leading commercial and passenger pilots, will vote next month on a boycott.
Around 450 trainees will be forced to take ATPs next month even though ministers have abolished the discredited tests.
Three-quarters of flying schools will set the tests to advanced trainees despite being told they longer have to.
Figures from the Civil Aviation Authority show 32 pilot training schools have ordered tests for 2009 which is only slightly down on last year's 41 even though they are now non-statutory.
You do a post that puts the Right-wing boot in on teachers one day, and then your luck takes you to another, much better illustration of how the whole set-up works to promote socialism and anti-patriotism – but mostly promotes schoolchild ignorance. Following a link about saucily-dressed porno schoolteacher from Letters From A Tory, I stumbled upon another little gem which you might already have read.
Here’s one about the whistle-blowing Channel 4 journalist teacher who filmed the anarchy in the classroom she worked in as a supply teacher in a Dispatches programme.
A science teacher who secretly filmed shocking scenes of pupil misbehaviour for a TV documentary has been banned from the classroom for a year.
Alex Dolan remains unrepentant over the filming of rowdy pupils
Alex Dolan said she was "shocked and saddened" that a General Teaching Council panel found her guilty of unacceptable professional conduct.
She said she was merely raising matters of vital public interest.
The GTC panel ruled that Ms Dolan, who also exposed apparent attempts to dupe Ofsted inspectors, breached the trust of pupils and abused her position.
She recorded secret footage at four schools in London and Leeds in 2005.
In its judgment, the panel said it did not accept that the public interest issues raised by the film, part of Channel 4's Dispatches series, justified the use of covert filming.
But Ms Dolan, who was suspended from the teaching register for 12 months, said she still considered that she acted fairly and in the wider public interest.
Note what the court criticised her for and what it suspended her teaching licence for.
Ms Dolan, who also exposed apparent attempts to dupe Ofsted inspectors,..
Still it’s no biggy duping Ofsted, as any reasonable person not a raving fascist Tory would have thought, and so on to the thing that hurts; really huts, a liberal’s sensibilities.
…breached the trust of pupils and abused her position.
Now she didn’t film them naked, or name them (if the clip is representative), and all she did was blur out their faces and watch them monkeying about. She states that this behaviour was typical of 14 out of 16 schools she taught in.
So what ‘trust’ did she betray; the trust so tenderly placed by innocent little children into her unscrupulous hands? The trust not to show them running about and shouting and leaping on desks and preventing any learning from going on?
I wondered at this point whether the court’s philosopher kings were getting any oxygen - perhaps due to their self-restricted air supply and reflexive body posture?
Does a teacher have some liberal-divined ‘duty of care’, perhaps, not to show schoolboys being hooligans and destroying in the process that irreplaceable precious time during which(as we are constantly assured by Left-wing teachers and educationalists) children’s’ minds are at their most fertile and open to knowledge and new experience?
You’d have to be a real curtain-twitching suburban Daily Mail-reading car-polishing-every-Sunday gnomes-on-both-lawns and stand up for the National Anthem fascist to see anything wrong with little children expressing their natural exuberance and curiosity about the world and what their young bodies are capable of…and completely trashing an hour’s worth of the ’education’ of 30 or many more representative of Our Future.
You’d think (albeit only in a parallel universe) that the wholesale negation of the point, purpose, goal and intent of a school is of some kind of public interest – say to taxpayers, parents, politicians, teachers, and even the courts.
But hey, that’s just me? What do I know? I just don’t have the sophisticated reasoning capabilities of the court and its Solomon-like panel which went on:
In its judgment, the panel said it did not accept that the public interest issues raised by the film, part of
Channel 4's Dispatches series, justified the use of covert filming.
So, utterly wasting the time and money of everyone concerned in all those schools is just whatever, but showing it to everyone else concerned is just plain not justified, right? Okay, what would be justified? Actual assault? Threatened assault? Rape or threatened rape? Crystal meth or crack? A racist comment? That might just do it, I guess.
Just how bad does it have to be for the public interest to be served in exposing such destructive behaviour?
Stumps me.
Ideas, anyone?
I Was Right About Teachers Loving Big Brother. Part One.
You’ll notice from the Channel 4 interview that her chosen cure for disruption in the classroom is money:
Many of the most needy schools are not given the resources to tackle their problems.
Sorry, did I say ‘money?’ I meant ‘resources,’ which of course can’t be bought with money.
Our fearless investigator touches upon discipline in response to her interlocutors, but she’s a modern British state school teacher through and through, so in the end it comes down to those ‘resources’:
“Very difficult question, unfortunately there will always be pupils in schools that don't want to learn and as teachers we have to put resources in place to cope with that. The current policy of inclusion of disruptive pupils definitely makes things more difficult for teachers, however, I think it's a step in the right direction, but, from what I saw in six months, schools need much greater resources to cope with these pupils who otherwise would have been excluded from schools.”
Though she does have a go at achievement targets:
I think this situation exists because targets have become more important than teaching.
And one last blast for resources:
“There are many things that could be done to improve the lives of teachers and pupils: more classroom assistants, greater support for schools forced to take excluded pupils and higher salaries for teachers to attract more people into the profession.”
Note her protective attitude towards schools and school funding, matching my clumsy and poorly-spelled yet deeply wise words from yesterday:
Alex Dolan the teacher who exposed the 'papering over the cracks' in schools has been banned by the GTC.
This is a Party Political move by the government to deter others from exposing the reality in many of our classrooms.
Alex should be fully supported in what she did. Heads who hide under their desks should be exposed, named and shamed and vilified for their incompetence.
Hmm. Sounds a bit like me. What’s gone wrong with the TES?
Ah this is better…
Posted by: tom clancy 28/03/2009 at 10:49
Tony, Your history on here and in other places demonstrates you have an axe to grind.
Socialist character assassination as a first resort. An ‘axe to grind’, huh? Utterly dishonourable. Maybe the evil tonycallaghan is some kind of Tory or equally morally panicked by anarchy in 14 out of 16 classrooms, d’you think?
2) "exposed the papering over the cracks in schools" ? How many schools?
14 out of 16. Remember reading that bit anywhere, tomclancy? Perhaps not.
Not all. Just carefully selected ones to make a sensationalist programme.
All too true, I’m certain.
Why, sure, a tiny unrepresentative minority of the guys burn a cross or two, maybe bomb a black church and so on, but most of them, they just pray to Jesus and organize bake sales and picnics for America. They worry about the possible future of a multi-cultural society. You can’t tar us all with the same brush by selecting a few isolated incidents, yeah?
She is a journalist, not a teacher.
She’s a teacher, Tom, as well as a journalist. They teach you the word ‘and’ as well as ‘either’ back at teacher training madrassa? People in the real world can have more kinds of jobs than the one you get at 22 and its Education Planet successors.
3) Party political ? OK Where's the proof?
Hmm, maybe tonycallaghan overeggs it here. We all post in haste sometime. Remember my Sarah Michelle Geller is a Republican? Oy.
...But which particular party (out of all the score or so of parties in this country) and that is financed by the teachers’ unions also upholds comprehensive education, removing discipline and utterly opposes parental choice at all times? Any guesses?
4) Alex should be fully supported. Not at all. Her motivation was as a journalist to make a programme (and for her to make her name, perhaps).
Questioning her motives and letting us all know it was for pride and maybe money. Socialist character assassination as a first resort. What’s your motive in minimizing any criticism of ‘education’ in Britain, tomclancy? Are you a net beneficiary of the system perhaps, or just a dumb-as-a-fencepost true believer? Only Lefties’ motives are pure and good, as all TES regulars will attest.
If she had wanted to see changes made in these schools, there were other ways.
Yeah.
She could write to the Daily Mail and be put down in the TES and at NUT conferences as a Tory moral-panicker. She’d never get onto the Beeb, except maybe on Welsh BBC4 at quarter to four on a Sunday morning. She could write to her Local Education Authority or the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Young Folks and Skills and Really Cool Stuff and get a rote answer and be ignored by the people on the inside whose fault this all is and who are interested only in maintaining the system.
But broadcasting moving pictures to show the facts? Unconscionable. Wicked. Just plain wrong.
5) "heads who hide under their desks..." Absolutely agree with you. But this was not the way to do it.
So you’re a sensible man of the people, right, tomclancy and not some hind of Leftie insider? What is the way to do it? Get elected to NUT conference and then be shouted down at Conference as an elitist/fascist/racist fan of the culture of violence? (I’ve actually seen teachers describing schools with corporal punishment as having a ‘culture of violence.’)
by: Traceyjane 29/03/2009 at 00:00
With Tom on this one.
Makes good news!!
Wicked, wicked investigative journalists! The issue’s not the issue, nothing to see, move it along. I’m so sweet.
I can surely see our youngsters working us out of Labour’s economic cluster when their bright young minds are moulded by such as these.
