Not good enough
EDUCATION – Here we go again and again. Tony Blair admitted the other day that after eight years of Labour promises, schools were still not good enough. It is an indictment of a Prime Minister who has taken so long to achieve so little. It is a policy which seems as clear as mud.
We have slipped down the international education league, as pupils leaving school with basic qualifications failed to improve, we have fallen from 13th among the 30 OECD countries to 22nd.
What do we do – a 39bn U-turn that has cheated each and every school since Labour came into power. In one of the most humiliating about-faces ever, it seems all schools will become independent, self-governing trust schools. The PM has finally admitted he was wrong to abolish grant maintained schools in 1997. These made schools free from local authority control and were hugely popular. Now it is said they want to bring these back and will spend millions doing that. No wonder 30 per cent of secondary school teachers are quitting within five years, statistics show above 14,000 who have left had only been teaching for five years or less.
At Question Time the PM had the audacity to state that teaching is getting better, results are getting better, but if you take out the must subjects of English and Maths the results have got worse, and how many are teaching who are not qualified to do so?
Tony Blair's report should say promising, this really means not succeeding, promising has been this Government's defining characteristic. They've failed again to keep their promise.
Even David Bell, the chief inspector of schools, said that one in four schools offers pupils only mediocrity, thousands are just coasting.
In some quarters, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has been branded a disaster. Her department is in chaos with the national curriculum where some GCSE students needed only 16 per cent to get a grade A in maths. Rigour has gone out of the window with results massaged so they appear better than they are, which shows a lack of depth and inexperience.
RAYMOND VARNEY
Smithies Moor Rise
BATLEY
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Weather for Wakefield
Friday 25 May 2012
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