Sorry but I had to!

 

How our Government is Killing Education.

I made reference to some gripes on the Background page but that is not the place, so here it is - if you want to read it. The Labour Government is killing education in this country - speaking as an ex-member of the labour party.

They have totally failed to understand the nature of education.

High quality t eaching is the responsibility of the teacher but learning is the responsibility of the learner - taking advantage of that which is being offered by the teacher. We cannot learn on behalf of the pupil. If parents and children do not value education - there is little we can do. The learner taking on his/her responsibility is a major part of the educational process which this government has totally failed to understand.

Children are now being spoon fed just so the Government can claim better results and shout off some meaningless political sound bite. In fact, the entire purpose of education these days has nothing to do with students, pupils or even education - it is simply to provide politicians with headlines to feed the press.

How often do we hear of employers and universities complaining about standards? The reason - this Government has made teachers solely responsible for pupil outcomes. So now, teachers get the grades on behalf of the kids, the kids leave school with loads of certificates but are often, quite poorly educated.

This unfair burden on teachers has also, perversely, had a negative effect on the quality of teaching in our schools. Many of our best teachers and head teachers have left the profession. This is particularly the case with head teachers.

We are now getting a tick-box driven type of head teacher who is more interested in their own career than in educating children, who (because of the shortage of head teachers) have been promoted too quickly and don’t understand the fundamentals of classroom pedagogy. As long as they have introduced a load of new initiatives, they think they have done their job. They need to provide headlines or soundbites for the inspectors who pass these on to their political masters. Because of our political masters, it seems that education these days is simply about continual change (for change's sake) rather than effectiveness in terms of teaching and learning.

We have a similar situation in the Health Service. Eighty people recently died as a resultof poor infection control at a hospital in Kent. the chief executive of the Hospital Trust suggested that the previous Chief Executive of the trust had been 'too ambitious' with internal reorganisation, external service reconfigurations, applying for foundation status, etc., etc., whilst taking their eye off patient care and in particular basic infection control. When will this Government learn - 80 dead and they're still hell bent on new innitiatives.

Worst of all in education, a number of good head teachers are cracking up under the strain of the accountability regime and becoming bullies.

Exam results go up year on year but there is always the issue of exams getting easier and the Government quango manipulating grades (threshold boundaries are only set when all of the exams are marked and the scores are known). Although standards in teaching are going up, standards in learning seem to be falling and the students aren’t actually receiving an education, they’re simply clients in what has become a service industry where part of that service is the serving of certificates. Teachers who tick all the boxes do not necessarily make for effective learning - it's about knowling which boxes apply to which child and when.