Cameron shooting his mouth off about schools again

[LeftishBrit]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14860352


He vowed to confront failure in education head-on and deliver "real excellence" through greater choice, competition and freedom. ...


"Today we are considering whether we need to go further and faster. It is not just failing schools we need to tackle; it is coasting schools too, the ones whose results have either flat-lined or they haven't improved as much as they could have done...

"Education ministers recently said they were increasing the minimum standard for schools.

By 2015, any secondary school which sees less than half of its students achieve five good GCSEs will be classified as failing. Currently the standard is 30%.'


Hmph, as far as I remember, one of the campaigning points of the Tories in the last election was to reduce all the targets and regulations for schools! The Tories are even better than New Labour at finding ways of combining all the worst things of central regulation (excessive bureaucracy, government sitting on people's necks) and all the worst things of the free market (insecurity, competition for its own sake, taking from the already disadvantaged).

[non sociopath skin]

1. One of the deepest areas of concern at last Easter's NUT Conference ...

... was the implications for students with special needs as a result of the Tory "reforms"

SEN provision, never great at the best of times, tended to be centrally funded by LEAs and, at least, equitably doled out. Increasingly, individual establishments are responsible for their own provision and there's no question of "ring-fencing" SEN out of the global pot they're given.

Given the increasingly "Grammar School" - "elitist," Cameron and Gove might term them - nature of the targets which establishments have to meet simply to stay afloat, young people with learning difficulties, physical disabilities or - heaven help them - both, are emphatically NOT the kind of bums Academies and Free Schools want on their seats.

The fear is that alternative free-market "providers" may emerge, benign Dotheboys Halls for the 21st century equipped with plentiful supplies of ritalin, whose purpose will be to keep these unwanted units out of sight and out of mind until they're ready to become minimum wage fodder, "benefit cheats" or street dwellers.

Funny, isn't it, how abolishing both universal healthcare AND universal education didn't even get a footnote in the Tory or LibDem manifestos.

O tempora. O mores. O fuck.

The Skin