Election Fever!

Wow, we now face the excruciating experience of being lectured to by a pack of self-serving politicians who cannot simply let control of education go. Way to go.

On the one hand we have a Labour Government that attempts to demonstrate that education standards are improving by constantly measuring, monitoring and target setting. This has been such a success that the two major teaching unions, the NUT and the NAHT, have voted to boycott the next round of SAT tests for 11 year olds. One union is traditionally a Labour supporter and the other represents the least militant group in society, the head-teachers for goodness sake!

Does our friend, Mr Balls, at the Ministry for Goodness-knows-what-it-is-named-this-week-but-was-formerly-that-of-education appear to care? No. He has rubbished the Cambridge Report into Primary education which condemned the standards culture. He has ignored recommendations from the Parliamentary Committee on Education that testing was ruining children's experience of education. He issues yet more diktats from the Ministry to cope with the fact that children are still not passiing the arbitrary "pass" mark of Level 4 in Maths and English at age 11, rather than accepting that a prescribed and centrally controlled curriculum, teaching strategies and inspection system have failed.

What about the other lot? Our Conservative friends have a long track record of undervalueing state education. Why else do so many of the Conservative front bench send their children to public schools (or have themselves attended them)? Their answer is still to control schools centrally through a standards system. They still want league tables which compare unlike schools with unlike schools.

What is wrong with these people? Why are they so intent on micromanaging education. Why does a school in Kent need to teach the same subjects in the same way as a school in Northumberland?

Let's take an example. Does Eton College let others tell it how to teach it's students? Does it take a rather more professional line and evolve a curriculum that suits its students? Eton answers to its Governors and Trustees, as well as its parents. Why can't state schools do the same? Are teachers in the state sector so untrustworthy? If a government has a realistic inspection system rather than the madness of OFsted then this could be possible. Do children emerge from Eton as ignorant and undereducated, with an inability to learn? Based on my own experience then I would say no (regardless of other questions such as privilege, money etc).

The reason there are still children who do not perform well at school in Maths and English is that there is not enough for them to do at school that they find stimulating. In British primary schools they learn to switch off at an early age when reading, writing and maths become more difficult. Contrast this with many European Countries where children actually formally start primary education at 6-7 years old). They become habitually confused in lessons because they cannot concentrate at crucial moments. They fall behind.

The bonkers thing about this system that we have allowed to come into being in this country is that you can find in almost any classroom in the country one or two children who are being taught to write before they can even read! Subsequently, writing has no meaning for them and actually becomes a source of anguish. Similarly, they can't do maths because most maths is presented in a written form, and despite their own possible natural talents at maths they are precluded from accessing more complex maths because of their poor reading.

These children are being forced into a sausage making machine that is the school. They have to be assessed at age 11 in Reading, Writing and Maths so they have to be able to sit a test. Panicky teachers and Heads, looking at the SATs results, on which the school will be judged by Ofsted, look at these children despairingly and try to get them through a faulty system but it is largely hopeless when so much of School time is skewed towards reading writing and maths.

Where are the politicians when we get down to the nitty gritty of actual classroom experience for most teachers in the country? They are not interested because the solution (if there is even one in the English speaking world) is complex and does not lend itself to headlines that proclaim a measurable success. Shame on them for their appalling lack of leadership!