Good grief. Labour are at it again. This time it’s the even more bonkers than usual suggestion that parents should be given the right to “vote out” the senior management teams of failing schools and “vote in” the senior management team from an “accredited” school.
I see a couple of problems with this. First, the aim is to have 500 “accredited schools”. Well, there are around 30,000 schools in the uk. So thats a 1 to 60 ratio. I would challenge any school management team no matter how good they are to manage a second school as effectively as the first without declining standards in the first. Unless the rate of failing schools is less than 2 in 60 then this means every accredited school will be split between two schools and there will be an inevitable decline as the performance of each reflects the split loyalties and time. If the rate is higher than 1 in 60, you won’t even find 500 accredited ones to start with!
Of course, I’m probably missing a huge amount of information that may make this idea sound slightly more plausible but hey, most soap-box ranting is under-informed, especially on the net so why should my blog be any different?
I am sure of my ground on one point though. Parents should not be given any more power over schools than they currently have. The problem is this. There are a lot of poor (morally, emotionally, not financially) parents out there. There are a lot of parents who rarely read to their children for example. There are more still who fail to hear their children read regularly. Unfortunatel,y those parents least likely to take an active part in their children’s education – the “high achieving” workaholic salary ladder slaves with mortgages and cars they can’t really afford unless they work so much they don’t see their kids – are precisely the types who will turn up to vote out a failing management team because their kid can’t read without realising that their kid can’t read because they never do it at home where it really counts.
As in all things of course, it’s a bell curve. The parents I describe above are at one end of the curve. There are parents who can’t spare the time to actually parent at the other end of the curve working double shifts just to pay the heating bill. In between there is a broad range that are doing their best and doing a good job but the problem is everyone has a vote and most parents’ experience of education is limited to just being a parent. They are not qualified to teach or to manage teachers. They do not understand the pressures that teachers are under; they do not even understand for the most part the laughable way in which the national curriculum calls for more hours to be taught each day than exist in any actual school day. (Don’t believe me… go ahead, get a copy. Add up all the recommendations. It comes to about 6 hours a day. Now how long, less lunch, breaks, registration, religion (grrrr) is left in your kid’s school day? a lot less than 6).
For crying out loud, most people you will meet in life are very likely to be insufferably stupid anyway (note: this opinion may be as a result of my acknowledged anti-social outlook and like most statistics “most” may be completely bogus.) The chances of getting a sensible reasoned decision on anything from a sample of “the public” are slim at best and parents, myself among them are well, you know, The Public.
Fixing education is simple.
1. Don’t have a national curriculum then leave wriggle room for teachers. Either give them free reign and let the cream rise or mandate the teaching so even the crap teachers can do some good and the really creative ones will go off and do something creative.
2. Have governing bodies made up of seasoned retired teachers who can serve for up to five years following their last full time teaching post. They should have the power to separate the wheat from the chaff. They should get paid.
3. Don’t try to kid parents that it is school’s job to teach their kids to read, write and add up. This is the parents’ job. The teacher’s job is to add some structure and to make sure the gaps are filled in. This should be made clear to parents. Stop trying to come up with nannying tactics that make parents think that they can devolve their child’s education to the school alone.
It’s not much is it? I could go on… how about not letting kids move on a year until they’ve reached the required level of attainment in the current year. If they don’t get it, they do it again until they do. Sure, it would be chaotic at first, it would have to be flexible and schools would have to adapt and have the resources to adapt to their local mix of abilities. But no-one would leave school not being able to read, write and add up unless they also needed so much help that they needed help to live independently anyway. Did you see that program “Kids can’t count”? quite shocking. Lots of poor teaching going on there admittedly but I’d bet that the most chronic under achievers are not getting the support for learning from home that they need either.
Rant over. I feel better even though it’s highly likely that no-one is reading this and less likely still that anything will change because of another whiny blog post.
