Originally Posted by chocolate_frog

Originally Posted by Ex_ex

Originally Posted by Oil_Slick

Originally Posted by Fifth_Columnist

Perhaps it is finally an admission that the vast majority of the money 'invested' in education has been wasted.

Bingo!


All that 12 years of Labour throwing a mountain of money at Education has achieved is kids that are on average less well educated than they were 12 years ago.

Agreed.

Bliar and Cyclops have destroyed the education system - cutting £2 billion from it won't make any difference.

Feral youths: How a generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society

Feral youths easily solved.

[/b]Ensure a good standard of male (and female) role models in the schools... not a bunch of idiots.

[b]Bring back borstals, where the kids will learn and emulate similar good role models with pletny of esteem building activities.

Bin the dole for them, they must turn up to work.

And basically chin this fcuking "call centre" economy and start building things again.[b]

You know that you are right, I know it too, most of us know you are right, but we all know it will never happen. Why not? it isn't rocket science or even difficult to do. Answer. The lefties won't allow it. Fcuk 'em. Bring back the birch and start with the parents.

Originally Posted by DigitalGeek

Whatever happened to the Blair principles of "Education, Education, Education"

Big mistake - using the words "Blair" and "principles" in the same sentence.

Originally Posted by CountryGal

They could save a shedload of pennies scrapping the completely pointless, time wasting, money shredding sat tests. A competant teacher should be able to highlight any pupils who need extra help, or those who are brighter and need more stimulation without the need for the sat tests. The amount of pressure it puts on little ones is immense and unnessacary.

The main point of the SATs is to test the teachers, not the kids.

The only 'little ones' put under pressure are the incompetent teachers.

Why do you think the teaching unions want them scrapped.

Bank funding = unstinting squillions
Schools = -£2bn

We'll be back to those rusty metal fire buckets catching the drips, just like when the Tories were in power.

And all thanks to Brown worshipping at the door of Greenspan et al. Cuts yes, but not education.

We have failed decade after decade to fund education and it has left us trailing behind our Western partners, be it technical colleges in the 50s or expansion of university provision. This will set us back again leaving France, France!, as more productive than the UK. It can be traced back to the skills gaps forged in the 50s by our failure to invest in new infrastructure and new skills.

£66 bn on devolution! Feck me.

Originally Posted by Pantsoff

£66 bn on devolution! Feck me.

Bargain huh?
All that money to try and break up the Union.

A highly educated workforce capable of critical thinking is a dangerous concept for any government. That much was demonstrated in the 1960s as the beneficiaries of a universal compulstory education of a high standard introduced under the 1944 Education Act began to enter Higher Education. They became radicalised with dangerous ideas of freedom and democracy with student riots and demonstrations against government foreign and domestic policy common on the streets of our university towns at that time.

State education is structured to provide a socially-engineered disciplined and docile workforce over whom political influence may be exercised. It is designed to produce people who are educated to a very basic level. Our Primary schools are little more than playgroups, our secondary schools have a lower standard than primary school of the late 1950s and our modern universities turn out people who are no better equipped educationally than an individual who left Grammar School in the same period.

We saw a practical demonstration of this on reality television not so very long ago when top 'A'-Level starred graduates were introduced to a 1950s school and could not even pass an 11-plus paper from that period. Needless to say, the programme lasted just long enough on the air to make its point extremely powerfully to a watching public and to a political class who remained totally silent.

Some of the Quangos association with Education absorb 40% of the education budget.Additionally they are stuffed with NuLiabor supporters and toadies.

The waste in Education is beyond belief...

Only a couple of weeks into the new school year & my desk is already piled high with forms for pointless courses (usually at £199+ a throw, plus of course travel expenses on top for attendees), "conferences", and details of the latest "initiatives" from LEA & Mr Balls' dept..

I rarely attend courses - the expense & loss of teaching time being the main reason, but also because I'm hard pressed to remember one that was any good: mostly long-winded drivel from self-promoters who state the blindingly obvious or are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Keep being pestered by an LEA "adviser" to take a group of 6th formers to a "Citizenship Conference" - ie a propaganda session. Last one I attended contained not one speaker who was not part of the "Left/ Liberal Consensus" - it was a joke, & a disgrace. Each of these pointless exercises must cost £ thousands to stage...

One could go on... "fact finding" tours to foreign parts for LEA toadies/ lickspittles; "Yoof Assemblies" & the plethora of (costly) "events" associated with them; "School Council Orientation & Training"; "Emotional Literacy"; "Healthy Schools"; "Every Child Matters" etc etc...

Constant rejigging of exam specs/ syllabi necessitates regular attendance at exam board briefings: I've been compelled to attend one in London because I'm lead member of my dept for teaching a new A2 module - so that'll be course cost (> £150 for the day - about 5 hours actual "contact") plus travel expenses for rail/tube of about £70. There'll probably be 100 or so teachers attending to listen to 2 "experts" from the board. As the Yanks say, "go figure" - someone is making a tidy profit, and all for delivering "clarification" of something which would not require such if the syllabus was competently written in the first place. A cynic might be forgiven for thinking the exam boards create confusingly bureaucratic specs to engineer opportunities to deliver highly lucrative "training support".

Schools employ more & more "admin support" staff: largely, it seems, to feed data into computers, produce spreadsheets/ charts etc - all to feed the cavernous maw of Ofsted & the DFSFC with their appetite for "monitoring & evaluation" of "School Performance". Woe betide the Head who does not play the game - "data rich" or die!

The pity of it is that fewer & fewer schools actually manage to deliver much of any real value... not least because they're subsumed by all the wasteful bulls**t.

In truth, anyone with half a brain & the will to do it could save 20% from the education budget and drive up school performance massively. Won't ever happen because there are far too many vested interests at stake, and politicians have not a clue about the real impact of their endless "initiatives". Education exists in a Kafkaesque world of lies & delusion all smothered in oodles of wishful thinking, but those at the top don't half feel good about what their minions tell them is being achieved - and they've got the data to prove it!

I think that your perspective is a very good one.However there are no politicians 'listening'.I have a friend (ex Army and Cambridge Uni) who was a senior local government official,and is now a 'consultant'.He backs up all you say.

Originally Posted by Wessex_Man

The waste in Education is beyond belief...

Only a couple of weeks into the new school year & my desk is already piled high with forms for pointless courses (usually at £199+ a throw, plus of course travel expenses on top for attendees), "conferences", and details of the latest "initiatives" from LEA & Mr Balls' dept..

I rarely attend courses - the expense & loss of teaching time being the main reason, but also because I'm hard pressed to remember one that was any good: mostly long-winded drivel from self-promoters who state the blindingly obvious or are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Keep being pestered by an LEA "adviser" to take a group of 6th formers to a "Citizenship Conference" - ie a propaganda session. Last one I attended contained not one speaker who was not part of the "Left/ Liberal Consensus" - it was a joke, & a disgrace. Each of these pointless exercises must cost £ thousands to stage...

One could go on... "fact finding" tours to foreign parts for LEA toadies/ lickspittles; "Yoof Assemblies" & the plethora of (costly) "events" associated with them; "School Council Orientation & Training"; "Emotional Literacy"; "Healthy Schools"; "Every Child Matters" etc etc...

Constant rejigging of exam specs/ syllabi necessitates regular attendance at exam board briefings: I've been compelled to attend one in London because I'm lead member of my dept for teaching a new A2 module - so that'll be course cost (> £150 for the day - about 5 hours actual "contact") plus travel expenses for rail/tube of about £70. There'll probably be 100 or so teachers attending to listen to 2 "experts" from the board. As the Yanks say, "go figure" - someone is making a tidy profit, and all for delivering "clarification" of something which would not require such if the syllabus was competently written in the first place. A cynic might be forgiven for thinking the exam boards create confusingly bureaucratic specs to engineer opportunities to deliver highly lucrative "training support".

Schools employ more & more "admin support" staff: largely, it seems, to feed data into computers, produce spreadsheets/ charts etc - all to feed the cavernous maw of Ofsted & the DFSFC with their appetite for "monitoring & evaluation" of "School Performance". Woe betide the Head who does not play the game - "data rich" or die!

The pity of it is that fewer & fewer schools actually manage to deliver much of any real value... not least because they're subsumed by all the wasteful bulls**t.

In truth, anyone with half a brain & the will to do it could save 20% from the education budget and drive up school performance massively. Won't ever happen because there are far too many vested interests at stake, and politicians have not a clue about the real impact of their endless "initiatives". Education exists in a Kafkaesque world of lies & delusion all smothered in oodles of wishful thinking, but those at the top don't half feel good about what their minions tell them is being achieved - and they've got the data to prove it!