I am a great believer in fixing what is broken. The UK education system is broken. So the education system must be fixed.
It does seem, however, that the new Government has no idea what to do because, instead of fixing the system, they have hit the rewind button.
Higher Education has rewound to a system that reduces availability by reducing funding, it has also been rewound to a system that discourages lower income individuals from believing that HE is accessible. Whilst I am not completely against post-graduation methods of cost recovery, how it has been positioned could have been done with a little more finesse. But then that is what happens when money today is more important than our children’s future.
School Education has rewound to a system that is based on an arcane belief in the “old school” according to how I understand Michael Gove’s white paper headlines. Bring back prefects. Allow head teachers greater measures in punishment and exclusion. Encourage easy access for the military to become teachers (although I’m sure they should be retiring officers of course). Oh, and let teachers decide on some of the curriculum content but damn them if they fail to produce enough “Good” results.
I can’t believe that a man, my age, brought up by a socialist family, can have become so out of touch with the real world that he defines a world-class education system as one that bullies, excludes and burdens and is an institution based on disciplinarian hierarchies rather than educational prowess and thinking. But maybe I can if he has no real ideas on how to take the system forward and is unwilling to listen to the people at the chalk face first – preferring to stick to the “good old days” and reading too much Dickens for our children’s good.
Education is the lifeblood of our future. Innovation, collaboration and inspiration are the means by which our society will improve and evolve as the world becomes a less stable and smaller place. The people to do that need to be properly educated.
The budget deficit will take us longer to solve than the current political term and its my guess it will need the hearts and minds of those we are about to abandon by a fiasco of poor communication and even poorer thought about education.
Please can we have a government that thinks with its head and not just its cheque-book. Please can we have some real ideas on education from people with knowledge, skills and experience rather than privately educated, Oxbridge graduates wearing pound-coin shaped spectacles?
About Peter