Michael Gove has been heckled by delegates at the National Association of Head Teachers conference who are mainly opposed to the drive to turn schools into academies, SATS and difficult OFSTED inspections.
It’s right that schools should face tough OFSTED inspections. We send our kids to school for a decent education – they don’t get a second chance. The quality of their education determines their prospects in adult life, of course we should demand high standards. I don’t want my childrens’ teachers burdened with unnecessary targets but I want them to be under constant pressure to achieve because the better they are, the better my childrens’ education will be.
I do agree that SATS are a bad idea though, as are exams as a whole. Continual assessments are a much better way of assessing ability than performance under stressful exam conditions at a certain point in time. The worst thing about SATS, though, is that they’re essentially useless – SATS are taken after secondary schools have made decided which kids they’re going to offer places to which negates their only real use which is to stream children into grammar schools.
Academies are a different matter entirely – they are absolutely the right way to go. Headteachers are better at running schools than local council officers. It takes years to the right qualifications and experience to be a headteacher, a council officer doesn’t. It’s no co-incidence that the top performing schools in the country are outside of local authority control. Headteachers who don’t have the ambition or competence to run a school without administrators at the local council telling them what to do should stand aside for someone who does.
The reason is obvious: the decline in admissions in England started when the British government’s racist tuition fees were tripled.
The English have been victims of institutional discrimination at the hands of the British establishment for years – elderly people have to go half blind before they can be treated for ARMD, cancer victims are refused life saving medication because there’s not enough of our money left to pay for it after it’s been “redistributed”, the price of prescriptions goes up in England every year but nobody in Scotland, Wales or NI pay for theirs - but just once in a while something so blatantly wrong comes along to remind us that discriminating against the English is an integral part of the British psyche.
I’ll concentrate more on the lack of a functioning grammar school system as I’ve done the funding thing to death on this blog over the years. It’s an indisputable fact that some people are thinkers and some people are doers. Some people’s brains are wired for academic education and some are wired for vocational education. The two tier education system that we used to have with grammar schools catered for this difference by filtering out the children that were capable of an academic education and sending them to grammar schools and sending those that weren’t capable of a purely (or primarily) academic education to comprehensive schools where they could get a well-rounded education.
It’s not the recession or uncertainty over fees that’s the problem, it’s the racial discrimination and high costs. I appreciate that this will come as a shock to a lot of Scots and the BBC but English people haven’t been going to Scottish universities because they’re better, they’ve been going because the degrees are easier (4 years instead of 3) and because they’re cheaper. Or they have been until the Scottish government decided to introduce racial discrimination into the Scottish education system by charging English students up to £9,000 per year for a degree in Scotland while every other “EU citizen” gets free university education largely thanks to EU laws.
Peter Mandelson, the unelected British English Business Secretary, 
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