Read that report and you quickly summarise that Sir Bruce got off the gravy train at the last stop before Sacksville,



None of which would matter in the slightest if they were a private company generating their own income and profit and answerable only to their own investors - but its public money intended for education of children that they are being criticised on spending recklessly - "not having an order" in the quote above means that Sir Bruce has personally authorised payments to individuals without any paper trail, no substantiation, and no auditing - makes the bloke sound like some sort of buffoon who believes himself to be above scrutiny.

...and more misuse of public funds by private educational trusts amid a culture of not actually realising that you can't pay for your private party's using public money ...

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22577069[/url


Meanwhile Gove seems to think its the way forward ...

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22558756[/url

Quite surprised to read that over half of all secondary schools are now Academies, when did that happen (when we weren't looking).

Now school's are Academies thay tend to see themselves as businesses competing for customers (pupils). In Wigan, where there are more places than kids, some became academies to avoid closure by the council (my brother was made redundant when they closed the school at which he taught) and this has lead them to wasting money that should be spent on the kids on advertising to attract pupils. You see it on advertising boards around the town, on buses and even the electronic advertising hoardings at the DW stadium.

I spoke to my local Labour councillor about this waste of money and was told that as the Academies aren't run by the councils there is nothing they can do, even though they too see it as a waste of money, and that the spending would have had to have been authorised by the Board of Governors at the schools involved. In my opinion the Governors and / or head should be shown the door for wasting money that should be spent on the kids.

Hull is going the same way, the inspectors go in and judge a school to be 'failing' and push it towards academy status against the wishes of staff, pupils and parents. The Tory government want privatised education, they will tolerate very poor standards in academies, but LA schools need to be 'excellent' to stave off Gove's hatchet men.

Fascinating yesterday, though, to see that headteachers are very angry. These are not 'the usual suspects'.

And Channel 4 news last night was reporting that rumours coming out of the DofE say that Gove himself is personally rewriting the national curriculum.

Teachers will be angry - if it was up to them there would be no league tables no judgements on their ability?

You have to seriously question why have the exams been dumbed down so far - could be that they have to be to match the quality of teaching most of our kids receive - its a disgrace.

The disgrace is the number of individuals and companies that organise their taxes "efficiently", then have the cheek to criticise the standard of education of our children. A standard that they make damn sure they don't contribute towards.

As I said earlier in this thread: If Gove wants the nation's state-educated schoolchildren to reach the same standards as those educated in the private sector, the answer's simple: the state should provide the same monetary resources and create the same pupil:teacher ratio and general environment.

But that ain't going to happen is it?

A very simple maxim I've always held: Don't expect Rolls Royce service if you're only prepared to pay Lada prices

You have to question why so many people are so convinced that such things are facts. Where do they get these 'facts' from? Newspapers or politicians with agendas, perchance? Very few - if any - of whom will have frontline teaching experience.

Sal, would you accept that anyone who doesn't work in your line of work knows all about it from the outside?

Of course there will be youngsters who are 'limited' educationally (for want of a better word). There has never been a time when it wasn't the case and never will be (unless we genetically engineer it otherwise). And there are factors that will mitigate against a child getting the best out of their education, just as other factors will work the other way.

I have an element of distrust of the system. But that's less to do with teachers and their performances at work, and more to do with 30 years of political meddling.

I find it's possible to over-analyse things.

LOTR was a project and an experiment of sorts. It's not great [iliterature[/i but then it was never intended to be. It's epic, and detailed (too detailed in places IMO), and hugely influential. Parts of it are excellent, parts of it dull. As for the cribbing accusation, I don't know enough about Wagner to say anything about that but Tolkien was quite open about deliberately blending many source materials in his creation of Middle Earth. A read through the Silmarillion shows the detail to which he went in crafting the background to his opus and also clearly shows the mythic sources from which he drew.

It's also true that underlying and weaving through the tale is a kind of wistful requiem for what Tolkien considered to be better, simpler times. He practically bludgeons you with a sense of yearning for a past that is inevitably slipping away, and with the supposed virtues of that more rural time and place over the industrialised present/future.

It is what it is. Still a cracking good story overall.

I can certainly remember a time when we binned-off a sizeable chunk of children at the age of 11. If you didn't pass your Eleven Plus, you were shovelled of into a Secondary Modern school, destined to not sit CGEs or even CSEs, many such establishments didn't even have any provision after 4th year (year 9 or 10 now) and you simply left school at 15 years of age, with a testimonial and maybe a couple of School Leaver Certificates.

If idiot Gove has his way, we'll be back to pre-comprehensive selection.

At the very least, the comprehensive system offered equal opportunities and a chance to those who, for whatever reason, may develop later than the majority

I watched the first Lord of the Rings film at the cinema on a first date. Every second of the three hours or so it dragged on for seemed like a week. I have never seen anything as dull before or since. I only stayed till the end because I thought I might get laid. I did not.

He's experimenting with political dogma, probably something he read in a book at University - problem is that those kids who's lives he affects will be affected for the whole of their lives, the Secondary Modern system was bad but its saving grace was that the country needed lots of manual workers in those times and Secondary Moderns were ideal at churning out hundreds of thousands of potential manual workers every year to businesses that were far more prepared to actually do some training of those school leavers into something that could possibly develop into a career, not to mention formally approved trade apprenticeships where your employer would pick up the tab for your five year training scheme.

Somehow we seem to have lost sight of those facts.

You'd have been better slinging a few halfs of Stella down her neck if you wanted to get inside her pants than taking her to watch that bollox.

Top post.

I passed the exam taken at an arbitrary age. My sister didn't. So I've seen it from two sides of the coin. I don't think the problem was grammar schools themselves, but an attitude that anything other than that was inferior and didn't need to be invested in properly.

There was an interesting point made, some time ago, by Andrew Neil, noting how many politicians from working class backgrounds actually came up via the grammar school system. The way education is arranged now, there is still a division – but it's not based on some exam, but on parental funds, which is part of why we have decreased social mobility and, indeed, the number of politicians from genuinely working-class backgrounds.

You could also point out that our top two architects, Foster and Rogers, came from northern, working-class backgrounds and progressed through the grammar school system. So it wasn't just about enabling political careers to be built.

I think that what we've seen in the last 30 years is a recognition that, with much manual industry gone, there needs to be a change to the education system to 'bring up' (if you will) many of those who would have gone into those manual jobs to be much more conversant with IT, for instance.

Universities complain that rigour in the groundings of such subjects as the sciences has been neglected.

That's not the fault of the pupils or the teachers, though, but – as I mentioned earlier – constant political tinkering.

Agreed. Let's face it, you could analyse Janet & John to tell you something about the social times in which those books were used.

I don't know whether JRR himself thought of it as literature or not. What has tended to vex me – since my own moment of release from this cult, as mentioned earlier – is the idea that LOTR [iis[/i great literature, which is why it is so often voted into the top few in polls of great literature. IIRC, it was second in a huge poll at the end of the millennium.

I think your critique of it is spot on – but it seems to occupy a place that is way beyond that.

On only a very slightly different note (and also bearing in mind Rock God's comments) – it's going to take three films to tell the story of the [iThe Hobbit[/i? Talk about milking a gullible audience.

From everything I've read about JRR he didn't set out to write literature and didn't perceive the book to be anything of the sort. The famous quote about it being 'a tale that grew in the telling' appears to be literally true - he set out on an intellectual exercise and ended up with something greater.

I think the place it hold now is somewhat down to it being a mould-breaker. Prior to LOTR fantasy fiction was either childrens stories or [iConan[/i clones. He practically invented the modern Epic or High Fantasy genre. He was certainly responsible for me getting into fantasy (via being made to read [iThe Hobbit[/i at school) when I had previously ignored the entire genre, and I think a lot of other people followed the same path. I've since read many, many fantasy novels that are superior but LOTR still holds a special place for me as my introduction.

I completely agree about the movie adaptation of [iThe Hobbit[/i BTW. As much as I enjoyed the first installment I really can't see how it will manage three movies without serious padding.

As far as I understand it the 3 films will be filled with content Tolkien hinted at in his appendixes in the LoTR. Look at the new scene with Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond as one example.

The film was all her idea. Had I known then how things would ultimately turn out, I'd have left her the taxi fare home and fvcked off after twenty minutes.

And now thanks to Gove's meddling it looks like NI and Wales will have a different examination system to England.

If he was in front of me now I think I would knock him out. It looks as though OFSTED have been briefed to ensure all non academy schools are deemed failed as soon as possible.

My daughter was informed at 10am yesterday that 3 OFSTED inspectors will be turning up at 8am today to do a 3 day inspection, targetting the SATS groups (SATS are this week as if they didn't have enough to contend with). They were given a list of things that the inspectors would need to see, which would include literacy and numeracy workbooks from 2 kids at, below and above the required levels, these books would have to be marked up and all paperwork complete up to finish of business yesterday.

Because these are not needed for this weeks SATS the teachers were going to do them over the half term closure (they no longer regard these breaks as holidays as they tend to work everyday of them), but she (and her colleagues) started to do them last night. At around 9:30pm her head teacher got in touch to say that the inspector in charge had rang to say that they now needed to see ALL numeracy and literacy workbooks at 8am along with a stack of other work that would generally not be required until after the next half term, which now means they will have to get into school at 5am to get this done.

Last year her school was given 'outstanding' status and my daughter was rated the same having averaged a 6 point improvement as an average across her kids, but because of the make up of the school very few had achieved 'expected levels' for their ages (over 70% are from overseas and have English as a second language, some of the girls from Islamic countries have had NO education whatsoever up until a few months ago). Gove has now changed the goalposts and ALL kids must be at the required level no matter what the circumstances, so my daughter will now be benchmarked against a teacher from a leafy, middle class suburb of Surrey and whose kids can probably read and write when they enter pre-school at the age of 4. Some of my daughters 6 year old hadn't heard a word of English until they enrolled at her school and a high percentage are in desperate need of an SEN assessment (which is refused most of the time).

She has been tapped up by a few schools where she would have an easier time of it in areas of mostly middle class families with little or no SEN needs, but she has always refused because she knows these kids she teaches need good teachers who care and she is reluctant to abandon them, but she fears that although they know they have maintained (or bettered) there standards since last year it is inevitable that they will be deemed a failing school under the new Gove directive and be forced (against the will of parents, teachers and governors) into academy status.

I am no educational expert, but I think Gove is a danger to the future of our kids, especially those at the bottom of the academic pile as these academies will be able to pick and choose who they want and a kid from a third world country who cannot speak a word of English and have some form of SEN such as autism will not be high on the agenda for a place.

The question being of course, what private limited company would see investment value in a school like your daughters ?

If you are paid by results then clearly you target the "cream" and disregard what remains.

On the other hand if you are paid by "improvement" then its in the sellers interests to downgrade the product as low as possible to make it attractive to a purchaser who can then claim an impressive "turnaround" after they purchase - bonuses all round.

Just to remind ourselves, these are children we are selling.

Just to make a memo to ourselves - check what jobs Gove is offered after 2015.

I've changed my mind.
I would happily punch the odious little turd until he lost consciousness.
Anyone who knows my posting history and so has a general feel for me will tell you that for me that is VERY strong.

Goves ideology will wreck english schooling.

Yep, and I think at least partly the fault of a packed full (and dull) curriculum that doesn't allow teachers and schools much, if any, leeway in how to teach.

I'd go with that to an extent.

Although I genuinely believe there is a core of subjects that all young people should have the opportunity to be introduced to. And unfortunately, it seems to me, we have lost sight of education in that kind of way, and replaced it with a strictly utilitarian version - not least as employers whinge about school leavers not immediately 'being ready', for the workplace.

I remember a year or so ago, the particular complaint was that school leavers did not have skills in dealing with customers. You do wonder how anyone in my generation ever coped. In the olden days, I don't think any employer imagined that a school leaver was absolutely ready for any job - they required training of some variety. But some employers increasingly seem to view that as the state's responsibility and not that of themselves.

But I do also think that there needs to be a capacity to split children up into groups/classes/subjects that are appropriate to them.

And then a. Different sort of thing: I remember reading, two, the years ago, about a 14-year-old lad who just totally ed off with school - no interest - but found himself work as a gardener and absolutely loved it.

And there was a furore about trying to drive him back into formal education, which seemed, in that case, to not be appropriate.