BBC Look East had a debate last night between the three main parties and the Green candidate in Norwich North. It is not available online, but there is a video from some coverage done a week a two ago when the candidates did a speed dating event with the focus being on education.
What is hilarious is the Labour and Tory attempt to assert their local credentials, something that April Pond for the Lib Dems and Rupert Read for the Greens didn't feel they had to do. There was from the Tories and Labour an element of willy waving, wasting the opportunity to talk about the subject in favour of showing off their threadbare local credentials.
As someone who works in education I welcomed Chloe Smith's claim that teaching professionals will be allowed to get on with teaching. This is, of course, at odds with Tory policy which is to allow parents group, charities, etc, to take schools over and allow people with no education background at all to start running schools. Perhaps this is why she has gone to such lengths to avoid talking policy on her leaflets.
As for the Green candidate, I worry when someone knows so little about education that he calls the SATS (to be said as one word to rhyme with "hats") as "S" "A" "T" s, with each letter said separately. Very American. That said, Mr Read has made plenty of visits to the USA, see his UEA webpage (don' mention his carbon footprint) so it's a mistake we might expect.
3 comments:
I think the Green candidate came across last night as arrogant and shot himself in the foot when he opposed the dual carriageway.
Chloe Smith is saying that teaching professionals should be allowed to get on with teaching?
That is the exact opposite of her party's big idea on education in the 1980s, which was that the problem with education was trendy left-wing teachers doing whatever they liked, and that would be resolved by national government forcing them to stick to a "back to basics" curriculum which they would devise and impose on them.
Conservatives and their "me-too" allies who call themselves "libertarians" like to suggest the national curriculum is all some nasty socialist plot. They don't want to remember it was originally devised by the prophet of the free market, Sir Keith Joseph. An idea they and their like had no problem with when it was they and their like proposing it becomes a bad thing when it's used by someone else.
As someone who works in education I welcomed Chloe Smith's claim that teaching professionals will be allowed to get on with teaching. This is, of course, at odds with Tory policy which is to allow parents group, charities, etc, to take schools over and allow people with no education background at all to start running schools.
Actually, I think their policy is not without merit. Here in rural Sweden (where I am on holiday) the local school has just been taken over by a parents' cooperative that has already been running a preschool. The alternative, as with many small rural schools in England, was gradual decline and underinvestment when it was run by the municipality (the school buildings have essentially had no work done on them for ten years).
As with your average school it is always the headteacher who is in charge day-to-day. And after all, by law county councillors are not allowed to be teachers employed by the county so most county councillors have no educational background.
Where I agree with you on Tory hypocrisy is the idea that allowing more people to run schools will make a difference when they still want Whitehall to micromanage everything.
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