Lessons learnt

After our children’s health the thing that’s most important to parents is their education, so why is it all going so wrong? I’ve worked in the exam industry (and it is an industry) for 25 years now so can speak from an inside perspective.

The rot started in the sixties and became endemic through the seventies and eighties as teacher training courses churned out teachers committed to anti-elitism and left wing values. Not that this was by all chance,  some months ago I came across a paperback of the era charmingly entitled 'teaching as a subversive activity', says it all really.

Labour's policy of mass immigration and multiculturalism in the nineties brought more decline via the route of moral and cultural relatism. If no culture could be seen as superior or better in any way then nothing could be criticised.

There were attempts to push back but the grip of the unions and the education establishement, sometimes referrred to as the 'Blob' for its capacity to resist all attempts to change it, was too strong.

So goodbye to grammar, 'proper' english and correct spelling and hello to ever rising GCSE pass rates. Competitive sport was either banned or discouraged; children told to stop a yard before the finish line and then holding hands jump over together. What a perfect introduction to the real world that was.

Despairing parents gazing in horror at their local 'sink' comp moved or bankrupted themselves going private.

So when the coalition came in and Michael Gove began his reforms the Blob rubbed their palms in glee at  the prospect of a new challenge.

But it has worked out differently this time. Gove is serious and correctly pushed through the most radical proposals in the early stages of  the parliament. Academies are becoming the norm, Free schools, Studio Schools and University Technical Colleges are open across the country. Outside the control of local authorities, free to set their own pay rates and teaching days they are beginning to make a difference to hundreds of young lives.**

Reforms have started in the failed public exam system and for the first year since their introduction GCSE pass rates stopped rising. There is a long way to go and the Blob is as strong as ever. So I'm only cautiously optimistic.

But it's a long overdue start and that's worth remembering.*

**Caution, sadly these reforms only apply in England; Wales still languishes under the socialists. The result of this can be seen in the ever declining standards of literacy and numeracy that are reported year on year. Scotland of course has had its own education system since the Act of Union.


*If anyone reads this then my next post will be on the real story behind this summer's GCSE scandal.