Category Archives: education

What happened?

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I was reading one of the myriad of articles in the Torygraph on Gove’s courageous plan to resurrect the O level (stop sniggering at the back, you know what I’m talking about, you filthy minded little skit). For what it’s worth, I don’t see much wrong with the idea.

This post isn’t about education, but as we can’t escape the issue it seems obvious to me that the people who need to use qualification certificates as a frame of reference, that being employers and HE and FE institutions, seem to have little faith in them and this seems to be eroded year on year. I’m not at all confident that this isn’t an expensive piece of window dressing, the equivalent of giving a burning house a lick of masonry paint, but there you go. I see nothing wrong with testing, by which I mean challenging, students rather than testing students so a school can do well in a league table.

Education sucks in this country, it doesn’t deliver for the kids who are told they are all great, which is fine until they leave school and enter the real world, it doesn’t deliver for the universities, I know of one at least that brings in temp remedial staff at the start of every year because the freshers can’t do little things like write an intelligible sentence, it doesn’t deliver for the employer because the bit of paper is no guarantee of what they’ll be getting. The only people it does deliver for are the teachers so they can get some tractor production stats to show how great they are, and the politicians who will gleefully report these tractor production stats in the House to show how great they are. Frankly, I couldn’t give a toss about them, I care about the kids.

Now, a proper pass/fail challenging system will mean some kids will fail, but it doesn’t mean they are failures. All this talk of a two tier education system being a bad thing is bollocks. It is a good thing, or rather could be. I am not for one moment suggesting that kids be thrown on the scrap heap at 14 when the GCE/CSE split is made, because there is no need for that to happen at all. Look, some people are academically gifted, some are not, that doesn’t mean those that are academically gifted are intrinsically better than those who aren’t, they are just different.

What is not fair is the herding of every child through the door marked ‘exams’, it isn’t fair on the kids who are being set up to fail. It isn’t fair on the kids who would be set up to fail, but find that the system needs them to be a success so get sold a lump of fool’s gold. It isn’t fair on the kids who can succeed but find their success diluted. Sometime in the 60′s we got this idea that there’s something wrong with working with your hands, fifty years on we are seeing the results. With a good technical education and a sound foundation in basic academia these kids will be the plumbers, sparkies, chippies, mechanics, whatever of the future with the skills to do the work and run a business of their own. Surely that’s more valuable than a GCSE in Hollyoaks?

Anyhow, like I said, this post isn’t actually about education, it’s about this photo which accompanied a report in the Telegraph, I saw it and found myself asking ‘what happened?’

For the hard of seeing, the posters behind Gove carry the following messages:

  • Social responsibility not state control
  • Labour, telling people what to do since 1997
  • We’re all in this together
  • Labour, wasting your money since 1997
  • There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state
  • Bye Bye Bureaucracy

So, let’s review them, shall we?

Firstly, ID cards and those HIP things aside, I can think of no scaling back of state control. Indeed, given the proposed We’re Going To Be Keeping An Eye On Everything You Do Bill, all I can see is more state control. Oh dear.

Secondly, well they’ve certainly stopped Labour telling people what to do. Oh yes, they’re doing it instead now. Want a say on the EU? Shut it, peasant.

Thirdly, if we’re all in this together, then where the hell was my ticket to Mexico for the G20? Perhaps it was because I might have been a bit rude to the mad Argentine woman? Anyhow it must surely go down as one of the most asinine slogans in political history. Really. They might just have well gone with ‘Tories: We’ll do some stuff*’

Fourthly, see secondly.

Fifthly, see firstly.

Sixthly, big hairy bollocks. Once again HIPS aside, you’ve done nothing.

Before any of you Tories out there start dropping the Lib-Dem bomb, I call bullshit. It was bullshit from the start, which is why I didn’t bloody vote for you. You really must think we’re stupid, and obviously many people are, but not as many as you’d hoped. I do hope this crushing realisation is brought home to you when you sit round the cabinet table and see Clegg, Cable et al gurning back at you.

I mean, you’re not as bad as Labour, but that’s like saying stoning to death isn’t as bad as crucifixion.

They really are a bunch of ‘tards, the lot of ‘em. All three parties.

*Stuff liable to change without notice due to our attitude, your attitude, the weather, if we managed to get our leg over last night and/or what we’re having for dinner.

One way or the other, they’ll get it.

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Oh, the students.

OH has touched on the subject, and makes some salient points.

Make no mistake about it, one way or the other the only people who will pay for university education is those who get it, either directly as proposed or hidden away in taxation once they get a job afterwards. There will be no escape.

Consider this; why do so many people go to university these days? University used to be for the elite. Elite is not a dirty word, not when it is an elite based on academic merit. Something happened in the 60′s and 70′s, a section of the (not at all meritous) political elite thought that there was something wrong with working with your hands. It was something to be looked down on, there was something wrong with the working man actually working. The result now is that all children, regardless of ability or aptitude spend their whole lives in school being herded through the door marked ‘academic excellence’.

There’s a problem with that. Not all kids have the ability to be academically excellent. The solution we had was to lower the bar. The result? Those who are academically excellent find their excellence is watered down, those who are not clutch a fistful of qualifications as valuable as a barrow load of Weimar Republic Marks. This is not fair on either. You cannot have prizes for all, it simply does not work that way. I would love to be able to sprint like Usain Bolt, paint like Da Vinci, think like Einstein or compose like Mozart, but nature did not make me that way, there is nothing anybody can do to change that. Not one thing.

This current education system strives for mediocrity, and does not even deliver that. We have all been turned into apples, all of us. The marketplace is flooded with apples. These apples are so common that they are dirt cheap. How much for a banana? Don’t see many of those, valuable things, bananas.

Be a banana.

If I had my time again, I’d have forgotten university, I’d have trained to be an electrician. You work for yourself, you are responsible for yourself, you command your worth. I fell into the trap of believing that university was the only way. I was wrong. Personally I got a great deal out of going to uni, academically it was pointless, a waste of three years.

Oh, to have had a trade. Yes, long hours, hard work. But your work. No office politics, no cuts, no pointless forms, reports, appraisals. I may yet still do it, if given the chop. Invest the redundancy payout in myself.

Why the hell did we do away with our secondary moderns, our polytechnics and replace them with degree certificates mass printed on rice paper? Why do we persuade people that the only choices are between debt ridden graduate or dole cheat? To try to persuade people that with a half-arsed effort they can be Bolt, Da Vinci, Einstein, Mozart? This is madness.

I should have been a banana.

I’m sorry students, but the money isn’t there. Take over every building in Westminster. The money still won’t be there. Unseat every LibDem MP in the country and replace with a scarlet red Labour MP. The money is still nowhere to be seen.

You are blaming the person who has realised there is a fire. Unfortunately, he hasn’t got the guts to shout ‘FIRE’. The person you need to blame is the one is the one who set the fire, the one who decided that everyone had to go to university. Who was going to pay for it? I’ll tell you this, unless you take the red shilling (and I’ve never seen a more politically detached generation than this one), once you start to earn and study the deductions column on your payslip, your attitude will change reeeeaaalll quick.

Don’t fall into the trap. Evaluate your situation. What will you do with that degree, what will you actually do with it? Unless that degree will give you access to a career path you have decided upon, civil engineer, vet, biochemist, doctor, ask yourself, is this worth the money?

Don’t view this as a tax, don’t view this as being screwed over. View the student loans people as a silent partner in You Ltd. This partner will want his investment back. Look at your place in the market, will this investment you are making in yourself produce a worthwhile return? If not, say ‘I’m out’, go and play to your strengths. You could have three year headstart in experience and valuable knowledge over your competitors.

There is always more than one route to the top and it may not pay to follow the herd. They may be heading to the slaughterhouse.

The One That Is Waiting For The Axe. . .

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We all have to take our medicine, and it can taste bitter. Lord knows my medicine bottle is on the horizon, and I may yet have to take a drink. But I’ll cross that bridge when and if I come to it. One thing is for sure, the axe will fall in my department, it only remains to be seen if my head is nicked off or not.

Being a public servant with a degree of concern over my job, and a Libertarian who absolutely believes that government is far too big, far too intrusive and far too expensive puts me in an invidious position. Sometimes I sound like the turkey voting for Christmas, knowing that the policy I support could result in my standing in the dole queue. But there you go.

So it is not without sympathy that I learn 75 public sector jobs are to be lost with the disbanding of the British Film Council. But I find myself asking the question, ‘whilst the BFC may have had a hand in the production of some fine movies, is it really the place of the state to be making them?’

The arts is without doubt important, but it is also very divisive. Is it acceptable to throw large amounts of public cash at the opera or the ballet, despite the minority appeal? Many would say not. Is it more or less acceptable to do the same for a more popular entertainment medium?

I don’t know how the BFC works, but I do know how the public sector works. Whilst films like Vera Drake and the Last King of Scotland were undoubted artistic successes, and I should imagine made a profit, would private investors want to be involved? There’s a simple answer, it is yes. If there is a profit to be made of course private money can be attracted. But I’m betting that the bureacratic restraints that the public sector will always bring to the party scares off more private investors than it attracts. Thus it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that films are hard to make without the help of the BFC, but the BFC makes it hard for people to make films. Sounds rather like the benefits system.

It is rather predictable when Tim Bevan, chairman of the Film Council says, ‘Abolishing the most successful film support organisation the UK has ever had is a bad decision‘. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

It is also rather predictable when the UCU lecturers’ union warned that an expansion of the private sector would be a “disaster” and that the creation of a new private university was the “beginning of a slippery slope.

Note that there’s no suggestion that any existing universities will be closed, but apparently, “Encouraging the growth of private providers and making it easier for them to call themselves universities would be a disaster for the UK’s academic reputation. It would also represent a huge threat to academic freedom and standards.”

Well, I hate to break it to you, but our academic reputation ain’t what it was. We have people going into remedial classes when they start uni because they karnt rite proper, and when they do get a degree it is a BA in Eastenders or a BSc in Climate Change Management or somesuch guff. My experience of uni, where I did a perfectly useless journalism (sort of) degree was that the tutors were more interested in using us as guinea pigs for their PhD research and making us parrot their political dogma than actually delivering anything of worth. A private uni won’t have that luxury. Fail to deliver a course in an acceptable manner and that is worth something, and pretty soon the university will be closed.

As for academic freedom, a bigger lot of rot it is hard to imagine. When has a centralised system ever resulted in freedom?

And finally to the boys in blue, their not at all political brass are complaining about elected commissioners. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers[. . .] said Acpo would “need to examine in detail the government’s proposals for maintaining operational independence against the practical reality of directly-elected police and crime commissioners“.

Operational independence? Give me a break will you. Firstly, the police are not independent. Chief Constables have been effective political appointments for years now, as evidenced by the Sir Ian Blair mess. Secondly, the Home Sec says jump, you jump. Unless that is a new Home Sec says something you don’t like, then you ignore it. So by independent, do you actually mean unaccountable? I think so.

Finally, the police should not be independent. They should be wholly dependent, dependent on the support and wishes of the community that they serve. If you aren’t producing the results and performances that the public want, then too bloody right your arse should be shipped out.

I refer you to the Peelian Principles:

The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.

That does not mean impounding kids toys such as happened at the Kingsnorth power station protest.

That does not mean beating a man sufficiently to kill him, such as happened with Ian Tomlinson.

That does not mean demanding innocent people delete photographs such as happens time and time again.

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

You are entirely dependent upon us. You would do well to remember it.

Any candidate Commish who promotes such a simple, clear and effective policy will get my vote in a heartbeat.

The One That Is Shouting ‘Run, You Buggers! RUN!’ . . .

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Right folks, just sit back, close your eyes and breathe in deeply through your nose.

Smell that?

Mmmmmm. Me too, don’t you just love the smell of cretinous mongtard in the morning?

Yes, Sir Liam Donaldson is at it again.

Schoolchildren could face annual fitness tests under plans laid out by the Government’s chief medical officer.

Sir Liam Donaldson wants pupils to undergo “bleep tests” – similar to schemes already running in California and Texas – to help increase fitness levels.

That’s a good idea. Perhaps we should install telescreens in everyone’s house, then we can have compulsory aerobic sessions in the mornings.

How about some Sokol gymnastics? Or the sort of mass gymnastic demonstrations so beloved of the Communist bloc?

It just goes to show that politicans have no concept of the connection between the decisions they make and policies they implement and the end results.

In the last thirteen years we’ve seen widespread sale of playing fields, a culture of fear that tells us there’s a paedo hiding in the bushes of every park and the obligation for anyone that wants to volunteer to set up kids’ sporting clubs to undergo the macro-examination of their lives because they’re bound to be kiddy fiddlers as well.

Surprisingly, and you yourself would be a racist paedophile to make any connection between the policies and the results, children in this country have never been less fit.

It isn’t the Government’s fault, oh no. It’s the fault of the parents who are scared to let the kids out of the house, or must seem so bloody precious about being screened, to those doing the screening, before they can work with the kids. The ‘authorities’ really do believe it is they who look after the best interests of the kids, rather than those who get of their arses and actually do it.

So how will this work?

The bleep test involves running between two markers laid out 20 metres apart. The child must run from one marker to the other before a beep sounds.

Must run? Or what? Will they be taken into care?

Actually, that’s not funny, as it probably isn’t too far from the truth.

And how will this test be administered? No doubt in some school hall in front of the whole school, where the less fit kids will waddle valiantly between the markers whilst their fitter classmates hoot with derision. Oh, the scope for bullying will be almost boundless.

And how will the kids who fail this test (Is this allowed? Or will they just be given a grade C?) improve their level of fitness? Will they magically be given time on the playing fields the schools had to sell to build houses on during PE lessons that they don’t have anymore because they’re having lessons on diversity, citizenship, Africa and global warming?

It really does beggar belief. We are allowed no responsibility for ourselves, unless we find ourselves disadvantaged because of the things that have been ripped from us, then it is all our fault.

The One That Says ‘You Will Look How I Say’. . .

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As a kid I remember England playing a qualifying match for the World Cup or Euros away to Albania. I also remember some genuine concerns about whether Chris Waddle would be admitted to the country due to his infamous mullet. Granted, even by 80′s footballer standards, it was shit, but I couldn’t get my head around the fact that you could be refused entry to a country just because your hair was business at the front and party at the back.

Nowadays I believe that the reverse is almost true, and that some pointed questions may be asked at passport control in Tirana if you turn up without a mullet.

Well, 80′s revival seems to be the in thing at the moment. God knows why, I remember the 80′s and am glad we’ve got 20 years distance between then and now. Still history repeats itself, and the latter day Enver Hoxha is revealed as Joe Langley, the NASUWT branch secretary in Salford.

This person has decided that it is very important to jump into the debate surrounding a moustache.

Yes. A moustache.

I feel a certain solidarity with 14 year old Akaash Iqbal. He has been banned (there’s that word again) for growing a moustache. Because? Well, as far as I can make out, because he’s grown a moustache.

He’s 14, when I was 14 I was turning into the hairy wolfman that sits before you today. My 5 0′clock shadow comes at about half twelve. I’m covered in the fucking stuff, and whilst I was at school, got so pissed off with the whole shaving lark, that I grew a full beard. Not some wispy poncy Che wannabe, the full beard like that bloke from Abba.

So yes, it ‘grips my shits’ to see this poor lad slung out for refusing to shave his face fungus off, and why the hell should he? It’s his bloody face. Where do these fuckers get off, what business it is of theirs? He is doing no damage to anyone. I’ve blogged in the past about kids being beaten at school by their classmates and the schools taking no action at all, but grow a ‘tache, you’re out of here son.

Let’s see what Enver Langley has to say:

Unless you start somewhere and make children abide by a code that’s the start of the slippery slope if you let them get away with it.

Sub the word children for teacher and that could have come out of the mouth of Ed Balls. Make children abide by a code? Yes, wholeheartedly. Here’s the code. Sit down, listen to your teacher, realise that you have to pick out the indoctrination. Be polite and respectful. Question everything you’re told, think for yourself and whatever you do, don’t conform. You’ll be a long time conforming, so express yourself now, you’re young, take the chance now because if you don’t, the opportunity may not arise again.

Anyhow. . .

All the school [Manchester Academy] is trying to do is enforce standards and I would have thought everyone would be onside with that.

Ahh yes, but who sets those standards? What if the standard was to dress in Waffen SS uniform, or to have only one book on the set text list, and you had to learn it by heart whilst rocking backwards and forwards?

Nasty controlling little fuckwits who are the first to moan when someone tells them to do something. It smacks of the parlour boy kicking the cat.

You go on and keep growing those whiskers Akaash, really put the cat amongst the pigeons and tell them you’ve converted to Sikhism, and then ask them about Kesh.

The One That Thinks He Is Mad, Mad, Mad. . .

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He really is stark raving mad.

Once again the idea of ‘voluntary’ work is trotted out again. Now, there’s nothing wrong with voluntary work, as long as it is voluntary.

The Prime Mentalist cannot ensure that young people have done ‘50 hours of voluntary work by the time they are 19-years-old.’ There are a large number of young people who would have no intention of doing 50 hours of voluntary work. Voluntary work is unpaid, there is a word for the system of making people work for nothing. It is called slavery.

‘Mr Brown said a promise to bring in compulsory community service would be a
part of his next election manifesto.’

Really? Why would you do that? This government really are hell bent on self-destruction. Well here they are removing their youth vote at a stroke. Well done. If I were a party standing, I’d be right outside the schools with sixth forms and every college letting the youngsters know that a vote for Labour means they will do 50 hours of work, for nothing.


‘Under the scheme, the work may include helping charities and is likely to
become part of the National Curriculum. The scheme would be woven into plans
to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by
2011.’

Charities? Which bloody charities? Are these the same charities that receive huge amounts of tax payers’ money? Are they now to get State Sanctioned slaves to push their agenda and carry out their bidding? And you are now to stay under control and indoctrination until you are 18. You will be dependent, you will be obedient, you will work because we can’t actually afford to give you any relevant education.

Gordon Brown has told the News of The World ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain. Arbeit Macht Frei’

Well, perhaps he didn’t say those last three words. But would we have been surprised if he had?