Sadly, I was correct in suspecting that a half page
devoted to news involving Tristram Hunt was bound to include much of the same
old nonsense to which we have become accustomed since his appointment to the
shadow cabinet.(Labour could abandon GCSEs within a decade, Hunt
reveals,23/04/15) Every time he makes an announcement like this one, he reveals
far more about his ignorance, both of what is happening in the majority of state
schools, and of what the majority of their pupils are like, than about his
party`s education policy. Where exactly are the schools whose "gates close at
2.55pm", or the students who lack "character and resilience"? I know of none of
the former, and in my forty plus years of teaching in the state sector, I saw
very few of the latter, especially as they became so adept at "dealing with the
unexpected" every time a government`s new educational initiative involved a
change of course, subject, syllabus or teacher!
It may well "drive him mad" to see these
so-called "fortress schools", if indeed they exist, so why doesn`t he visit them
and discuss problems with the heads and staff? What makes, I suspect, many of us
even madder is to see a future education secretary miss yet another opportunity
to praise teachers and congratulate everyone involved with the huge improvements
made in state education in the last twenty years or so; he much prefers, with
Gove-like predictability, to emphasise the "long tail of underachievement",
something based on Pisa tests where students from a variety of nations are given
different questions, and their results somehow compared. A commitment to address
teachers` ridiculous workload would not go amiss, either, and how about an
announcement to meet and work with teachers` union leaders on a regular basis to
sort out the pay and conditions` problems? After all, he is the Labour
spokesperson for education, so it would be refreshing to hear some comments on
education which do not sound as if they were drafted by Keith
Joseph!
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