to think maybe we should just abolish state education altogether

[Caronaim]

Having left teaching after 20 years, I can look back at it a bit more objectively now I am out of it.

It is a total and utter disaster zone.

The children who do well are the ones who are supported at home, if they don't get that, nothing that happens in school will compensate.

much of what happens in schools is assessment rather than teaching, and teachers spend more time recording the results of assessments than they do even doing the assessing.

Records are often not even true, you have to cook so much of it. Records are extensive, but much of what I spent my working life recording has never been read back, either by myself or anyone else.

I ended up working up to 18-20 hours a day, of which 2-3 hours max was actually educationally beneficial.

Some children behave well, but can't learn because other children whos parents don't care about education, behave badly.

So how about we close all state schools, and give parents the money in the form of education vouchers instead. parents could buy resources, or pay for tutoring, or club together to hire a classroom, or apply to have their vouchers redeemed into actual money to allow a parent to stop work to home educate, with certain conditions.

more people would be able to afford private school, and more private schools would open.

parents who encourage their children to behave badly at school would have to deal with that behaviour at home.

Children who do well at school would probably do even better at home, and children who do badly wouldn't do any worse.

The country would save vast amounts of money towards paying off the national debt.

Caro why then do you propose giving such parents total control over their kids education - do you think it would change their view when education obviously failed them?

sorry ghostly, I see the conversation moved on quit some way while I was typing!

it details the cost of unemployment, petty crime, pregnancy, social services involvement, hard crime, illness, depression etc on society compared with the cost of investment aged 0-18

I can well imagine this. I think massive intervention to stop this hopeless cycle of one generation not seeing point of education, passing that down, and In my immediate family I have seen this, in my DB and his own son...compared to me and my children and are different values...The cycle needs to be broken, even if was so costly they could only intervene for a few generations....it would surely help?

TRIPLE yes yes, as per article I posted about low lying behavior..its heart breaking all round...

anyway I am ill - proper sick and fed up and off to bed x

I know the system aint great but it's not all bad either

and lots of people who work in it realise their kids have complex and difficult home lives

You probably have to simply right off the parents and tackle the children as ghostly said to try and save the next generation.

thanks for answering my questions ghostly, hope you feel better.

I know that ghostly, and I don't think the education system is doing them any favours

well for the ones that ghostly knows it is, but thousands of dc wont be getting any help and literally held in a holding zone until they can legally get out of school.

You will never get some parents to see, you just have to work with the kids, the best way you can.
I don't think I could do it OP, but somebody has to.
They deserve an education the same as everybody else.
So much store is put on mainstream education, it doesn't suit everybody.Its not even that good.
The problem is that the stereotypical stigma attached to some groups who might seek education outside mainstream is not good. Some parents even think they have failed if their child isn't in mainstream. This is one of the things so wrong with the system. There are others through no fault of their own have barriers but are fine until they are forced back into a classroom.
I hate classrooms as a natural default.
My dd is now 11 but from about 8 years old strangers have asked why she isn't in school and what was she expelled for or usually what did you do?

It depends entirely on the school, many including the one I work in are fantastic and help all children to make great progress. That is almost entirely down to an incredible HT and a very strong team.

Totally agree with you about the pointless record keeping though especially in early years. It's absolutely ridiculous.

YANBU to feel powerless and frustrated. YABU to think that abolishing state education is any kind of solution. The problem parents would just be lost entirely - and their children with them. The supportive parents would carry on being supportive and their children would do well. Very little would change, except that there would be a lot of chaos.

The solutions are mostly not simple, though we could start with a 10 year moratorium on any more political meddling with the education system. No more op down changes, no more changing grade boundaries and course requirements mid course, no more back-of-fag-packet policies put in place for the sake of 'rigour' and leaving a 'legacy'. Trust schools and teachers to teach. Stop the obsession with data to justify every little thing.

However, underlying it all is the massive gulf of social and economic inequality that exists in the UK. If we can show that hard work and achievement will get you a better job, better pay and a better life then people would have a stake in education. If we could invest in vocational education, we could grow our own plumbers, electricians, builders, mechanics and children who might not be academic would have opportunities to see their talents blossom.

Unfortunately we're a long way off that - the UK has a fetish for academia, vocational subjects and skills are not valued, the people who do the essential jobs of cleaning, caring, maintaining are not seen as an asset to society - they are seen as losers in dead end jobs. Unless that changes, we'll carry on maintaining the toxic legacy of the UK class system where the few thrive at the expense of the many.

You are Michael Gove and I claim my £5

private education should be abolished - not state education. This country will never have anything approaching decent social mobility or equality of opportunity while the private education system exists.

I can only speak for myself and of course the plural of anecdote is not data. But I am really happy with my children's education - it is a mixed state school and the teachers are fab - friendly, inspiring and with boundaries and the head teacher seems a really good leader. It's strict but kind -people know where they stand and the teachers go out of their way to bring out the best in children. The knackered children are lower 6th and year 7 and I am really pleased with their school!

Iv not read the whole thread but I wanted to reply to your first post.

school saved my life

Without the opportunity to have an out of family place to go and be safe and learn was the only thing that means I'm here today!

My home life was hell but I was the "perfect" pupil no one would ever believe my homelife

To say give parents vouchers means thousands of children would be left to languish behind closed doors.

What you've said is dangerous to all the children who desperately need the safety of school, I was one of those kids.

I'm sorry you didn't have a good time teaching and some pupils were horrible to you.

I think the real problem is gigantic secondary schools. I know they have to get subject specialisms in, but small secondaries do do well, so that's not the be all and end all. So many primaries have managed to hold onto the ethos of being small and caring and get so much "value added" out of secure, happy kids who all know each other. Then they all get fielded out to massive secondaries, just before they hit the vulnerable stage of puberty and all the kids who simply don't have it in their make up to wear a blazer play the game find themselves totally out of their depth.

Ghosty "all kids deserve a decent education"

Love you big time x

some parents do actively encourage their children to act up at school. I've experienced it regularly.

Yes, I have encountered parents who do this, but not all children who are challenging at school have parents who either don't care or positively encourage it. Some kids simply can't "do" school and quite often, either the school environment or a teacher with unrealistic expectations is at fault.

I care very much for my DDs education she does not. It is not down to parents "who don't care" DD has LD and finds school frustrating with the added issue of not wanting a 1-1 due to her peers reaction to this .
I agree the education system doesn't work for everyone. Teachers are pressured to get X many GCSE's for some kids thats just not realistic and they are branded trouble out of frustration .

This is a fascinating debate, not just on Mumsnet but out in the wider world.

However, it is a 'tricky' one for several reasons.

• We often find it hard to separate our own circumstances and experience from observations and analysis of general trends or features in the broader population.

• Clumsily (or maliciously) phrased contributions can provoke a defensive response from anyone.

• None of us likes being told how to raise our own children but each of us is happy to opine on those of others.

A 'systems thinking' approach seeks to look at the bigger picture of any issue, across both time and space and, rather than looking for a single 'root cause', will try to identify contributory factors, the combination of which will usually produce certain outcomes, more or less.

However, using this approach can take us down murky paths and force us to consider ideas that some consider sensitive or downright toxic.

I’m talking about things like:
-The postcode lottery whereby the wealthy buy houses within the catchment areas of top schools. We have a selective system here – based on wealth, not ability. The better school leads to better results which lead to better jobs which leads to more wealth and so the cycle continues…

• The tendency for families to conserve and replicate outcomes, for good or bad. For example, children of graduates will usually become graduates and so on. Children of the disinterested, apathetic or illiterate will themselves probably maintain this attitude. Child abusers were themselves once the victims of abuse, and so the cycle continues…

• The relative ease with which children are sired by people that are not couples or have not been couples for long enough to know one another sufficiently well. Sometimes this means little or no consideration of whether they are compatible or whether now is the right time in either party’s life for the burden of joy (!) that is raising children. An obvious consequence of this is the quick breakdown of these ‘families’ and the ease with which men avoid their financial responsibilities and both men and women go on to have other children with other people in the same situation and so the cycle continues… A quick visit to the Relationships page shows the fall-out that occurs.

• The tendency for greater involvement in people’s lives to remove their sense of worth, dignity and responsibility. Well-intentioned external ‘support’ eventually becomes a replacement for activities, duties or responsibilities that were once the preserve of the family and those that take on these duties are viewed with contempt by those that need them most. On the AIBU pages, one can find many stories of parents that question disciplinary decisions made at school, to the point of refusing to countenance that their little darling would ever do anything wrong.

So, as well as talking about the symptoms of poor education, we need to talk about causes that create differences in ambition, wealth, parental engagement, literacy and so on.

I think what I’m saying is that dealing with existing ‘problem families’ and removing their agency is already too late. Politicians need to have an honest debate about why such families exist and what can be done to stop them in the first place. And we need to have the grace and intellectual courage to allow that debate to happen, without knee-jerk defensive reactions.

Because state education is really cheap per pupil - it's only about £1200 per pupil I think

Primary schools where I live spend £5000 to £6000 per pupil per year. I know this is above the country-average, I suppose schools in this part of London get special funding for various reasons. However I think the country average is still somewhere in the region of £3000 to £4000. There's actually a state school that spends £9000 per pupil per year, however that has money from a charity in addition to government funding.

In fact I've just done a comparison of six local schools and only one has funding per pupil of less than £6000 a year. (That one is £5900.) Nearly all are between £6000 and £7000.

private education should be abolished - not state education

can you imagine the utter chaos and catasphrse of loosing private schools and flooding all these extra pupils into a system that cant cope with what its got!
Its like saying ban cars and force us all onto an already collapsed public transport system..

You would write off several generations until they could steady themselves and sort themselves out.