To ask why voters don’t care about state schools?

[Lycidas]

Polling suggests that schooling has declined as a priority for voters. Why?? Unless your children are safely ensconced in a private school, can’t people see the:

• Relentless slashing of school budgets
• Atrocious SEN provision which impacts all
• Teachers leaving the profession in droves
• Too many stressful high stakes exams

Why have we accepted the dire provision of state schooling in this country?

@noblegiraffe What do you want people to say?

Everything is fucked. Everything is urgent. But no polling company is giving people the opportunity to mark everything as 5/5 for importance or urgency. They make you order them. Then you get headlines that say most people are most worried about NHS or Climate or whatever and it tells you nothing about how people feel about anything else.

Like saying the UK voted to leave the EU. Well 48% voted to remain. If most people say the NHS is most important they might think NHS is a 5/5 on the importance scale, climate is 2/5, and education 0/5. Or it might be 5/5, 4/5, 3/5 or 5/5 for all of them but the poll won't let them do that.

It’s not just polls, waffly I’ve noticed it on MN too. Last election there were loads of threads and mentions of school funding cuts. This election it barely comes up.

And yet schools have had two more years of the funding cuts that people were worried about in 2017, the teacher shortage is worse, some schools can’t open 5 days a week, our kids are ranked amongst the unhappiest in the world by PISA.

For some reason people think things are fine for their kids even though they’re not, or they don’t care.

" 15:02Thatagain

I don't really care about the school's. I don't like how the education system teaches children it makes me feel uncomfortable as I do not teach my children the same thing's as they are taught in school. I am guilty of saying that they are taught the wrong thing's. The system should focus on the essentials ie maths, English, science, geography, and arts and sport. The school gets to choose what they teach now and the main lessons are lesser then they us to be."
Why does education make you uncomfortable and what are your children being taught that you disagree with?

Noble I know a lot of teachers and it is clear that education really needs attention and funds, but this election sees the NHS at real existential risk. And the climate crisis after decades of being ignored is getting more genuine attention. I'm sure anyone who has a child or works in education knows and cares.

As well as what waffly says, I think also that the Labour party knows that their attitude to the NHS is the Tory party's Achilles Heel, and therefore to be focused on for this election, which Education isn't in the same way.

until immigration both legal and illegal is appropriately controlled there will continue to be issues whichever party is in power.

Also my dd is in private school & Corbyn wants to push people like me who only just afford the fees back into the state system

Ah, now it makes sense. You don't want your dd in school with all the immigrants so scrape the money together to send her private where the only immigrant families are wealthy ones.

And the climate crisis after decades of being ignored is getting more genuine attention.

By some, yes. Not by anybody prepared to fly 81 miles for meeting instead of spending an hour on a train.

I'm sure anyone who has a child or works in education knows and cares.

Then why do we have any Tory voters with children in state schools or Tory voters who are teachers or governors at state schools?

When you hear school governors complaining about the state of school finances when they are Tory voters (and in one case a Tory councillor) it is nauseating.

I think Austerity has destroyed so many public services - education, libraries, Sure Start centres, plus reduced bus services, roads with potholes, that people feel a weariness of it all. But Trump and his henchmen aren't circling round any of these; they are round the NHS.

@rhubarbcrumbles I'm not English so that's not true but you go ahead and make sweeping assumptions. I do genuinely believe of immigration was controlled then the education system as a whole would be much better. Not no immigration just controlled immigration.

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