How do we ensure all UK children regardless of back ground/ability receive high quality education?

[happygardening]

Contrary to what some may think I'm not anti state ed and as someone who works with disadvantaged children it really matters to me that they receive a high quality broad education and they fulfil their potential. But sadly in many cases they are not (there are I know exceptions) frequently their parents cannot assist them for a variety of reasons.
Is there an answer to this problem or are they condemned by their circumstances which are not of their own making to remain at the bottom of the heap?
No judgey DM comments please.

An antidote to Gove - and a passionate believer in good education.
19 minutes of an inspirational amusing talk, well worth the 19 minutes.
here

If you are very hung up on pedantic usage, it can make it difficult to fit in at work in an international context.

It's interesting that all this stuff is considered completely old fashioned at DS terribly old skool school.

And globalisation has all but killed it in business.

True dat Bonsoir .

Nope, sorry, I'm quite happy for others to say they were showering if they really want to, but so far as I'm concerned, when I stand under a shower, I am not showering, the shower is. Likewise, when I'm in a bath, I am not "bath-ing," because one bathes, not baths... There comes a point when turning nouns into verbs becomes weird. Or do the rest of you happily bath in your baths?

Multi-lingual people rarely bother with pedantry, though. It gets knocked out of them, as it does of other people for whom language-crafting is part and parcel of their livelihood.

Which doesn't mean that you never allow yourself to adapt your language to your audience if it might be to your advantage to do so!

To shower has long been a transitive verb. The intransitive usage is more recent in British English.

But the shower itself is only called a shower through metonymic association. Which is why I always refer to it as 'the device which showers water through multiple jets', and would not allow anyone in my household to refer to it just by naming the action it undertakes. We say 'I am going to be showered with water in the room containing bath, loo and basin'.

It is as well to know these things.

Give credit where credit is due. If the device which showers water through multiple jets is doing the showering, don't pretend it was you.

Still, it is all very modern - just as people these days think they are writing an essay when they copy someone else's work from the internet, they also think they are showering when they stand under a shower.

I only say it to help and as seeker says it does not harm to know what others (whose views you might despite) are thinking about the dodgy foreigner with the weird way of talking....

Plenty of people learn a variety of ways of talking. There was it Nick Clegg dropping his Ts to be cool recently ad most teenagers have a way they speak to their friends and another to their parents. It is when you keep getting rejected for jobs (employers often even ask to hear you on the telephone first sometimes these days or look at a video of you on youtube etc) that it might help to find out the reason (and it is equally as much the other way round - there was a time at the BBC when you could not obtain promotion if you spoke with received pronunciation - you had to have or adopt a regional accent to be promoted).

I am not sure I agree with Bonsoir. Often the foreigners speaking English who learned it well know better grammatical English than most English school leavers.

Well, quite! Don't get me started on 'I cook supper'!

Yes, we would not say "I cook supper".

Ah, now we are getting on to the degree of control which someone has over the process.... I might think I was showering myself (but would NEVER admit to merely showering...) if I had a cheap shower attachment on my tap which I had to exert a lot of control over in order to get it to shower me rather than anything else. But since I wouldn't want to admit to having that kind of arrangement, I would rather attribute the showering action to the shower, which makes me sound posh. Likewise, I wouldn't want to admit that I was heating up a ready meal, where I could claim the merit for the heating up because I turned on the oven and paid the electricity/gas bill - I would want to imply I had been more active in the process than that and would therefore use the verb "to cook" which would imply considerable effort on my part in the preparation of the meal and avoidance of burning it...

Actually, I would "prepare" a meal.

I assemble it, and then use appropriate kitchen appliances to heat it to a safe temperature.

No, no, no. You do not assemble it. I refute that.

Assembling does not give sufficient sense of the mixing involved in food preparation.

Now, can we go on to talk about scones - which rhyme with stones and cones?...

Oh dear... Now I'm going to have to fall out with you.

What a (s)con...

S-controversy!

Is that S-controvversy, or S-contro-versey?

EFL learners often have correct grammar, but they are not pedants. I have a pedantometer in French - old-fashioned usage rings massive bells in my ears - because I wasn't accustomed to the usage of grandparents and parents as a child.

sconTROVersy!