Gove out??? Chief whip..

[stillenacht1]

Is he out??am actually shaking!!!

No, he means institutions that push the "all must have prizes" approach, who think schools should not teach spelling and who promote the approaches to teaching that have seen the UK sliding down international league tables.

The 'sliding down international league table' old cliche is about cherry picking PISA and ignoring all the assessments which put the UK top in Europe, sixth in the world and well ahead of the US.

And the paranoid ideological drive to close down university departments - including the very best, like Cambridge university - is resulting in a severe crisis in teacher training and recruitment. Schools Direct is seriously under-recruiting, and university departments were asked at the last minute to pick up the pieces, Troops to Teachers resulted in the recruitment of only 38 teachers, Teach First is ridiculously expensive and leads to high turnover. All in all this policy is misguided, politicised and disastrous.

www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/07/teacher-training-the-new-ideological-football/

So these kids that don't get any prizes. What is the plan for them?

They get to work in low end minimum wage jobs. (If they can find them)

cherry picking PISA and ignoring all the assessments which put the UK top in Europe

Not cherry picking PISA. Just taking it at face value.

The assessment by Pearson (an education and publishing company) put the UK second in the Europe behind Finland, not first. But this included higher education which significantly boosted the UK's ranking. If it had been based on schools alone the UK would have been much lower - we would have failed to make the top 20 in the world or the top 10 in Europe.

So these kids that don't get any prizes. What is the plan for them?

Who said there should be kids that don't get any prizes? The "all must get prizes" approach says that all children must be told they are wonderful at, say, maths regardless of how good or bad they actually are. Being honest about their ability should lead to helping them finding things in which they can succeed.

I'm not sure they'll even get those jobs without any skills. If they aren't academically up to 5 A*-Cs in the new 'rigorous' exams what will they have? Just failure on their record.

I wouldn't wish nothing but a bucket full of failure on any 16yo.

Yes, I'd give them all a bloody prize is the prize was a numeracy and literacy 'certificate' that let McDonalds know they could tell the time well enough to turn up for work, read the computerised orders and pick out 67p in change. Or structured work experience where they learned not to tell the boss to fuck off when she asked them to repeat a cleaning task.

Quite a few people need to walk a mile in these kids shoes.

prh47bridge

The pisa tests were never made to form league tables. Even pisa says this.

Ah yes, Finland was too in Europe according to Pearson. No academies, inspection regime, testing before 16, selection or private schools. Sounds marvellous.

But no 'sliding down' in PISA. We hardly changed position sine 2009 although we improved in science.

Finland has a number of private schools which are funded by the state rather than local authorities. They receive the same level of funding as municipal schools and provide free education. So whilst they are not called academies they are very similar to our academies in many respects. All schools are given more autonomy than LA-controlled schools in the UK.

There has only been one set of results since 2009. We have gone down significantly since the first results in 2000. But yes, the 2012 results did indicate show that there was no significant change since 2009.

Those Finnish private schools are in a similar position to faith/church/religious schools in the UK (one in three schools here) in terms of the autonomy they have and funding by the state. Indeed, most of the private schools in Finland are religious. And UK maintained schools have had autonomy since 1990 after Kenneth Baker brought in local management of schools. But the added layer of control by academy chains gives less autonomy to individual schools.

Don't compare PISA results to 2000. The results were flawed and the UK statistics watchdog has repeatedly criticised the government for pretending you can make a direct comparison:

www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2012/10/statistics-watchdog-expresses-concern-about-dfe-use-of-the-pisa-2000-figures/

If you compare 2009 against 2006 (I believe many more/different countries entered in 2009 so 'rankings' are difficult to compare) UK test scores were largely the same, apart from another big improvement in science.

So no 'sliding' or 'plummeting'.