Why is it only the right that gets angry about how state schools fail the poor?

[longfingernails]

A truly fantastic article.

blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/06/christine-blower-the-nut-and-the-bigotry-of-low-expectation/

My favourite snippet:
This is what separates British left and right now. The left, in their post-Blair phase, is no longer very worked up about the poor doing badly at school. (?It may matter or it may not,? Blower said about poor children not going to top universities). The standard left response is to talk philosophically about inequality in society, as if this has the slightest bearing on whether the concept of a sink school ought to be tolerated in this day and age.

By contrast, the right are hopping mad about educational inequality. When the subject is raised in front of Michael Gove, it?s like flicking a switch. He blows his top. When I last interviewed him and raised the subject about whether it poor kids should be expected to do as well as rich, he replied in a crescendo of anger.

Yes, that is what Labour said the other day and is right.

But of course, it took Labour a very long time to come round to this position. It is only because the Tories started changing things that Labour have now also changed and updated their views. And I guess there may still be questions of whether Labour's change of mind is for real or just more of their usual spin.

"Harris City academy in SE London have a head on 250k a year."

How many state comprehensives have heads on salaries like this?

I presume these salaries come from taxpayer money. If this starts looking like a gravy train with the public being milked and bilked, this might all end in tears for the politician who implemented it.

No wonder private businesses want to get into this game if the rewards are so huge and if the taxpayer is the one who pays for it.

This might be easier for them than banking.

The problem with heads is that no bugger wants to do it at the moment, so silly money is justified to 'attract the right candidates'.

But that is the argument that the CBI and Institute of Directors use to justify the huge salaries of business executives who often face shareholder disapproval.

These state roles seem to attract huge salaries - in the health service, in charities, in social trusts, in the BBC and tax-exempt foundations - and the argument is always that these people are so skilled that no one else is capable of doing the job and they therefore deserve to be paid so much by the taxpayer.

The public is beginning to wonder if they are being taken for a ride by a self-elected clique who profit from the public purse.

We know that they are all philanthropists now. We know that hedge funds are investing in schools and financiers are setting up priivate schools and universities and we know that students are paying £9000 a year in fees, but what's in it for the hedge funds and teh private businesses and are the public and the taxpayer and the students losing out?

And Amazinggg and noblegiraffe are right. There are lots of brilliant hardworking teachers and education professionals who have been involved in education all their working lives and they don't charge the taxpayer what some of these businesses want to do, and they are being told by people who have little experience of education, that the job can be done better by philanthropists and businesses and parents.

Instead of giving more freedoms to free schools, give freedoms to state schools, and cut the tick box red-tape target culture and get back to spending time and resources on education without being micro-managed by bureaucrats in ivory towers.

Who pays for the land on which these free schools are built and who owns the land?

Will charities own the land, could some philanthropists be owners of the land?

And what happens if some of these free schools eventually fail and need to be shut down? Who will own the land, will it be the public or charities, philanthropists and hedge funds? And who will profit if the land is then used to put up shopping centre complexes with blocks of flats etc?

Scrap the National Curriculum - that's what holding State Schools back.

PLus State Schools need to STOP blaming parents for everything!! - that's holding them back too!

Claig - thing is, it takes financial savvy to be able to commission the myriad of services required by eg a big secondary. ICT services, performing arts facilities, Library services, Technology, cleaning and general care taking (often sold out massively expensively to big companies like Kier as part of a PFI contract to sweeten the deal), SEN services that have been provided by the local LEA which now have to be paid for my individual schools, so costs are cut, other providers are sought, profits are skimmed and schools are ripped off.

Even if you have a dedicated business manager in schools, which lots do - they title them 'deputy head' and pay them lots - it's a huge ask to organise all this stuff, which is why it has been done centrally by LEAs for so long. Not distant top-down micro-management but sensible pooling of resources. All that is being undone by academies. If schools choose not to buy in various borough-provided services, those services wither and die - even if a couple of local schools desperately need them. Survival of the fittest. Market theory just doesn't work for schools and I have no idea why anyone would think it would. Parents don't want schools that specialise - they want good local schools that aren't tripping over themselves to re-invent the wheel, making mistakes, wasting public money, wasting valuable time and energy. By the time this is realised outwith actual teachers and unions, who can see all this happening on a daily basis as their heads are demoralised and replaced with ex bankers and the like - it will be too late and all the essential infrastructure of LEAs will be lost. Politicians think any idiot can run a school, that teaching is for pansies - let them run our education system into the ground and watch how they do it.

Individual schools shouldn't be concerned with finances - same as GPs shouldn't.

Academies are already forming 'chains' to save money. Banging my head on the table of dissolving LEAs and allowing companies motivated by profit to do the same thing. But without any requirement to serve the poorest, the neediest and the most difficult to teach - look, they can get good results without spending anything on dull essentials like enough TAs.

Bonsoir - that school gets good results because it only takes good students. Those same students would get better grades at the comp. that's what value-added means. Lots of the so-called outstanding grammars in Kent are the same. Lazy to look only at results and not at what they do with what they get.

"Individual schools shouldn't be concerned with finances - same as GPs shouldn't."

Agree. These are public services and should concentrate on service. However, the centralised LEA bureaucrats should be fully transparent with what they spend money on.

This drive to make every service its own business will eventually lead to teachers being employed on zero-hour contracts and that will destroy the profession and the quality of service that the nation gets from it.

There will eventually be a management class of bnakers, hedge fund managers and management consultants paying themselves £250,000 and above and teachers, who actually do the work and make the difference, will be on zero hour contracts

And the hedge fund managers will donate to the Conservatives and some of them will be knighted for their "services to education".

And some ex-politicians, kicked out by the electorate, will get directorial jobs in hedge funds, be paid thousands for philanthropic speeches and be given lucrative taxpayer jobs in social trusts, third sector publicly funded roles and educational charities.

Everyone's a winner except the people, same old same old.

It needs to be started as a small experiment and then scaled up. So a bottom up and not top down approach which is increasingly seen as the wrong way to work.

Parkinson summed up why brilliantly in the Economist 50 years ago.

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available.
Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditures rise to meet income.
Parkinson's Third Law: Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay.
Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
Parkinson's Law of Science: The progress of science varies inversely with the number of journals published.
Parkinson's Law of Delay: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
Parkinson's Law of Data: Data expands to fill the space available.
Parkinson's Law of Meetings: The time spent in a meeting on an item is inversely proportional to its value (up to a limit).
Parkinson's Law of 1000: An enterprise employing more than 1000 people becomes a self-perpetuating empire, creating so much internal work that it no longer needs any contact with the outside world.
Mrs. Parkinson's Law: Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind.

moondog have not read the whole thread, in fact for the last few pages have just skipped to your posts as they are the sanest and most sensible I have seen on the education threads over several years of mning.
Christine Blower is a terrifyingly stupid woman, does a complete disservice to teachers and the teaching profession. Her 'logic' a few years ago at the NUT conference that 'Private' (sic) schools getter better results so they should be abolished' tells you everything about her dizzying-lack-of-logic mindset. If indie schools did not exist there would be no yardstick to measure the failings of some her members.
The mindless and casual anti-Gove-ism has made the TES letters section not worth reading now - informed criticism would be fine, but this is just it is just tedious knee-jerk nihilism.

I like those moondog

And claig your predictions are really depressing and probably true. I don't want to out myself but I have seen ridiculous honour bestowed on clueless managers of academy chains who have done precisely nothing.

I'd like to see a teachers' equivalent of a military coup though. They are by far best placed (the good ones, of which there are plenty) to say what should happen. It's simply not true to say that teachers have vested interests. Teachers should ensure LEAs do their jobs properly. And be properly consulted on curricula and examinations issues. Politicians really should stay out of it other than to listen and observe.

I wonder if outsourcing teaching is next. Big service providers will offer to staff entire schools with the teachers that they have on their books. It would be a bit like large-scale facilities management IT contracts. There will be competition on price and once a service provider has staffed an entire school, they won't look to closely at how good individual teachers are because each teacher is contributing to their bottom line.

Slowly, slowly teachers' conditions will deteriorate and there will be nothing they can do about it as the big service providers will have sewn up all the service contracts in schools.

Don't be fucking stupid. How do you measure the performance of state schools by comparing them to private schools which have a completely differ intake, spend much more money per pupil and have tiny class sizes?

State schools that are highly selective (ie super selective grammar schools) tend to get bloody wonderful results and turn out highly accomplished and bright pupils at 18.

Moondog is actually talking bollocks, but doing it in such an articulate way which is blinding some of you to the basic faults in her argument.

Stop it claig, you're seriously depressing me.

And if you have spent time training to get a PGCE, that won't count for diddly squat, because you will be at the same level as an ex-banker with no training or one of the troops to soldiers, and they will be considered as better suited to teahing because they have experience of the "real world".

troops to teachers not troops to soldiers

Would be interesting to have a ne experiment running of two schools side by side with equivalent intake, School A staffed by ex business people and soldiers and School B staffed by teachers who have never done any job outside the education system. I don't think there would be a shortage of parents refusing to send their children to School A, and I predict after a few years School B would struggle to attract any pupils at all.