Fear for your children's education under the Tories

[MissM]

Ed Balls' letter to Michael Gove today

This is the end of huge amounts of hard work by committed professionals in the education sector with the best interests of children at heart. Vote Tory for higher teenage pregnancy rates, financial mismanagement and boring teaching.

Glinda, I actually thought you might have been a Labour plant on an AIBU thread last night.

It matters that England and Wales are performing badly in international tables, particularly as New Labour has put so much money into education. They have proved that you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it. And don't blame the teachers. They have had successive non-specialists telling them how to suck eggs in a new way. A lot of school buildings are PFI, which means they have to be paid for in the future.

I would welcome a poster who was in the Conservative party and knew about Conservative Educational policy to clarify their position on Home Education.

In 2011 onwards there will be a very high number of people retiring, spending less and collecting their state pension. The early sixties baby bulge are turning 47, the age at which people traditionally stop spending and start saving. This means less money coming in in indirect taxes, and more money going out to pay pensions, etc. Whatever party wins, there will be belt-tightening all round.

I am really nervous about education under the Tories. They want more faith schools, and they also want to expand the academy program to primary schools. While some academies are amazing, the lack of accountability is horrifying - christian fundamentalist groups with enough money can open up a school, dictate large parts of the curriculum, admissions criteria, governing body, appoint head, etc, and then push homophobia and the maintenance of dangerous ignorance among our children about STIs and teen pregnancy.
For the person who wrote 'vote tory if you want to keep your rights as a parent' - I really have to wonder! Labour more than trebled child benefit since it came to power, brought in family tax credits, subsidised nursery places for 3 year olds, the right to pay for your child care out of your gross as opposed to net salary, the cash incentive for 16 year olds to stay on in education, raised teachers' pay, built and improved many many schools and tried - though failed thanks to the Tories - to bring in compulsory sex ed for primary age kids. Friends children have this sex ed in their school already (enlightened head teacher) and it is age appropriate, informative and brilliant - gets them talking about body parts from early age, removes taboos so kids are able to be relaxed in really important conversations about their well being. You have got to be joking that the tories will shore up your rights as a parent. They will only benefit you if you are so rich you don't need the state at all to help you and can just buy in whatever you need yourself.
That comment is completely bonkers!

Bob, No I am not saying that, but I do feel that the balance of the site has changed in the last few days.

It could be a genuine swing in opinion, or it could be that people are posting more politically than they usually do.

Don't you agree that there are more right wing posters than usual?

Look at the early part of this thread. Somebody even commented on the level of agreement.

Sorry If I offended you by suggesting links to Tory central office. I agree that it was a nasty accusation.

The Crack fox - Maybe I am, how would you know?

Gaaah - bloody hell! Just read through thread - why is everyone a Tory all of a sudden????! What will they do for education which everyone thinks is so great?! help us all if they win. help us all.

Michael Gove forsees 'the need to make some changes' so home educators need to watch and act quickly if we need to fight anything - but they will not be the intrusive changes we will have under another terms of Labour.

you know the intrusive changes are motivated out of a desire to protect some of the children who are home educated who are not, in fact, educated at all?! I know the vast majority of home educated kids (including all of the ones I have ever met - never met a dull one yet!) are having a brilliant enlightened and well rounded education - but you must recognise the state's responsibility to put safeguards in place to ensure kids aren't just sat at home watching telly all day? Imagine the recriminations and blame if it became apparent the gvt had done nothing to ensure home ed kids didn't have the same minimum standards available to protect their education that everyone else has, and as a result, lots of kids arrived at 16 illiterate?! I know that for many home edders gvt minimum standards can be constricting but surely thatis the better of two evils - your kids are flying anyway due to your commitment to them!

no actually - I don't recognise the state has a responsibility that intrusive. Not least when they can't even ensure all state educated children are suitibly educated.

And shocking as it may be an LA can already send a child into school if it appears they are not being educated which leaves it up to the parents to prove in court that they are - what exactly is wrong with that innocent until suspicision of wrongdoing set up?

who has that responsibility then? If the parents fail the child, who is there to make sure the child is ok?

The parent has the responsibility first and formost.

If they fail in that responsibility the state has a duty to intervene. That is not what the CSF Bill proposed.

The CSF legislation would have been more like you deciding your children would do really well in the Ofsted satisfactory school that has fantastic music and art facilities- and the LA being able to over rule your decision unless you could show them yearly plans of just how you would make sure that your child would keep up academically with the children in the ofsted Outstanding school next door. You'd tell them to butt out because you know which school is likely to suit your child wouldn't you?

btw - not a perfect comparison, but best I can come up with that shows the shift from parents being responsible for educational decisions

'I would love to see an education policy that allowed kids the freedom to learn through outside play, didn't have a 'sitting down learning by rote' from day 1 element, and was imaginative in teaching. One of the things I love about my kids' school is that there are no 'lessons' as such on Wed afternoons, and instead they do a rotation programme of enrichments activities, which might be cooking, sewing, gardening, forest crafts etc etc. They learn SO much from it, and yet it won't get them many marks in SATs exams. But I know which I prefer. ' Private prep will provide that, as it did for my ds, so it is available in the UK.

Rocknstroll, where do I begin?

Child benefit has not trebled, it has gone up from £11.24 a week for the eldest child to £20.00 now, so that is not trebling. Please be accurate.

Whilst you can trumpet the introduction of tax credits etc, and they have helped many people, there are swathes of people out there who have not benefitted from anything that Labour have done. I wouldn't vote for them anyway, especially as I think the last 13 years have been a disaster for both education and defence, and they are the key points on which I vote.

I qualified as a teacher in 2001, having had a different career before that, and since then, I have seen a dumbing down of standards at GCSE level and A level. Questions that were on the O level maths paper in 1976 were on an A level paper in 2001 or thereabouts. The GCSE that I teach and mark has got easier both in content and the marking. The students are spoonfed and there is no breadth in the curriculum any more. It is no longer compulsory to take an MFL at GCSE; single sciences are rare, and the DCSF won't allow state schools to offer all the IGCSEs, whereas the private schools use them because they are far more rigorous.

As for the compulsory sex ed at primary - that's what parents are for. I can't say that when my ds was at primary that I had 'really important conversations about his wellbeing' with him. I made sure he was in a situation where he was safe and there was no need to have those conversations with him. I taught some Sex Ed at secondary to year 8 and some of the questions were shocking (and probably designed to be so). There is a place for sex ed, but it has to be at the discretion of the parents imo, as the parents know when the child is ready for that.

As for the home ed comments - I think you'd find that the kids who are uneducated are those with parents who don't make them go to school, as opposed to those who make a choice to home ed, and the latter will have thought about it long and hard. This government doesn't like people doing things that they don't control full stop. Contactpoint (the pernicious database referred to earlier) is a case in point. The data is not secure as has already been proven, and the data is retained far beyond any reasonable date. There is no reason to keep data on any child until that individual is 24, it should be removed from the database and destroyed post A level, or post 16 if the child leaves school.

scaryteacher - private prep is great if you can afford it - no way could we EVER afford it! So we are just really really lucky that our local, mixed-intake, state primary has some inspirational leadership. It wouldn't be available if it weren't for the uniqueness of this school.

Yes you are, because the only primary school available to me for ds was one with a track record of teaching to the test for SATs, and an ingrained bullying culture which was never addressed and was the reason why several children were removed from the school.

The prep on the other hand had a breadth of education, a mix of parents, any bullying was addressed very early on, there was sport every day and had inspired leadership, and I worked bloody hard to pay for it.

the thing is with the dumbing down, Labour are in denial about it - they just trumpet 'standards have risen' blah blah blah when everyone knows that there has been grade inflation.
If they had admitted it and come up with a plan to sort it I might have had more sympathy but for political reasons they show no sign of doing so (it would be a massive u-turn if they finally admitted it).

so scaryteacher, the solution surely is to try and make more state schools like that? Which is NOT what the Tories are proposing at all.

We turned down the 'Outstanding' 'top of the league tables' in favour of this primary.

And btw, we work really hard too, but we would still never be able to pay for prep school for the kids.

So why haven't Labour done it then in the 13 years they have been in power? It's no good, saying the Tories aren't going to do it; Labour isn't, and we know that because they haven't.

Prep school was surprisingly cheap compared with having paid nursery fees, and looking into child care costs for the times I needed to have a child minder.

scary teacher, god, really sorry about the child beneefit mistake - i honestly thought it was £5 in 1997, turns out it was £5 earlier! Still though - an increase is an increase. That money makes a big diff in our house.
We obivously differ on sex ed, I think the point of having it at school is that all kids are given an equal chance at knowing the basics - whether your parents are incredibly on the ball hard workers like yourself, or people with little or no education, very fundamentalist religious views, or any other reason that would mean that might not be able to equip their children not just with knowledge - condoms etc for teenagers, but also a much more deep rooted confidence in speaking about their bodies and not being embarassed about it. For too many years we have hid away from information that is really essential that children have in order to protect themselves. THey also need the confidence to use that information to protect themselves, and I think sitting round with your mates when you are 5 and talking about all the different names for your 'willy' or your vagina is a really good place to start breaking down those dreadful and dangerous taboos.
And we could possibly at a push afford prep school, but absolutely no way not ever ever ever would I send my kids to a fee paying school. Parents are just a bit too snooty - know what I mean?!

but this thread isn't about labour's education policy? And I'm not voting labour anyway.

the thread is about Labour's education policy.

The whole thing starts with a letter to Michael Gove in which Ed Balls stamps his feet like a spoilt little boy and huffs and puffs in a 'oh I hope you're happy that we had to leave out legislation we wanted to get through because despite having had a clear majority for the past 13 years we've left loads of complicated bills that need proper debate and scrunity till just before we dissolved parliament' sort of way.

'absolutely no way not ever ever ever would I send my kids to a fee paying school. Parents are just a bit too snooty - know what I mean?'

No I don't actually - they are perfectly normal people imo and ime. Nurses, teachers, cleaning ladies etc, not snooty at all.

Sex Ed - those with fundamentalist religious views, or indeed religious cultures that aren't fundamentalist, will withdraw their children from this, so they won't attend the lessons, and at 5 I'd rather they were learning to read, write and do arithmetic than a list of words to call your genitals. I would have had ds out of lessons like that pretty sharpish as well. What you are not getting is that not being embarrassed about your body can't be taught at school; it's part of a learned culture at home.

Some very interesting responses, but I'm not in the right space to argue with many of them as I'd like. But throwing out this bill after two years of hard work by extremely dedicated professionals (including teachers and headteachers), that proposed a primary curriculum that would allow teachers to be more flexible and teach to the needs of their pupils in a more cross-curricular way (and in a way that many primary schools are actually already using and getting better results through the changes) is crazy on so many levels.

In the case of sex education, yes, it should be the domain of the parents. But not every child is lucky enough to have parents who will discuss sex or emotions or the correct names of parts of the body with them. And the reason the SRE aspect of the bill fell down was over the parental right to withdraw their kids from SRE - Labour were proposing they should be able to withdraw until they're 15, the Tories wanted it kept at 16. So because of that sex education will remain patchy and poor.

The reason I mentioned financial mismanagement was because learning about personal finances and enterprise is a part of the PSHE education programme of study. Yep, that's right. Bet lots of people assumed it's just about sex. Have a look at the actual curriculum here

Am hiding this thread now so please don't have a dig at me if I don't respond again.

You're hiding the thread why? Because we didn't all agree with you?

And no, I don't think that many people will have assumed that PSHE was just about sex and you are being rather rude and patronising in saying that.