State education system, is it broken?

[minimathsmouse]

I believe the wheels have fallen off the state education system. You might not agree but I have read so many posts here from parents who have had and are still having huge problems with their child's school. Many people seem to have worries about standards of teaching, clashes of ideology and problems with making up the deficit with tutors and home study. Horrendous SEN provission, huge class sizes, lack of provision for able pupils, the list goes on. It is truely depressing to think so many children are not receiving the education they deserve.

How many people believe the whole system has failed? Are falling standards only due to poor teaching or wider problems that are not being addressed within the system?

Yes and more resources, ie more TAs more teachers in each class or smaller class sizes?

I have noticed a drop in standards from Reception to Y1 and I think it's because they've gone from 1 teacher with 3 TAs to 1 Teacher with a part-time TA. I don't envy that teacher trying to teach a class of 30 by himself for half of the week. Eek.

Another political thought. Private funding and expertise are not automatically better than state (I mean, why on earth should they be - they're both run by people?), they just have different motivations. Rather than privatising everything, so that organisations become less politically accountable, we should work more on trying to understand what is going wrong with the motivation of people in the public and private sector - neither is perfect, they just have different flaws.

I think cuts in education budgets will see less not more TAs in schools I'm afraid.
I'm Y2 ...28 children ... no TA for any part of the week at all

So, the question is - can the State really no longer afford to do anything properly? Or could the State still do a pretty good job if we were all agreed on what a good job is?!

And by doing things properly, I of course mean doing things in a way in which the majority can be in reasonable agreement and support. Which can surely only happen if we believe in the State in the first place as anything more than a controller of the rabble.

Hmmm. I'm beginning to wonder whether I should actually have read PPE.

Actually I thought about this long and hard in the last few days.

I think that the state both in health and education has some wonderfully skilled teachers and doctors - however they don't have the necessary resources to deliver to the best of their abilities, and the ones that do so do so on a heroic basis.

Having said that, I work in the private sector (IT) and we are in the same boat: delivering to impossible timescales with cut down resources and just relying on a hero culture. A hero culture in both sectors is the one to fight; if means people burn out, and it means there is no consistency of service.

Agreed. And they are each inclined to be suspicious of each other and not believing that the other is pulling its own weight.

(By "they" I mean state institutions and private institutions, of course).

I'm not sure if I agree that the institutions are suspicious of each other perhaps it's fair to say those who use the institutions are suspicious

I do still think that some of those working in the institutions are suspicious of each other - unless it's the press skewing everything again, with their talk of the private sector complaining that it was doing all the suffering whilst the state sector tried to maintain salaries and not change anything, and people in the state sector complaining that the comparisons being made between salaries were unfair, and that anyway, the real problem was the bankers and company directors who didn't pay their staff properly and didn't contribute enough to the State with their taxes, either.

Is that just the press enjoying turning everything into a political football?

Or, is it politicians misrepresenting us in the press?

I don't think the majority of those working in either sector give a second thought to what is happening other than how best to provide for the children in their care.

Agreed there - which goes back to how do we get more people involved enough to stop the chattering classes changing things for the worse!

Or should the chattering classes be able to sort it out effectively for everyone if they stopped chattering at cross purposes?

Can we persuade the Government to listen a bit more to the people who are supposed to be the professionals within education - or is the problem there that the professionals want more money than is on offer, which is why they aren't given enough credence? Or is there no consensus amongst teachers in the State sector, anyway, and they're just waiting around for the inevitable with a sense that they just don't have any control over the process anyway and won't have the funding for whatever they want? I certainly get a sense at my dss' school that everyone is waiting around to hear what's going to be thrown at them next and doing the best they can with the old curriculum and existing methods in the meantime. Then everyone will be off again to try to make the best of the new regime.

Any comments, mrz?

Michael Gove announced "Shortly, my Department will launch its own review of the National Curriculum" if it follows the same format as the last governments consultation on EYFS they will ask teachers to contribute and then ignore what they say make a decision based on the expertise of people who have never been inside a classroom

Ah, I thought as much.

From what I've heard we will have a new primary curriculum in 2013 (it will be in schools 2012 for staff to familiarise themselves). What form the curriculum will have is anyone's guess in the meantime LAs are talking about "negative rises" (fall) in funding and staff are applying for their own jobs ...

Which shows how much politics can get in the way of consistency and effectiveness.

And, of course, all the spare money is going on the review of the system, so that once it's been reviewed we'll all be told the money's run out during the consultation stages and we'll all have to run about making changes out of thin air.

Perhaps that's why the Tories want to reduce the size of the State - political accountability costs more than they are willing to spend and if they feel directly politically accountable, they feel the need to fiddle around with things more, just to be seen to be doing something. But then, we don't want the State opting out of our education system, because that would create a free for all, which wouldn't be any better. Didn't want it opting out of our railways, either, because it couldn't actually opt out: it's always forced to bail out private companies when they turn out to be both as useless as the State but also even more greedy without actually turning out to be any more efficient. But at least the Government can't be directly blamed for their inefficiency...

The last government conducted the hugely expensive Rose review of the primary curriculum spent considerable amounts publishing the New Primary Curriculum sent hard copies into every school before it had been passed by Parliament resulting in lots on expensive glossy scrap paper when it failed to become law...

Yes, I heard about that...

Oh, and back to the railways - privatising rail companies and rail tracks as separate entities resulted in even more inefficiencies still, because whereas when under the State sector they were at least attempting to sing off the same hymn sheet, the separate private companies certainly don't appear to sing off the same balance sheet hymn sheet. Yet we keep going back to the same old ideas, one extreme or the other, without coming up with any better ideas. Are there any better ideas?

Please don't say dictatorship is the only alternative...