Amazing amount of favourable publicity afforded to the Sutton Trust’s latest report on the Today programme this morning. Also used as an opportunity to mock Michael Gove. Yet isn’t the Sutton Trust a reliably left wing organisation? Why DOES the BBC get so excited about it’s press releases? Is it because any opportunity to somehow “do down” Gove is grabbed with relish? If our children really ARE lagging so far behind overseas students, perhaps the BBC might choose to square that with their adulation of the teaching “profession” and the NUT? Maybe this is evidence we need to sack poor teachers? Oddly, the BBC never goes down that line, for some reason.
SUTTON TRUST
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I don’t know if the Sutton Trust was trying to score political points but I know that I was appalled at the results. The questions that sprang to my mind were:
“How could this have happened?”
“Was it due to exams being made easier?”
“Was it due to the abandonment of selection in the state education sector?
“How much was due to the interference in education by the government, both the previous one and the current one?”
“What role good or bad had the teachers unions played on this shockingly poor performance?”
…and many more. The 7.50 interview…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9735000/9735605.stm
…that was to include Christine Blower General Secretary of the NUT was set to be interesting as we would from one of the central players over the last decade in the decline in education standards.
To say I was disappointed with the interview conducted by Justin Webb would be laughable. The conversation seem to revolve around whether league tables were good or bad and to be honest I lost interest after listening to an uninterrupted couple of minutes of Christine Blower telling us everything was all right really.
Given the set up and the potential for some really tough questioning, this interview was lamentable and Webb should be embarrassed by it.
As an aside, on the BBC page linked to above, providing the running order of the Today programme, I was interested to note Christine Blower being described as the chief executive of the NUT.
Er… come again? Since when are union reps calling themselves chief executives? No longer Comrade Blower, but Chief Comrade Blower! LOL
“Was it due to exams being made easier?”
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Please note, we at New Labour did not make exams ‘easier’. To suggest so is to insult millions of hard-working children.
We simply made exams more ‘accessible’.
Or ‘double plus unharder’.
That is why under New Labour children got mo’ be’ah at English every year.
Dem chillen dun lubz dat Nu Labor skoolin’ an’ ting, ya get me innit!
Oh dear, Webb (inadvertently?) let a cat out of the bag when he suggested that the logical outcome of the way Parkside Federation comprehensive school pursues excellence in its mathematically gifted pupils is a return to grammar schools. Blower couldn’t wait to sit on that one although, as usual in these discussions, her contribution was the predictable “speak your weight” barking of the brain-dead educational establishment. This resolved into the, basically unchallenged assertions comprising “no need for league tables, teachers are wonderful so what’s the problem, we’re getting it about right – or would be but for the cutz”.
Webb didn’t pursue the matter.
It makes me weep when I compare the ease with which my generation climbed out of poverty with the politically correct treacle which my grandchildren have to wade through to end up in the poverty we left.
Yes, I did go to a grammar school.
It is not news by any stretch of the imagination, it is 50 years old if a day. Governments of both colours, the so called teaching colleges and not least the teachers are to blame. end of!
Most people get their education despite not thanks to the State System. It is a disgrace, due to lazy leftie school teachers who perpetuate the “everyone must win a prize” mentality, as “learning facilitators”, and pack the benches at Question Time.
Try getting a job as a geography teacher who declares belief in catastrophic man-made climate change is a dangerous cult. CO2 is innocent, get over it.
The teaching colleges were taken over by marxists about 50 years ago. They got rid of grammer schools not because they were unfair because they didn’t want anyone else coming along and replacing them because they were better than the lefty freaks.
Most of what you learn in secondary education is a waste of time. You just learn to pass tests. Education gets dumbed down more and more each year and the people who suffer are the people being educated. Home schooling is the best way to go now, at least you will know your children is learning. Not whatever is flavour of the month withj cultural marxists.
I always get the impression that the Today sock puppets see state education as , very much “another country”…the likes of webb and Monty won`t be sending THEIR kids anytime soon to Fiona Miller Campbell Comprehensive will they?
Hence Webbs fascination with this exotic tribe of state taught schoolchildren-they rap and they riot-oh the japes!
And the self satisfied head with her Union Blowhard basically say that things are grand….her school is fine and all we need is more comprehensive education and less embarrassment regarding exams and low standards.
Pay teech more…keep inspectors out if it….and celebrate our world leading prowess at sums…witness our MPs and bankers with expenses and fiddling….world leaders in creative accounts and sum bending since the South Sea Bubble and the Rotten Boroughs!
Fascinating creatures these kids who know only eighths and grams-and the time of the court case that they`ll not be bothering to show up to.
Pip pip Justin ole boy!..thanks for asking anyway!…what what !
Isnt it Justin Webb who scored pitifully lowest in some “celebrity” 11 plus test? Still he seems to owe his entirely unmerited eminence to the fact that he was conceived by a previous newsreaders concupiscence and aunty out of shame has found him the equivalent of a position as scullerymaid.
I heard this interview too and noted that the truly ghastly Blower was allowed to spout whatever utter crap she liked without challenge and Webb who is so stupid he makes Sarah Montague sound like Germaine de Stael restrained himself from the chorus of self-regarding interruptions he reserves for anyone “right wing”.
Five years ago I was running a short “English for Tourism” course at a small private language school in London. I had a very pleasant group of intermediate (ie: middling) students who were studying tourism in their home town in Italy and the course involved a visit to a group of students on a broadly similar “Travel and Tourism” course in a west London further education college.
Each group had to prepare and deliver a presentation on their home tourism industry. I was proud of the Italians who prepared a well structured presentation using English which belied their moderate command of the language.
The Italians sat aghast at the poor quality of the local presentation. The climax was a reference to “Heide Park” in the Powerpoint presentation.
I didn’t know whether to feel proud of “my” Italian students, or just plain embarrassed. The complacent attitude of the local teachers was even more disturbing.
This country has a lot of catching up to do. Teachers and the BBC are part of the problem and just don’t “get it”.