Cameron's cannon fodder aims to get 'em young

Cadets in schools. First mooted during Gove's tenure at DfE and now the focus of a wodge of cash to enable state schools and academies to get their pupils into uniform and learn some discipline. Just think, the young learning how to wear a decent suit (khaki, navy or air-force blue), do up their ties and sing the national anthem - oh, and how to shoot straight should they come across some goddam liberal pinko surrender-monkeys. I can think of a many more worthwhile places where that cash could go, and none of them involve indoctrinating the young.

Managing failure in the classroom - the ghost of the 50s and 60 returns...

Michael Rosen's open letter to Nicky Morgan about the dangers of the return of creeping selection are a timely reminder of the waste engendered by the grammar school system. Talk about helping the brightest tends to be a diversionary tactic. Selection now, with its emphasis on critical reasoning test results, means that children from poorer backgrounds won't even get to sit the 11-plus in the first place because parents can't afford the tutoring fees. I live in an area with two selected grammars - and a well established system of private tutoring that takes kids as young as 7! I also grew up in Leeds as the 11-plus was ending. Mine was the first year that didn't have so to sit the exam, so my parents never got to find out if - in the not-so-infallible view of my primary school teachers, I was/wasn't 'university material', aged only 11. Primary teaching in those days - as Rosen so well illustrates - was about managing failure for around two thirds of pupils. Now, in selective grammar areas, its about letting parents battle it out to get their children the supposedly best tutors so they can pass the 11-plus. A grammar school place has little to do with helping the clever working class, more ensuring the sharp elbows of the middle class get what many of them view as their just reward.

Food tech terror

Five texts, the tone increasing in panic, from youngest son on school bus this morning. He'd forgotten the ingredients they'd been instructed to take in to make carrot buns. The teacher is - according to him - a terror, who shouts at the slightest provocation. We immediately leapt into action: ingredients weighed and bagged in only a few minutes. Mum now making a considerable detour from her work commute to ensure peace reigns in the Food Tech kitchen area. I can identify with the sense of panic this teacher engenders because I well remember the three domestic science psychos who kept my cohort of kids in a state of terror. One was a middle-aged friend of Jesus, who used our saviour as her own personal and unseen enforcer. Appearing sickly sweet, she could reduce individual pupils or even an entire class to silence with her quasi-religious line in mind control. Of her two colleagues, one was a large, mainly silent, character who had a corner of her room decked out as a living room - complete with standard lamp and flowery lampshade with a rug and armchair: we took to recreating Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch there if left alone in the room. The third member of this decidedly unholy trinity could go from apparent calm to wailing banshee in the blink of any eye; it was her I thought of as I grated carrot and bagged up the castor sugar. The memory fades but the suffering doesn't. I just hope our efforts were in time, son. I really do. No schools were named in the writing of this blog to protect both the guilty and the innocent...

Work experience?

15 year-old son's high school has declared that next week is work experience week for Year 10 (14-15 year-olds). In his case, this is to consist of visits to three universities. Parents were asked if they could arrange work placements, but only given a week to do so, and subject to the proviso that they were to take place within the LEA area, to cut down on traveling costs for teachers who needed to conduct risk assessments and supervise activities.
Would have thought uni visits were more appropriate to Years 12 and 13. On present showing, by time we reach that stage they'll tell them to stay home and watch day time TV in mornings in preparation for the real student experience.