Following that case, BBC News reported:
This is tackling the symptom rather than the cause.Schools Secretary Ed Balls has asked for a report on the problem of parents cheating to get school places.
England's Schools Adjudicator will look at the scale of the problem and whether there are enough powers to tackle cheats - and if they are being used.
The reason that many parents cheat to get their children into a preferred school is that too many councils run schools to which no caring parent would want to send their children.
No, I don't have an easy solution. But the first step to tackling a problem is to admit that it exists.
Was talking yesterday evening in the pub to a teacher of mature years about his and his partner's experience - they teach in very different schools, and have done so for a long time. Retiring in a year or two, in fact. Their dominant problem in recent times has been change after change after change, with no proper training (and seemingly none at all at Head and Deputy Head level). Not for nothing does Burning Our Money use terms such as The Commissariat and Tractor Production targets.
ReplyDeleteVery true, we should certainly focus on improving school. However, while I acknowledge that her motivations were family-oriented, she's still a liar and deserves to suffer the consequences.
ReplyDeleteBut Jonathan, councils don't run schools.
ReplyDeleteThey provide the money for the school to be there, and they administer the system under which pupils apply to and are sent to the various schools, and that's about it. They have almost no say about what goes on inside the schools. That's a matter for the Headteacher, the governors, and the National Curriculum.
The REAL reason for this cheating and all the other fuss about school admissions is that there are large numbers of children which no caring parent would want their children to mix with. What parents want is for their children to end up mixing with the children who will be a good influence on them and not with children who will be a bad influence.
If we can accept that is the real problem, we can do something to deal with it. We won't deal with it if we think the problem is purely down to "good" and "bad" schools so that there's some magic thing we can do to make all schools "good". The reality is that however you apportion them, those children who nice caring middle class parents wouldn't want their children to mix with still exist. Their presence will still drag a school down and if there is enough of them make it a"bad" school. Their absence will enable a school to be a "good" school.
If what I was saying was not true, and the goodness or badness of a school were purely down to its staff and the council, one would find "good" and "bad" schools randomly distributed. But one doesn't. Schools believed to be "good" are overwhelmingly in prosperous middle class areas. Schools believed to be "bad" are overwhelmingly in economically poor areas.
That's not to say there aren't things a school and its teachers can do to improve it, or that there aren't bad teachers and schools which have got into a mess due to poor management. But until we recognise that's not even the main issue here - and most commentators haven't recognised that because there's an awkwardness in talking about the real problem and it suits certain political views to suppose there's easy solutions based on schools improving themselves - we will carry on desperately doing all these politically inspired things which governments have been doing, New Labour obsessively, and in reality get absolutely nowhere, in fact worsen not improve school education.
Mr. Huntbach is absolutely correct!
ReplyDeleteWe have similar problems in Germany, or maybe even worse. One of my friends actually moved from one Bundesland to another, so his children could go to a "better" school.
Our politicians have wonderful ideas about "equality", which means that in some schools all the children are drawn down to the same level - it is horrible.
I agree with Matthew Huntbach.
ReplyDeleteAlso Mrinal Patel surely has been paying taxes on the same basis as everyone else - why is she any less entitled to good public services than those in happier postcodes.
It's a postcode lottery, I tell you.