having just listened to the latest goverment ofted inspector giving us his view on how the education system needs upgrading i was struck on just how much these etonians are out of touch with reality.
for example. take the town i now live in Trowbridge in Wiltshire. (35,000) . Within the boundries you have three social housing estates, (which when built were called council estates) now by there definition these estates were and still are, where the working class people live. these people who before we allowed the world and its dog in, where the very people who served us in low paid thankless jobs that are vital to our everyday needs. like it or not this is the way of the world, and always will be, it has been accepted for hundreds if not thousands of years. they filled our once thriving factories , alas now relocated to asia , these factories now lie idle and unloved/unused, as do the people who once occupied them( aka benifit scroungers so called). you get the picture, unemployed workers all living within a towns boundries, sending there offspring to ancient schools to be educated by poorly funded teaching staff.
then came the motorway m4 and a fast link to the promised land, so clever developers soon worked out that people wanting away from the smoke, might like to commute to wiltshire , and up sprang a 600 houses private estate , which grows nearer the motorway by the day.now you dont need a grammer school education to work out these homes were not occupied by working class families. the people that could afford to live there were well paid middle class families and they had middle class value,s. there offspring would in no way be going to any run down school , but to the brand spanking new school built by developers, as a way of thanking the district council for allowing them to desicrate the green fields around trowbridge. so we now have a two tier education system where the working class go to old run down school and the middle class go to the new school. that is the way of the world as ive said . always will be, accepted by all except probably the extreme left. whatever you do this will never change. maybe i should explain , new schools get a lot of additional funding for three years. this allows new schools to recruit on ability rather than cost. so they have a massive advantage that old schools never had. this i accept as do others without envy. BUT! and here,s the rub, ofsted expect the old schools to attain the same standard as the new one,s without additional funding. if they dont they would be taken over and run by government wonder men/women . how can this be you ask. well failing schools also get additional funding so are briefly on a par with new schools. :rolleyes: as we speak most schools with working class families attain a satisfactory pass from ofsted, but the changes brought about by lib/cons mean these schools will now fail. so in a stroke hundreds of hard working teaching staff will be labled as failiers regardless of circumstances,.
one other point you need to take into account, you may have noticed we now have half of eastern europe and most of africa amongst us. how would you imagine these peoples children fit into our education system?? well think about it for a moment. do these immigrants have there own houses??? can they speak da lingo??/ answer in 99.99999% of cases the answer is NO. so where would you imagine these children are sent to be educated then?? new or old.??? yes youve guessed it old schools. HA you say surely they bring additional funding for interpretors ect. not a bean. the additional cost is bourne by the cash strapped school, the gap it widens. BUT ofsted will not take this into account and here,s the smoke and mirrors bit. instead of the new schools attaining the lable outstanding they will be downgraded to good thus at a stroke closing the gap. yes for a month or two poor schools will be failed until some civil servant points out that its costing too much in additional funds and all will go quiet. we can never change the social classes in this country and i wouldnt want to but what gets my goat and always will is that instead of giving these poor kids the funding they create the means by which they can give the impression that there trying to help, when all along there doing the opposite. SMOKE AND MIRRORS .