Anger and tears at Tory devastation of our schools

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/25/anger-and-tears-at-tory-devastation-of-our-schools

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John Harris is absolutely right (Schools are now at breaking point. Where is the outrage?, 22 April). But it is not just schools that have been devastated by nine years of Tory austerity and ineptitude. Every aspect of the system has been ravaged by cuts and wrong-headed ideology since 2010, from the country’s kindergartens and nurseries to its further education colleges and lifelong learning institutions. It is time not just for outrage but for a clean sheet, because the Cameron/May governments have made the state’s education system utterly incoherent and unfit for purpose.

One starting point for a new national education council faced with such a clean sheet might be to establish a widespread national conversation about what the purposes of education should be for the 2020s. Such a council should listen carefully to people like the primary school head in the article, who is clearly an expert on children and their development. And we should ignore junior education ministers in the Lords who believe that the biggest current educational problem is waste in our schools. Their kind and their personal whims about education have held sway for too long.Allen ParrottYeovil, Somerset

• John Harris is only partly right to say lack of money is the root cause of the crisis in England’s schools. I started teaching in the 1970s, when the Plowden report had already effected radical, brave and positive change. UK state primary schools were seen as the best in the world and Hertfordshire, where I worked, the best in the UK. Our classrooms were visited by teachers from around the world who wanted to witness how we were achieving such superb results.

During my career there was a gradual deterioration until the situation we have now, where our schools flounder among some of the worst. So what’s gone wrong? Four main things: (1) focus on results rather than children; (2) the loss of dedicated teachers who entered the profession because they loved children and wanted to make a difference; (3) the replacement of trust with a plethora of (often unnecessary and unrealistic) demands, expectations and targets from local and national government as well as Ofsted; 4) the scandalous lack of money that John Harris’s article highlights so well. Laurence ArnoldStevenage, Hertfordshire

• My wife, a former primary school teacher, now aged 77, burst into tears while reading John Harris’s article. It says so much about our society as well as the state of the education fiasco. It should be required reading for all MPs and their advisers. Other recent revelations about land ownership and wealth concentration make it clear we no longer live in a democracy but in an oligarchy. Sadly, the prominent and largely incompetent members of that clique have shown that money, and the accumulation of it, is the only target of interest to them. Damn the rest of society. It is not a society in which we feel comfortable any longer.Jeremy RobertsLongden, Shrewsbury

• How right John Harris is when he writes that “in eight years flat, they have inflicted damage on the schools system that may take decades to repair”. But they inflicted the damage long before that. I worked with teachers on how to cope with Kenneth Baker’s 1988 national curriculum and will never forget the misery in the voice of the teacher who said: “This is the end of our creativity.” Gradgrind has been the Tories’ inspiration always.John AirsLiverpool

• Lord Agnew of Oulton is not the first DfE minister to waste money on a team of pointless advisers, nor the first to be born without a sense of irony. During the second Blair government, we in local education authorities were knee deep in DfE goons. Then the minister’s strategy for educational change had three elements: publish a policy; turn it into a scheme of work; send advisers to read the scheme of work to us. We counted 23 different advisers coming and going in the course of a term. Exasperated at the inherent idiocy, I complained publicly to a minister at a conference. The ministerial response was to send me a relationship adviser.John NashChild Okeford, Dorset

• May I suggest that schools plagued by fatuous cost savings suggested by Old Rugbeian Lord Agnew should set up the “Rugby Index”. Fees at Rugby for day pupils are £22,400 a year and the index would simply be the per-pupil allocation to each individual state school expressed as a percentage of the Rugby fee. Agnew’s suggestions are a disgrace and I hope they are disowned by his old school.Maxwell WildStockport

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