The solution to England’s education problem

The first of the Party Conferences (the Liberal Democrats) is now over, and soon it will be the turn of Labour and then the Conservatives.  The media is, and will be, full of comment, and counter argument.  Confusion would dominate over-clarity as people try to understand what the different policies actually mean.

To help those politicians responsible for education the Initiative has, in the last few days, sent a short Paper, It’s Really Very Simple, to Ed Balls, Michael Gove and David Laws.

It starts with a very direct statement: “The solution to England’s education problem will be very simple once the country comes to appreciate the danger still being done by two Victorian myths that haunt everyday thinking.  Just as early years education was seen by the Victorians as little more than child minding which came cheap, so secondary education was accepted as being specialised and expensive, and most often delivered away from the child’s local home community.  A century or more later primary education is still allocated significantly fewer funds, and far less status, than secondary (which means that classes are much larger when pupils are young, and smaller with more direct teacher involvement, when they are older).”

The Paper concludes two and a half pages later: “Simple as this may seem, it won’t happen until the English people, individually and collectively, regain a sense of their mutual interdependence, and their responsibility for the future.  Nor will it happen until teachers are properly equipped to demonstrate they know as much about how children learn, and collaborative skills are developed, as they know about the subjects which they teach.”

Read It’s Really Very Simple here. It is also available to download as a Word document or PDF.

This article is tagged: Education, politicians, politics.