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    #26
    Schools again

    AG: Replied.

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      #27
      Schools again

      AG - You used my assertion that parental choice had nothing to raise standards in the UK to make a stupid dig at me, which I suspect is related to the uniform thread. It can probably be summed up thus:

      Me: So-called parental choice has only entrenched privilege. All schools should be good.
      AG: Ha! So you think one size fits all then?

      You'd have to be an utter moron or completely disingenuous to take what I wrote and imply I'm advocating some sort of Maoist/Stalinist position. If you want to debate education policy or philosophy with me, fine, but if your opening gambit is a deliberate, gross misrepresentation of my philosophy, I'm going to feel justified in telling you to fuck off and not bother wasting my time.

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        #28
        Schools again

        I think you're being a bit hard on AG there Chris, even though I agree with you. He's asking reasonable questions.

        The trouble with 'choice' of course is that education is compulsory, so there isn't 'choice' the way there is with buying CDs and books, which are not. So therefore the questions that need to be asked of 'parental choice' as we currently have it, are 'who does the choosing?' Who succeeds in getting their choice met? Who, just as importantly, does not? The losers in the choice lottery are rarely heard from, usually discussed and dismissed as some sort of inhuman 'other', from whom Proper Parents need to distance themselves as they grapple with their oh-so-tortuous 'dilemmas' about state education. (The not-remotely-marxist Simon Jenkins characterised this as all about paraphrasing "keepting away from the blacks").

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          #29
          Schools again

          I am suspicious of these claims. It looks like a cheap dig, with a lot of bad accounting.

          Reserves are also the working capital - ie the money the schools need to pay their bills every month as well as the amounts needed to cope with sudden repairs.

          What are these reserves as a percentage of turnover? How many weeks discretionary expenditure do they cover?

          Once we have these figures for each school we can see who has sufficient funds. We can also see who has been getting too much money - calculating the grants to each school must be a rather arbitary figure.

          Schools with modern buildings, young teachers and few statemented kids will have lower costs - it is almost impossible to capture these differentials in any grant formula. So there will be arbitary winners and losers.

          Comment


            #30
            Schools again

            E10 - You're right, they're perfectly reasonable questions to ask, and all the issues you raised are real and valid, but they weren't phrased in the manner of a seeker-after-truth; they were posed in a confrontational manner which implied I'm uninterested in meeting the varying needs of children. Which I rather resent.

            I read and hear ill-informed nonsense about education on a daily basis and thought OTF might be some sort of refuge. I think I'm going to avoid education threads in future, my tolerance levels are clearly too low!

            Comment


              #31
              Schools again

              Don't do that.

              Chirpy, I can see a case for keeping money back for things like accidents and OFSTED stamping their feet, but staff costs?

              Do you have evidence it's schools with old buildings that have built up the big surpluses? I haven't exactly noticed particularly old schools in Tower Hamlets.

              Comment


                #32
                Schools again

                I'M with ChrisJ here. The abolition of the LEA's was a disaste,and the promotion of "parental choice" has been an enormous con perpetrated on the British public by spivs, liars and political consultants.

                Parents should "suck it up", or rather realise that the most important thing is to maximise the overall standards of their child's education rather than the differential between one school and another.

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                  #33
                  Schools again

                  I agree at least theoretically. The trouble is such a "realisation" on the part of a critical mass of parents and non-parents (who, let's not forget, are also "stakeholders" in whatever public education system is on offer) is unlikely to happen swiftly, easily or universally. Once again, some consensus on what the "standards of [a] child's education" are needs to exist and, frankly, it really doesn't at present. At a bare minimum schools today are required to provide basic day-care, child therapy, utilitarian life/career skills, access to higher education and — I'd like to think — some critical thinking ability. Which of these should get preference depends on who you talk to and what's more, arguably some are either mutually exclusive or impossible to deliver in a classroom setting. Teachers do the best they can with this mess in an increasingly untenable situation.

                  Comment


                    #34
                    Schools again

                    What happened with the British (and I guess the Canadian) education system, was the release of commonly held wealth (in a very similar way to the release of communally held wealth in Building Societies and other mutual institution) made the community far poorer. The vast majority of the wealth that was made transferable left the education system all together and meant that tasks were performed by already over-worked staff, or schools became Ponzi schemes.

                    The schools' apparent desirability in a massively distorted market (like the latest must have toy at Christmas) was all that mattered and the actual value of the education produced- or of the totality of benefits that a given school system brought to its society in a hundred ways, from social cohesion, through added employablity to reduced crime was leached away to pay snake oil salesmen and build houses on the playing fields.

                    And let's remember this all happened in what was supposed to be a period of great wealth. God knows what the future holds.

                    Comment


                      #35
                      Schools again

                      As a related thing, as well as having LEAs back, I'd like to have bigger boroughs in London. Tower Hamlets runs localised one stop shops which seem to work pretty well. In terms of centrally run services, I might as well speak to someone on the phone in Hackney or Newham as Poplar. As well as the savings on management salaries (especially housing, where they go up despite the stock being sold off all the time) such boroughs would have a bigger profile for their education and other services. I imagine this was what the IILEA was like.

                      I know London's not the country, just a local observation

                      Comment


                        #36
                        Schools again

                        yes. exactly. Dealing with the economic inequities between (say) Tower Hamlets and Westminster and the City of London. How much was lost from London education by deducting the City'of London's contribution to educating the workforce.

                        perhaps one could also integrate things like fire, police management, transport, strategic planning econonmic stimulus and so on.

                        You could call it, I don't know, the Greater London Council.

                        Comment


                          #37
                          Schools again

                          I wasn't thinking primarily of having rich and poor boroughs, because I have nightmares about Shirley Porter getting to run a bigger area. I expect there are more than enough old Westminster people involved with Boris Johnson.

                          I've never fathomed the need for the City Police.

                          Comment


                            #38
                            Schools again

                            ChrisJ, I apologize for coming in two-footed on you. I find the characterization of choice = consumerism to be a lazy one, but there were probably better ways to express it.

                            It seems to me, though, that most of the criticism of choice that I see here is around the manner that choice was implemented in the UK. But there are lots of other ways to do it.

                            In the city where I grew up, there were six school boards, each covering an area with between 50,000 and 150,000 people. Within that area, everyone had an absolute right to enrol in whatever school they wanted. End of story.

                            Where I live now, every school has a catchment area. If you want to go to a school outside your catchment area, you put yourself on a list at that school. Every Feb 15 there is a lottery for the spots that are free.

                            Why is this concept such an atrocity?

                            Comment


                              #39
                              Schools again

                              Proper Parents need to distance themselves as they grapple with their oh-so-tortuous 'dilemmas' about state education. (The not-remotely-marxist Simon Jenkins characterised this as all about paraphrasing "keepting away from the blacks")
                              Indeed, the phrase "disruptive child" when used by parents invariably means black, from a council flat or both.

                              With my son, of course, it actually does mean "disruptive child" but a lot of middle class liberal parents gloss over issues with their own children's behaviour and blame the school and other children, sometimes serially from school to school

                              Comment


                                #40
                                Schools again

                                Wouldn't "lower" social classes contain more disruptive pupils though?

                                Comment


                                  #41
                                  For reasons with which I won't bore anyone, I came across this thread today and wanted to offer an apology to Anton Gramscescu. I know it was 13 years ago, but I was really taken aback by how much of an arse I was on this thread; really aggressive and shitty. I have a memory I was going through a bad time MH-wise, but that's not an excuse. Anyway, I'm sorry.

                                  I should probs also say sorry to Tubby Isaacs, but I fear he no longer posts on OTF. A loss.

                                  I'm sure this wasn't the only case and if anyone wants to raise anything similar, either here or by DM, I'll do the same. I can be a bit of a cunt at times.

                                  Comment


                                    #42
                                    I stand by what I posted on this thread

                                    Indeed this headline from twitter reminds me what a disgusting scam academies are and how they have been used to rob whole areas to enrich scammers and bullies like the chap below.

                                    Meanwhile schools are closing because of crumbling Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) and the government won't even tell parents which ones are afffected

                                    Comment


                                      #43
                                      Originally posted by Stumpy Pepys View Post
                                      Schools again

                                      It's a general problem in the public sector.

                                      I headed a publishing department for a government agency and managed to cut costs by about 50 per cent. In the private sector, I'd have been rewarded for my performance, but in the public sector it meant that we'd be given less money for the next financial year. Therefore, the final three months was inevitably a race to spend all the money that was left. Crackers really.
                                      I came across this when I worked in the semi public sector once and it really shocked me. Without going into the name of the organisation or the specifics, I was given a week long project to organise towards the end of the budget year and the remit I was given was to spend as much money as humanly possible whilst making sure that all the things I spent it on clearly fell under the remit of the organisation's aims and didn't seem unnecessarily extravagant. It was an interesting challenge and I performed my task admirably.

                                      Comment


                                        #44
                                        ChrisJ I wouldn't worry how you came across in this thread. Yes, you were a bit abrupt, but you had a lot of really useful contributions and explained your position very clearly. It's an area where you have a lot of valuable knowledge and experience, and one where you are understandably get a bit prickly if you feel that schools are being unjustifiably criticised.

                                        Comment


                                          #45
                                          In terms of the topics of the thread, it's quite interesting looking back at how things have changed over the last 13 years. My thoughts are:

                                          1) Schools still rely on parental fundraising. Our PTA equivalent raises over £20k per year, with a large bulk of it coming from the school summer festival. This is another way that schools in poorer locales are disadvantaged. This is an area where it's not that difficult to extract £10 or 20k from generous parents. Some catchment areas just don't have that much excess cash available.

                                          2) Some level of parental choice is helpful as there are different considerations for different children. For my daughter we're likely to choose her secondary school mainly based on academic results as she is very bright and thrives in an environment of academic challenge and high expectations. For my son we will have to give much more consideration to pastoral care, SEN support, etc, and that may mean we choose a different school.

                                          3) Narrow catchment areas inevitably disadvantage poorer parents, and less middle-class parents who don't know how to game the system. In our local area there have recently been some housing estates built on the outskirts of the town, nearer to the villages but still ostensibly with the name of the town in their address. The houses here were more affordable and many of the lower middle-class families jumped at the chance to actually buy a house with enough bedrooms for their children. We were more wary, more clued up about how narrow the catchment areas are for secondary schools and we value education very highly. So we bought a smaller house which is slap bang in the middle of the catchment areas for 4 different state secondary schools (3 of them are Ofsted Good-rated, one is Ofsted Outstanding, and we're less than a mile from all of them as the crow flies). The slightly poorer families who moved out (i.e. the families of both cleaners I've had while I've been in this house) suddenly discovered when they applied for secondary schools that they were no longer in the catchment areas of the good/outstanding schools. They'd just assumed that they would be because of the town name in their address. They also tend to just accept the decision rather than appeal so their children have ended up at lower-rated secondary schools in other towns, or sometimes other counties. It's social cleansing by stealth.
                                          Last edited by Balderdasha; 16-09-2023, 08:01.

                                          Comment


                                            #46
                                            4) Since 2010, ICT has become even more central to primary teaching. I still agree with ChrisJ that there are more important things to be teaching primary school age children but any school that didn't have good computers, etc, would be crucified these days. Kids are also so used to electronic devices in their home that they'd find it very weird if they were completely absent in schools.

                                            Comment


                                              #47
                                              5) I fully agree that hollowing out Local Education Authorities and handing the budgets over to schools was a disaster.

                                              6) Schools have become the last stand for even more social ills since 2010. They're now routinely having to feed starving families.

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                                                #48
                                                I think "choice" in education is as bad as "choice" in healthcare, meself. A lie, as well as nonsense.

                                                Comment


                                                  #49
                                                  I agree that it's mostly nonsense but I can see a small amount of sense in it in some limited instances. In healthcare it makes no sense to me, other than that you should be able to ask for a second opinion if you have a particularly dire local doctor (my mum would almost certainly not have had to have a medical termination if she had had a better primary care doctor who told her to take folic acid after she had a baby with anencephaly).

                                                  In education, I can see an argument for having a few different schools tailored to slightly different needs. One that's more academic, one that's more sporty, one that's known for its excellent music facilities, one that has more SEN provision. Ideally you'd have schools that all have brilliant academic, sports, music and SEN provision, but that is very expensive. With a limited budget it can make sense to put one centre of excellence in each school rather than a bit of half-hearted provision of all topics in every school.

                                                  Comment


                                                    #50
                                                    A variation of schools might make sense, but I'm certainly not sure that most parents are qualified to make choices about whether they think their own child is brilliant at various things. Also, I'm not sure that it's a great idea to determine for a child at age 11 they're not brilliant academically or at sport or whatever. And it's certainly not sensible to have specialising school which have separate catchments so if you live in some locations you can go to a school which has excellent STEM and if you live two towns away you get to go to a school which specialises in languages - that is clearly nonsense (and it seems to be what happens although I'm obviously no expert).

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