My wife taught 4 year olds (in an age before tablets/phones/etc) who had never held a book and never had one read to them.

Some children start school so far behind their peers it’s no wonder that they aren’t achieving the same results at the other end of the process.

And what did the Tories do to counter this?

Shut down 600 sure start centres that they’d promised not to cut funding to.
It really isn’t the governments responsibility to correct poor parenting. I do appreciate the issues your wife encountered but to imagine a Labour or any other government could address them is a fantasy.

@wasawas “oppressive maintenance costs” the problem with state maintained facilities are the hidden costs of paying state employee pensions etc People don’t factor this in when making a comparison private contract reflects that.

We’ll always keep the red flag flying in Hove

What the demographic/factors which keeps it Labour ? Brighton I kind of understand, my daughter and her husband live there and its a sort of protest vote, a chance to do something different at the ballot box.

It really isn’t the governments responsibility to correct poor parenting

The thing is that poor parenting leads to adults that fail and then cost us money in terms of prison and benefits.

I think Tories do it not out of caring but, as with all things, to save money.
Its short sighted as well as heartless [ not to mention the fact they lied]

ahwiles
I think many observers me included would say private education in the UK is generally superior to that provided by the state. Class sizes of 20 instead of 30+ just for one ?

jambalaya
i’d suggest the first thing we should compare would be the funding:pupil between state/private schools.

Wellington College, Berkshire (annual boarding fees: £30,075), occupies a 400-acre site for its 1,000 pupils. To bring every school up to that standard, we would need 3.6m acres, roughly the amount of UK land now occupied by houses and other buildings (from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/01/sport-britain-elite-privilege-schools)

How much do state schools cost per pupil by way of comparison?

To bring every school up to that standard

You think every school should be a boarding school?

In Camerons speech he talked about how poor social mobility is in this country. I can’t see anything that the Conservative party is proposing or doing will change this.

In 2012/13, I was involved in parent-led work with the local authority, to pressure them into increasing primary school places in our area. We gained a fair amount insight into their planning techniques as a result.

The most striking thing was that – because of the increasing number of academies – the council was clearly struggling to work out how to meet local needs for primary places and to make investment decisions. This is because of the entry of an increasing number of autonomous education providers, who aren’t tied to commitments such as providing an education for a certain geographic population: they simply operate in the best interests of their own organisation.

There is a sensible level of local planning that you hope that any colour of local government is able to sort out, which – on this evidence – it is clearly struggling to do… I hate to think how it now is in 2015, let alone what it’ll be by 2020.

Obviously my experience is limited, but it seems that smashing-up a single education provision body (LEA) and replacing it with lots of independent actors (academies) is a *very* inefficient way to allocate the education budget and solve problems like how to ensure that primary spaces are available in a given locality.

P.S. My father-in-law went to Wellington!

I’m not intrinsically against the whole academies concept, though it’s been rolled out in a fairly demented way. But what I see from local authorities, is scale and coordination. Eh, this is one of those posts that gets a bit too close to confidential so it’s intentionally vague…

Anyway, we work with a council which has been struggling, as do a lot, with maths and other stem attainment levels, so they’re working with the local universities and colleges (and companies, and tons of other stuff, but that’s not my thing). And some of this stuff would be really difficult to do with smaller groups- with 20 high schools, it’s realistic to set up schemes for kids from multiple schools that would be worthless for 3 or 4 schools, they have teacher exchanges, full-time liaison people, they’ve taken people out of teaching on secondment to work on strategic stuff. Tons going on. And we’re committing a level of resource to some of these projects that’d be completely unfeasible if we were dealing with 10 schools instead of 20. Or 5 providers instead of 1. Or, you know, profit makers- lots of wrinkles there.

Obviously, an academy chain can run multiple schools but unless they’re close to monopolies they’ll never have those… ah ****, I’m going to have to say “synergies” aren’t I. Yeah, them. It’s a combination of scale and locality which is always going to be hard to replicate outwith the state.

And just to state the obvious- these are things that benefit a larger number of kids. A well resourced or very effective academy could achieve a lot of this, or go in different directions, but it’ll only help “their” kids. It’s pretty hard to see any way that it doesn’t create new inequalities.

I think the thing is that there are some advantages to academies – because there are some things LAs do badly which can be improved if you break away from them. There are also cases where academies are vast improvements on what has gone before. The trouble is that as you identify there are a lot of things which do benefit from “economies of scale” in a very real way.

goto McSchool and get McEdukated.

anyway its all the fault of those pesky immigants.

The idea of LA-controlled schools is a myth, because they have devolved budgets and are run by the senior teachers and governors. LAs retain oversight, for example resolving poor performance, and provide services such as catering, buildings maintenance and HR.

All Cameron is doing is removing schools from the “shackles” of local democratic oversight.

In Camerons speech he talked about how poor social mobility is in this country. I can’t see anything that the Conservative party is proposing or doing will change this.

Really? I think they will make it much, much worse.

@JY I didn’t see any change under 10+ years of Labour. The “back story” of Caemrons comment that who your parents are makes the greatest difference in how you do is that the future of your kids is in very large part a parents responsibility. You’ll never reduce crime/prison etc to zero, spending money around the edges to try and change the attitudes if parents who don’t care about education is a waste of money. You provide the kids with the opportunity and dedicated teachers to try and enthuse them but ultimately it’s an individual’s choice

anyway its all the fault of those pesky immigants.

Well more kids requiring places at already stretched service is to going to make things better

Controlled immigration allows us to select the best and the brightest who will have the greatest positive impact on the UK economy.

anyway its all the fault of those pesky immigants.

Well more kids requiring places at already stretched service is to going to make things better

The newspapers in Germany are now saying that the 1m migrants they were expecting is now more likely to be 1.6m to 2m by the end of the next year, with a family factor of 4-8 people likely to follow in the years immediately after that. All of these people will have right of free movement in Europe so that’s the best part of 10m people who all need housing, health and schooling just from the “open door” in Germany alone.

The migrant debate is somewhat heated but the simple reality is that in Britain we already have many hundreds of thousands of families who do not have permanent, satisfactory or affordable accommodation. This situation is simply unacceptable as anyone familiar with the conditions of families living in poor accommodation will already know.

A further 6,000 net migrants are arriving in the UK every week – throw in the additional challenge of accommodating 20,000 refugees and another 80,000-160,000 of their immediate family members and it’s quite easy to see that our ability to build out new healthcare capacity, schools and housing will clearly not match demand. For those already living on the fringes of our society things will almost certainly get worse.

On housing alone we need to build in excess of 300,000 homes a year just to start addressing the backlog and catching up – that’s equivalent to a city the size of Newcastle on Tyne every 12 months which gives some indication about the feasibility of delivering this given constraints on land and the significant skilled labour shortages in the house building supply chains that will take years to address.

spending money around the edges to try and change the attitudes if parents who don’t care about education is a waste of money.

so if a kid has shit parents they’re basically screwed as it’s “a waste of money” to try and help them? Nice.

It really isn’t the governments responsibility to correct poor parenting. I do appreciate the issues your wife encountered but to imagine a Labour or any other government could address them is a fantasy.

wiki says GB announced surestart in 1998 so unless it was a tory idea that labour hijacked I guess they get the credit for it. surestart centres were very successful around our way, always very busy with parents and children from a variety of backgrounds, then under the coalition they got cut so only at risk or disadvantaged families could use them, now seemingly getting killed off completely, bad news IMO.

I think for the most part most things can be fixed,

unfortunately there is no profit in doing it, in fact the opposite.

= business as usual,

no point in arguing about it really

…carry on 🙂