Attacks on young people who have found work and are establishiong themselves in life, by the New Labour government and its ministers, are reprehensible. Dressing up nearly twelve years of failure to offer decent education and employment opportunities to ordinary people as a conspiracy by the bourgeoisie to favour its own is letting their failed social policies escape censure.
Forty percent of children leaving primary school last summer could not read and write, or undertake simple mathematics. Other lacks in their level of instruction and achievement reflect this. These children, who have entered secondary school unable to profit from the teaching offered there, were born in the year New Labour came to power. New Labour had a full parliament before they arrived in their first year of primary school. They were let down utterly. Let down by much more than just the schools they have attended. And others are following them, year after New Labour year, suffering as badly.
New Labour social policies in housing, health, child care, economic policies in industry and employment, as well as the sociocultural attitudes championed and increasingly enforced, destroyed stability in the home lives of the children born at such an unfortunate time. Let me be very clear, stability can be found in all sorts of family structures; and it is stability, not the form of the family, that enables children to grow in confidence and advance in knowledge without having to put their energies into surviving upheavals beyond their control or understanding.
Stability gives social and intellectual poise. Not wealth. And gaining such poise is helped by using social funding to provide social resources, rather than means - tested welfare for individuals contorted by the need to attract benefits. Significantly it is the children of stable families, in work, without need of welfare, who are the objects of the vicious criticisms published recently on improper influence and network advantage being the source of their well being. Such well-being so improperly attributed to wealth and nothing else.
New Labour has gone too far in much, but it is beyond the pale in blaming its failures on children.
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5 comments:
Interesting HG, but none of that explains what primary school teachers (who I assume are/were themselves able to read, write and do simple sums) were doing during the children's first five years or so of formal education. Were they deliberately instructed not to actually teach all these basics? What on earth were these useless people being paid for - and perhaps more to the point, why were parents not thumping a few desks in outrage before the rot really had time to settle in?
agree with nomad.
primary schools have been well provisioned in terms of infrastructure and resources. certainly any primary school teacher who has stayed in the job for the past ten years has also been extremely well re-numerated compared to days gone by, not quite as well as GPs mind! we havent heard a peep from the likes of the NUT or NASWUT for ages have we? so shouldnt we hold them accountable?
by the way, is it possible to substantiate these claims that tens of thousands of kids cant read or write?
by the way, is it possible to substantiate these claims that tens of thousands of kids cant read or write?
Yes. As well you know. Try googling Colin Richards literacy numeracy uk primary schools - you know, that sort of thing.
Pretending doesn't make things go away.
Nomad, the problem seems to be the notion of 'formal education'. That is no longer what schools do, as was exemplified by the woman in Sheffield claiming she wouldn't call the school of which she is, heaven help them, the head, because it had 'negative connotations'. This woman announced that the school was 'a place of learning'. Which seems a bit previous for a normal primary school intake. Places of learning tend to expect command of considerable intellectual and technical skills very rarely mastered by the very young.
Perhaps she meant learning to pay attention, speak, eat with a knife and fork, like others, co-operate, go about unarmed with knives, wear appropriate clothes and generally be pleasant to be with.
As you know.
It must be a horrible job being a primary school teacher in many parts of England. Reviled, abused, expected to mend inestimable and ongoing damage with what? Money. Newmania has posted often on the uselessness of throwing more money at schools. The damage lies elsewhere.
no ones is pretending everythings ok, just as no one should believe the barbarians are at the gates.
I feel that there is a cycle thats needs to be broken and to set future generations free - regardless of background, class or wealth. Maybe such change cant be wrought by government but rather by communities?
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