In light of my dislike of covering the King.com Candy Trademark Saga, Nintendo sinking like the Good Ship Busted Hull or Microsoft’s suffering from delusions of authority, I have decided to cast the Story-net into waters that are actually near and dear to my heart: the continued collapse of the British scholastic system at the hands of a deflated latex wendigo.
A quick description of the British education
system; it used to (in theory) look like this, a simple
robust system, however, with the inefficacy of teaching equipment and the lack
of proper measures for special needs students caused the overall standard of
learning to plummet. As a result, the Department of Education started to build
new sections and courses and alternate learning methods that it now looks
something like this. As you
can see, it resembles more a bingo card than anything else, and that has led to
great debate: one side wanting to go back to the good old days of milk and
honey and the other thinking the new system is perfect in its complexity.
Michael Gove is a unique choice in
that he is of neither camp; in fact, he has no documented experience in
educational policy,
so he was given the position with the most clout in the field. His policy
changes have caused much controversy; especially his proposed reforms to GCSE and A-Level courses,
and their possible
disastrous results
for students that do not perform well under exam conditions.
Today, Mr. Gove announced yet another
initiative: that of bringing down the “Berlin Wall” between state
and private schools.
One of the means of doing this, he believes, is to institute entrance exams
into state schools for 13-year-old students.
The move seems about as ill
received as any of his other proposed reforms, such as the planned removal of
the current grading system that has boosted student performance across the
board, especially amongst primary school teachers who are also preparing to
have their salaries
and bonuses directly linked to the performance of the students they teach, all in
the name of improving standards of state schools to a private school level.
The shocking thing is, teachers
themselves have already suggested another reform that Gove has curiously not
commented on which is almost sure to increase the performance of schools on
average, an increase in the number of teaching jobs and schools to educate
children. This is based on the opinions of in-classroom teachers and TA’s who
follow a simple logic: the average classroom size is 27-30 students, if you
double the number of teaching staff, it would half the class size and
approximate the size of a private school classroom. As a result, teachers can
give the students the attention they need to function at a private school level
(ignoring the fact that state schools have a much higher concentration of
special needs students than their private counterparts).
This has led many in the education
profession to call into question Mr. Gove’s capacity to produce effective
reform. I await news that will hopefully answer the first question that popped
into my head upon hearing of these exams:
“What if they fail?” Updates will
be incoming, hopefully.
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