Labour education policy.... the mess gets worse....

Things the BBC has not reported.....

Over a period when education spending has rocketed in an unprecedented fashion and where average spend per pupil now exceeds £5,000.....

THE number of secondary schools being failed by Ofsted is continuing to rise, according to new figures published by the inspection service yesterday. There were 96 on Ofsted’s “special measures” list at the end of the Easter term, up two compared with the end of December.
Record numbers of UK parents are putting their children into private school. And this in spite of the substantial additional sums thrown at the public sector. The failure of London schools is highlighted by the fact that in London around 20 per cent of parents send their children to private school, nearly three times the national average.

LIBERAL Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said in April that he hopes to avoid the grief of finding a state school in London by educating his son in Scotland. This is one of the few sensible things Kennedy said during the UK election campaign.

Tony Blairs children attend the London Oratory (a Catholic only school). Luckily for the Blair children. On the standard measure of five or more grade A-C GCSEs passes, the Oratory scores 93%. Superb results. However, no worries if they aren't Catholic. There are lots of other schools in the London borough of Hammersmith and Fulham...... only minor snag is that the remaining schools score between 21% and 28%. Imagine if you were a parent.
So what's wrong with state education in England? Here is an example. A recent Commons MPs' report attacked the standard of reading. At age 11, it said, far far too many children do not achieve the reading and writing expected of their age. The MPs called for investigation into the use of phonics - the sounding out of individual letters to blend into words. Any sensible parent - and surely teacher - knows this is how you teach reading. Not so, says the grand National Literacy Strategy, set up in 1997. It prescribes memorising words by their shape and guessing at words by their context or the pictures with them - along with an element of phonics.

What can parents do? Err.... not a lot. Except those of us who go private (and get taught using a method that works - in my case the delightfully titled "Jolly Phonics").

The most recent comparison of international achievement, called the ‘world education league’ by the press, was the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) [ http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/63/34002454.pdf ] which gives figures for 41 countries in 2000 and 2003. Between those years, the UK dropped from fourth in science to 11th, from seventh in reading to 11th and from eighth in maths to 18th. However.....

..... scandalously the UK did not send enough data for the study. It was THE ONLY OECD country to fail in this regard and the ONLY Country (out of 41) to do so. As a result of which the UK Government has been able to deny the drop has any validity. This is even when suspicion is clear that it was the best schools that sent in their results and so the UK performance in comparison to our international competitors is probably even worse. It is also suspicious that the government made no attempt to rectify this situation, odd when the report would have been published just before the election to no doubt inform the electorate of the Labour governments educational achievements.