The marching morons - Embedding privilege into education

Robert Henderson

Blair's latest wheeze to distract the electorate from his war crimes
and
abridgements of our ancient liberties is a fundamental change to the
state education system. He proposes that not only shall all state
schools be freed from LEA control but that they shall be able to
decided
their own admission policies and to a large extent their curricula.

Freeing schools from LEAs is a sound enough move because they have been
an ideological and administrative millstone around the neck of schools,
pushing both the destructive progressive educational agenda and wasting
a great deal of money which should have been spent on education through
ridiculous empire building and gross administrative interference with
schools. In addition in some cases councils have siphoned off money
from
educational budgets. This will now stop because the money will go
directly to schools from central government.

The downside is this. Local democratic will be removed and the power
of
central government over education greatly increased,. However
independent schools are supposed to be you can bet your life on
measures
to withhold funds from schools which do not play the NuLabcur game will
be put in place.

Removing the LEAs and giving schools control of their budgets will
also
increase the opportunities for corrupt practice ranging from the
drawing
of absurdly high salaries by heads, nepotism and cronyism in staff
appointments and outright fraud. If bursars are employed they have
great
opportunities for the last. A strict system of auditing needs to be put
in place and enforced. It is doubtful if this will happen.

More fundamentally, the system as it is proposed will simply entrench
the educational divisions which are already pretty deep. More
middleclass parents will turn to fee paying schools and the better
state
schools will become ever more the preserve of the children of
articulate
middle class parents who know how to play the system.

What is being proposed is more divisive than the old grammar-secondary
modern-technical school split set up by the 1944 Education Act and
demolished gradually in the sixties and seventies. That system was far
from perfect because it consigned a majority of pupils to schools which
had little of the academic about them and low expectations for their
children. But the grammar schools did provide a route out of poverty
and shallow horizons for the bright working class child.

That a supposedly Labour government should be proposing such a
divisive
measure is an indication of exactly how far Blair has corrupted his
party.

What should be done? Set fairly broad catchment areas and let parents
apply for the schools they want and then choose the pupils by lottery.
That is the only fair way. RH 26 10 2005

--
Robert Henderson
Blair Scandal website:  http://www.geocities.com/blairscandal/
Personal website:  http://www.anywhere.demon.co.uk