Tom Pride here lists some of the Tory reforms and attitudes that are destroying just about everything that educational reformers achieved during the 19th century in order to create a better school system that allows children to develop to develop their talents, rather than automatons that learn everything by rote.
This list of malign and retrograde Tory policies includes the prejudiced – Toby Young’s view that disabled children shouldn’t go to school alongside the able-bodied, the needlessly disciplinarian – banning redheads until they dye their hair a more natural colour, putting those children who didn’t have the right school uniform in isolation, to the real core Tory policy of privatising education outright.
This all seems to follow from the Tory belief that private enterprise is the only successful way to raise standards in organisations, as well as allowing themselves and their donors to purchase potentially lucrative sectors of the state. Justifying this is the nostalgia for grammar schools. This is largely unspoken, except in the case of UKIP, who have made their return one of their policies. It is there, nevertheless. When Thatcher began taking schools out of the control of the local education authorities under the guise of giving them more autonomy, the head of the headmasters’ union praised the programme for creating a sector of independent state schools like the previous grammar schools.
As for using unqualified teachers, this also comes from two attitudes in the British right. The first is the populist attitude that anyone can teach, and that the years of specialist training teachers go through is somehow merely left-wing indoctrination that makes them totally unprepared or unsuitable for teaching children the real skills that society needs and values.
Back when Thatcher and Major were in power there were schemes to introduce ‘chartered’ teachers. These were trainees, who effectively learned on the job, supervised by qualified teachers. There were also plans to allow people to teach, who had years of experience but lacked the necessary academic qualifications.
The other factor behind all this is cost. Teachers with a teaching qualification have put years into learning their trade, as well as racking up a considerable student debt. They are therefore in a stronger position to demand proper wages and conditions commensurate with their qualifications. Those who don’t have them, are in a somewhat weaker position, and can therefore be sacked more easily, and offered lower wages.
This last is the crucial point. The privatised parts of the state can only be run at a profit, if wages and conditions for the people working in them, rather than the managers and senior staff, are low. And as the Tories believe that wages should be kept to the barest minimum anyway to keep the proles in their place, this is effectively one of the major reasons for guiding the Tory privatisation of British schooling and their attempts to undermine teachers’ professional status.
(not satire – it’s Tory Britain!)
The Tories are rapidly taking us back to Victorian times in many ways – not least in our schools.
First of all they openly say that children in wheelchairs shouldn’t have the right to attend school:
Tory spokesman Toby Young thinks disabled children should be excluded from schools
And they’re excluding pupils with red hair:
Redhead banned from school just weeks before her A-levels
They’re even putting young children in forced isolation because their parents have dressed them in the slightly ‘wrong’ school uniform:
Ex-prison head puts 100s of children in isolation
And Tory Education ministers have clearly never spoken to any 4-year-olds, or they would have realised just how stupid their decision was to force toddlers to sit formal exams:
This may not be Cameron’s worst policy – but it’s definitely his stupidest
The Tories are also openly handing lucrative state school assets over to their donors:
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