Bits and pieces

Over on my "Bench Hamlet 2008" blog, I am writing a personalised review of "Attempts On Her Life", last week's production of the Bench Theatre at Havant Arts Centre. I might send an edited version to go on the rehearsal blog of the show and perhaps to the Benchpress.
Here, I just wanted to vent my spleen at a couple of things that caught my eye this week. Both were to do with education, which still clings to me like an old familiar smell.
Firstly there was the Tesco CEO banging on about education standards of school leavers not being good enough. I am not sure what educational level is expected of a store replenishment assistant but what takes the biscuit as far as I am concerned is that this comes from a company, which like many others of its ilk, is finding ways to avoid paying tax in this country. Once upon a time tax avoidance was the domain of giant multi nationals but now even companies of the size of Tesco are doing the same. One figure I have seen quoted for the amount of tax thus avoided is £12 billion. That would be enough to build 50 new hospitals and would certainly be enough to invest in state education. The CEO will probably claim he is paying his own personal tax but companies like his are directing money away from this country. In education I constantly heard the expression, "you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it." You could solve a number of problems by looking closely at what the problems actually are and investing wisely to overcome them. Over 300 secondary schools are under-performing and there are probably as many reasons as there are schools. However there must be some generic problems.
Based on personal professional experience, a school with difficulties usually finds itself militated against. The inspection team arrives and identifies the fairly obvious faults in the system prevalent in the school. They report on these faults and publicise them. They then move on to the next school in the system. The school management and staff in the affected school are virtually left to drag themselves out of the trouble they are in. Wouldn't it be better if a team of dedicated specialist teachers (if such things exist?) moved in alongside the existing staff until such time as the school recovered to the standard expected? It may also be necessary to axe some of the current staff and replace them with more capable staff on a higher pay scale. The number of staff should be deliberately increased to improve immediately the chances of the children currently at the school. This would reduce the numbers in teaching groups and give the teachers more preparation time working alongside more experienced qualified staff. What usually happens in reality of course is that the inspection report causes an abandonment of the school by those parents and children who can move. This reduces the numbers on roll and staff is reduced accordingly as they are made redundant. It doesn't take much imagination to see that the ones who move voluntarily are the ones that can. None of this works in a free market capitalism based education system but it could if that £12 billion was used to improve buildings, resources and staffing because that is what the common good needs, not what the market demands.
The other point was exclusions. Apparently if a child is excluded from a private school, the fees are retained by the school as part of the contract entered into between the parent and the educational establishment. In the state system, if a child is excluded from a school, the funding for that child must be forwarded back to the local authority or on to the next school receiving that child. The original school is therefore penalised all the way round for excluding a child. I am not advocating that it should be made easy for children to be excluded, but rather it is usually followed by a lot of bureaucratic hand and arm waving in the air, accompanied by tutting noises, and basically total inaction. This helps neither the individual child or the school. The blame for the inaction usually is laid at the door of inadequate budgets provided for thos in authority. I did wonder again if some of that £12 billion in avoided taxes could have been used to take an excluded child from a state school and that the state then invests in a private education for that child. It might be cheaper for the state to do that in the long run, it would then have an investment platform in the "much better" private education system and the child would be given a true new start in life. Of course there are lots of flaws in this idea and perhaps the most glaring one is that unscrupulous parents might encourage their state educated children to misbehave in order to attain this "new start". As if parents have any responsibility for the behaviour of their children in school! What a socialist idea that is!
I read in the letters published in my local paper that we have a "socialist government". Which country do they live in and which century?