The reason that we’ve had these below inflation pay agreements is because we’ve shown no inclination to strike. The right to strike should mean that no one should ever need to strike, however when an employer is negotiating in a manner where by the right to strike is being ignored( in this case as they did not believe that teachers would ever have the inclination to strike) a strike is necessary to ensure that all future negotiations proceed in such a way as to mean we won’t need to strike for another 20 years or so. The thing that confuses me is how the Prime Minister doesn’t understand this, as he used Game Theory to devise the bidding for the 3G mobile contracts, and the strike theory is also an off shoot of Game theory…. oh well.

The government attitude to state education is like its
attitude in other areas of public provision. It prefers
centralised bureaucratic control rather than trusting the
professionals who do the work. The result is interference
in what should be taught, how it should be taught and
assessed, an obsession with paperwork and vain attempts
to raise standards by means of league tables and
performance targets.

While many state schools have managed to maintain
standards despite this regime, many more have not. There
is poor discipline because there is no apparent penalty for
bad behaviour, teachers are demoralised because there is
too much prescription about how to do the job, too much
paperwork and too much time spent child-minding instead
of teaching. Examinations have been degraded to maintain
the pretence that education is working well, and too many
young people leave school without even basic standards
of literacy and numeracy.

Give more autonomy to our state schools, to allow
teachers freedom over how to teach and what they
want to cover outside the curriculum. Leave schools
to organise their own intermediate testing: Standard
Aptitude Tests must go.

Leave the decision to exclude unruly pupils to the
headteacher without allowing governors, parents or
bureaucrats to compromise this authority. Provide
sufficient specialised facilities for excluded pupils.
Encourage schools to specialise in technical or
academic disciplines and allow limited selection of pupils.

If your school isn’t closing you could, however, call in sick … but of course I wouldn’t recommend anything as unprofessional as that.

My argument is not about the greatness of OFSTED or league tables (although I do think some form of accountability is inevitable) my point is that no serious political party in England is going to be able to sell the idea that there should be less information about schools available to parents, no matter how much teachers call for a black out. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland might well be different but I certainly have strong memories of the (pre-Blair) Labour Party being ripped apart on this issue.

I agree that targets often leave schools focusing on just one or two things,. However, an absence of targets is unlikely to result in a sudden improvement in focus.

Humm, got to disagree here oldandrew. OFSTED is more about ensuring compliance with whatever the current government diktat is for ‘good teaching’ than any other purpose. Wales has completely abolished league tables and no one is complaining there about a sudden drop in standards, and voters / parents aren’t demanding their return.

Targets skew education into narrow funnels prioritising the few, (’boosters’) at the expense of the many.

Behaviour is, of course, an issue. But there are others.