Tagged with Education

What is the National Policy Forum Doing? The Case of Education

angelaraynerlabconf3The National Policy Forum (NPF) is the body where Labour Party Policy is developed (or so the LP Rulebook tells us). It presents reports to Labour’s Annual Conference each year and these are supposed to be the basis for Labour’s next election manifesto. The first thing to be said is that, if the talk within Labour of getting into gear for an early general election is sincerely meant, then it would have appear not to have reached the ears of the organisers of the NPF or its constituent Policy Commissions.

After 6 years of onslaught on our education service in which the majority of secondary schools have been ripped out of the sphere of local democracy to become state-funded independent institutions, a period in which teacher training has been undermined and in which great strides have been made towards various forms of privatisation of education, what does Labour have to say in response? Continue reading →

Grammar schools do nothing to promote social mobility

MorganLast week it was announced that the first new grammar school in a long time is to be opened in Kent. It’s using a loophole in the law by claiming that it’s really an expansion of an existing school – even though they’re nine miles apart. Apparently, in order to prove it’s one school, kids will have to be bussed backwards and forwards.

This is being presented as an unusual one-off event which doesn’t mean Tory policy is changing. According to Nicky Morgan “I don’t want to fight the battles of selective and non-selective… This is one particular application with one particular set of circumstances. Why would I deny a good school the right to expand?” Continue reading →

Academies and Free Schools – A failed experiment in education

PowellAs of June 2015 there are over four thousand academies in England. Originally introduced by New Labour back in 2000 in order to support failing schools in socially deprived areas, academies have long since remained a controversial topic. Touted by governments as the miraculous magic answer to improving standards and loathed quite rightly by teaching unions opposed to their undemocratic nature and the neo-liberal free market approach they are constructed around. ‘Academies equals success’ has been the long repeated mantra for many years now, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is the only approach to education and LEA controlled state schools have been an all-round epic failure, yet statistically does this add up? Continue reading →