The People’s Parliament organised by John McDonnell MP recently held a meeting on education under the title Re-thinking schooling: class & education. The panel of speakers included Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the NUT and Diane Reay, a Cambridge university sociologist specialising in questions of class. The contributions were excellent and were followed by an hour long discussion with questions and points coming from the audience. You can find a report of the meeting and audio files of the main contributions on the website of the Socialist Educational Association (SEA).
Frustration with Labour’s policies on education and a lack confidence in Tristram Hunt were both evident in the contributions of virtually everyone (panel and audience) who spoke about them. It was mentioned more than once that the only party with educational policies anywhere near matching what most campaigners for inclusive and comprehensive state education want is the Green Party. Some members of the audience even said that they had left the Labour Party because of its abandonment of progressive educational ideas and policies along with its embrace of neo-liberal marketising concepts. Continue reading
Gove and his right-wing Tory allies, such as the Daily Mail, earnestly desire to re-introduce selection , but know that if they did so straightaway in one leap they would court a whirlwind of resistance. So he’s adopted the next best thing – phasing out GCSE which was designed for Comprehensives and bringing back the Certificate of Secondary Eduacation (CSE) for ‘less intelligent’ children, as was used in the secondary moderns of the 1950s. The ultimate goal is obvious: the resurrection of the old grammar school/secondary modern divide. 