Coalition Education Policy

In May 2010....

One year on...


Practically every politician who ever drew breath has been convinced of his or her ability to transform our education system for the better; what was it Tony Blair said, ‘education, education….’ you know the rest. The sad reality is that few manage to do very little other than disrupt schools and confuse teachers.


For us, the Government’s education policy has been an unmitigated disaster from the first moment that Michael Gove stood at the dispatch box.


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Review of 2011: the Coalition’s Education policies fuel social segregation, promote unfairness and cause administrative chaos

During 2011, the Coalition’s Education policies started to impact directly upon the lives of teachers, pupils and parents: the first free schools opened; many secondary schools converted to academies; supporters of the government’s policies were put in key positions and cuts to education services led to thousands of redundancies with most local authorities seeing their education departments decimated. There was also a great many policies initiatives announced with promises of changes to the national curriculum and the examination system announced; however, we’ve yet to see these changes “on the ground”. A new reductive inspection framework is now, from January, in place. However, amidst all of this frenetic activity a few key things are emerging; points that are stressed again and again on this website but are worth re-iterating because they are so important. The Coalition’s policies are already having a negative impact upon schools and our society for the following reasons:



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If Michael Gove gets his way, more teenagers will fail their GCSEs and A-levels. Gove intends to make exam questions harder which will mean pass rates will fall after increasing every year for a decade. At GCSE level, coursework will be phased out and more emphasis placed on written tests. Modularisation will be ended and schools will return to linear, end of course assessment.
The Independent (22/2/12) quotes Gove on his intentions. He says that ‘Education is like trying to run up a down escalator’, strangely the same phrase we use in our book ‘Lost Generation? New strategies for youth and education’


http://radicaled.wordpress.com/review-of-lost-generation-new-strategies-for-youth-and-education/


For Gove ‘there will be years when, because we are going to make exams tougher, the number of people passing will fall. There are headteachers who have been peddling the wrong approach to teaching for too long, who are going to lose their jobs’
Unlike Gove, ‘we confront economic realities to show how the recession has intensified longer term changes in the relationship between education qualifications and the labour market. Even if there is a partial recovery, there will be a ratchet effect which will raise the bar to worthwhile employment at the same time as qualification inflation continues to devalue all qualifications with the effect that participating in education is like running up a down escalator.


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Thatcherism's long shadow...


Extract:
Coalition education policy threatens to transform the school system in England. A combination of public spending cuts, and the drive to making all schools Academies, represents a key moment in the restructuring of the education service along neo-liberal lines. This article argues that there is nothing distinctively 'new' about Coalition schools policy, but rather it represents a realisation of the '1988 project' to break up and privatise state education in England. What took a major step forward in the form of the 1988 Education Reform Act is now reaching its logical conclusion in Coalition policy. This article identifies how such policy threatens to finally secure the dismantling of a democratic system by replacing it with a state-subsidised free market. The article also sets out the possibilities for a 'coalition of resistance' to emerge, capable of interrupting this latest and decisive stage in neo-liberal reform.


A-Z Update on Coalition Education Policies