Education, Poverty, and the Uselessness of a Gove

Any Questions was debating education, and why everyone was supposed to aspire to a university education.

How right the speaker was who said that this country does not properly value the non-academics! What use academia if it produces the likes of Gove? And for that matter, why are 50% of population being steered into a university life? For what possible purpose? For many, a life of under-achievement?

Finally the Any Questions' panellists are waking up to the small question of he effects of poverty on people's educational achievements. But they are not quite there yet. 

And while they get there, Gove and his successors will go on pointlessly closing the good schools who are working wonders in poor areas, giving them to, of all things, private businesses run by rich people who have even less idea about disadvantaged children than the government, and certainly a lot less than the teachers who presently care for them. 

And while the institutions that Adonis, Balls and Gove call "academies" manipulate their admissions and force feed the borderline kids Cs, their rejects fill up the inner city schools who are then rubbished by Ofsted and uploaded onto the Walls of Shame. 

The point yet to be understood is that the inner-city areas often include most cities' immigrant families, and some of these children will not be ready for a meaningful GCSE exam at the same age as the native monoglot or bilingual English speakers. This regime of League tables encourages schools to push all children to take exams at the same age, irrespective of their years' experience and knowledge of the subjects studied; irrespective of their emotional and mental health. Then they are let go, their usefulness over once they pass 16 years old.