'There has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession'

I, and many others loved this letter. As they say, He is only saying what others are thinking.

       but don't have the courage.

'There has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession' - one primary head's open letter to his MP

Colin Harris

8th October 2015 at 17:40

 

This week, Colin Harris, headteacher at Warren Park Primary School in Havant, Hampshire, received a letter from his local MP offering to visit the school. Mr Harris wrote the open letter below in response.

Dear Sir,
Thank you for your letter dated 2 October offering to visit Warren Park Primary School.
Unfortunately, I have real reservations about such a visit on several levels.
Under the coalition government and ongoing to the present time, there has been an unprecedented attack on our wonderful profession. I have worked for and supported this profession for the last 37 years in what I hope is considered to be a successful way.
Under Mr Gove [the previous education secretary, Michael Gove], we saw the rise of divisive policies which ensured we created true isolation for teaching. These policies have led to thousands of teachers wanting to leave teaching with little hope of replacing either their number or their quality and experience.
My views on academies, free schools, lack of funding, assessment, Ofsted, pay rises, curriculum reform and the demise of local authorities will, of course, be different to yours. However, does it really matter? We have no forum to actually get people to listen to us, as we are now a true political football to be knocked around for the pleasure of both the media and the government at the expense of the future of our children.
I for one am fed up with it and so thank you for showing an interest, but I have to decline the visit until such time as the government really and truly cares about the future of education.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Harris,
Headteacher

Education Proposal is Unrealistic and Bonkers

Letter: Education proposal is unrealistic and bonkers

Published on the 31 May
2013
09:26

Published 31/05/2013 09:26

 

I am surprised that the YEP started its account [front page 23 May] of the latest scheme to destabilise education in Leeds, with the words ‘Ambitious plans’.

At the very, very least it should read ‘Over-ambitious’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘undemocratic’, or ‘bonkers’. Who do they think they are: this consortium?
This new establishment is one of three such free schools planned for Doncaster, North Lincolnshire and Leeds, so no given local knowledge then.
Originally the plan was for a 3 to 19-aged school, but DfE has only approved the establishment as a secondary school, so whatever the previous philosophy had been, it will be no longer.
The spokeswoman claims that “Our Alternative Provision Free School will...seek to reengage our most challenging and vulnerable students between the ages of 3 and 19...”
Did no one tell her that wasn’t going to happen?
Free schools are, but have no right to be, state-funded. If someone has a genuine alternative educational policy, by all means let them set one up, and for those parents who understand the score.
But not at our expense, not in competition with and at the expense of increasingly cash-strapped local schools and their supportive local authority.
The headline says this school is “backed by ministers”. Of course it is. Trashing local education authorities is the name of the Gove game.
Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, Leeds 6

 

Dear Mr Gove . . .

I wrote this letter to TES in May. They printed some of it. Here it is in full:

Dear Editor

I woke up one day last week to hear the BBC World Service telling me that a Lib Dem was going to be Minister for Eh. Eh? What was that? Education? Sadly no, It was Eh for Energy. So we still have that nice cove of a Gove, I guess, for Education.

Mr Gove is keen to let parents get together to form and run schools of their own. Will this be in their spare time, I wonder? Will they not need some type of a training to be able to do this? I spent years at Uni preparing to be a teacher. I found it all very helpful.

But, Michael, you don‘t need to go to all this expense, take all the chances when amateurs think they know how to run a school, and you have to worry about it not working out, like that school in Surrey [your own constituency, I believe] where the local authority had to step back in and take over again.

Parents’ schools are already here. It’s called home schooling. Groups of parents can get together, and hire in tutors as and when; then when their offspring are safely at Oxbridge, they can leave it to the next generation of parents to pick up the baton for their own kids.

Or you could do what most parents with a bit of cash do now. Let their kids go to school with the local riff-raff, then hire in private tutors to cover any subjects that they feel need extra time on. [Eighteen years ago, I earned a packet, briefly, as a private tutor to five GCSE students of Russian at a local high school. That school was covered in league table glory, whereas my own school, in much poorer area, got closed two years later]

One big advantage also of going to a real school is that they meet some real people [aka riff-raff] at said local school before they get to be government ministers and have to rule over us,.

Victoria Jaquiss FRSA, Russian graduate, teacher, blogger, parent, school-governor, writer, band-leader, part-time saver of the world, riff-raff and ex-private tutor