You don’t say if you are primary or secondary.

If you’re secondary, how many pupils fail to get passed the 5 GCSE hurdle?

Then under the new system, you get the cash, and you pay the LA if you think its worth it.

However, lots of schools will decide that the money is better spent on teaching, rather than administration.

So under the new system, you still get the cash, you still spend on the admin not teaching as you do now.

For other schools, the result is more cash on teaching.

Then if my other proposal, of 50% of the cost of educating a child goes in education vouchers to the parents removing their children from your school, to go private, means you get the other 50% to spend as you see fit – admin or teaching.

So 10% from the LA, plus lots of 50%s from anyone deciding they can get a better education elsewhere.

[Pick your own number for the 50%. Could be 90% and you still get money for not teaching a child]

I’ve been on the finance committee for a local school for a while, and from my experience the money that the LA keeps covers a bunch of non value add stuff (HR, Legal etc) and some useful things like mandatory training for teachers and governors. Could we save money by doing it ourselves? Maybe, but we’d save very little and it would add a bunch of headaches.

From what I’ve seen (I’m now chair of governors and we’ve just had a Good OFSTED rating) the negatives would outweigh the positives for our school if we broke with the LA.

No it doesn’t.

10% comes from the spending by Local authorities. That’s a major increase.

Next, if you pay 50% of the spending (3K out of 6k) to parents as a voucher, if they take their child out of the state education system. So what does this do for the state system. For each child taken out, that is 3K extra for the other children. For those taken out, they will get a better education – pay more tax etc.

So there is lots of money available.

However, the left constantly fight against it. The reason is that jobs for those in LA will go. They would rather have the money for themselves, than for children’s education.

All this requires investment though into more resources, where would you get these resources from taxation?

Ah that old chestnut.

Lets wait until the end, and then test. By which time, its too late. Kids have been failed, because they are functionally illiterate without getting passed the extremely low ‘aspiration’ of 5 GCSEs.

There needs to be annual testing at a minimum, in a way that excludes the teacher. It’s needs to be objective and not subjective. It needs to be standardized between one cohort, and between successive cohorts. Exams are the best system for this.

For technical subjects, art, music, technology, then clearly you have also to include project work. However, even music is exam based, so you can test those too.

Now I expect that to be heresy to teachers at the schools that are failing their pupils. However it does give kids the experience of exams, and it gives early warning as to the kids being failed.

What is needed is for the teaching profession to wake up. They have failed lots of kids awfully. Since they haven’t changed, change needs to be forced on them,

What I also suggest is that Gove changes the ranking of schools. In particular the triage system of teaching to exams where the good are ignored, the complete failures are ignored and all the effort expended in the marginal.

By changing to a points based, where an A scores more than a B, than a C, … and averaging the points per child, its in the schools interest to expend effort on all children, and its hard to fudge the numbers.

Yet you have not said what percentage of children fail under other systems?Acadamies exclude troubled kids (automatic failure) and decides which peoples they have reducing the chances of children with learning difficulties getting a good education (another failure).

Have you considered part of the problem is learning styles, if I give you a maths paper written in latin on a different base level of maths say 8 would that mean you are a failure if you do not complete it?

The answer is no, the touble is the system is to set up around final papers, when not every student is academically bright, but bright in other ways and skill sets suchh as hands on etc, these skills are something that are hard to measure and something we should try to include in the education system.

24% of all pupils have been failed by the state. Without those 5 GCSEs (and what a low target that is), after 80,000 pounds worth of spending, they are functionally illiterate to do much in a modern society.

Now, that’s an average. What that means for the statistically illiterate like Ofsted and Bush, is that there are schools who are well below that level.

So if you think money solves all, here are some suggestions.

1. 10% of school spending ends up in charges to the LAs. How about removing schools from LA control, which means they get 10% extra to spend on pupils?

Ah yes, can’t increase spending in that way because Gove’s doing that. Gove’s a tory and anything a tory does is evil. Plus we would lose our jobs. Can’t have that can we. Bugger the kids so long as we’re employed.

2. Vouchers. You get 50% of the states cost of educating your child, if you educate them privately. That leaves 50% of the money for the state to use on spending the remainder. The money spent per pupil goes up by 3,000 pounds for every kid that leaves.

So what are the objections to that one? Lets see the one’s I’ve heard.

Private education is evil.

The middle class will leave, and that means the state gets all the basket cases.

Profit is evil.

If the money leaves, how we will be paid a pension?

…

3. How about some equality?

Each and every school gets a per head amount to spend. If they want to spend it with the LA, 10% of spending, they can.

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What school you go to determines your future

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Agreed. If you end up at one of those average schools, where 76% scrape 5 GCSEs, run by the state, [Are you one of them?} you are pretty much screwed for life.

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Ah, the evil teaching unions. Because it’s so easy to negotiate pay and conditions with corporate private sector bosses ON YOUR OWN, isn’t it

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And where are the kids in that? Where are the people who have to pay for it all? Not on the radar.

You need to face up to the damage that schools do to the life chances of kids. These are state schools, and its state schools that are screwing their pupils over.

5 GCSEs for only 76% means 24% are condemned to low skilled low paid work. That’s the evil.

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Most state school teachers are interested (sadly) in IKEA furniture, football and cookery programmes on telly.

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That’s one of the causes.

The 76% relates to 5 A*-C GCSE grades, not the number who got some grades and the rest who did not. Not perfect, but don’t expect results to shoot up any time soon. Anyway, the important point is that this WENT UP and it did so with the kind of govt. spending that would never have happened under a Tory administration.

Gove’s spending (and his OVERSPEND of a £1bn) has been on bribing schools to become academies or on free schools, not on improving provision. We need better training for teachers of special needs and FAR MORE of them. But Gove is not interested in special needs. They don’t exist, to him.

LEAs distribute money to schools based on per head numbers. Discretionary spending went to schools with more pupils on free school meals. In Gove’s world the market would determine spending on schools, not on the needs of pupils. Both schools have 1000 pupils but in different catchment areas? So what, the company decides that they both get the same. That’s the market.

Education isn’t some money-making scheme for LEAs. It is a core function of local government and what local government should be about. It’s like saying, IDS could get more money if state pensions weren’t creamed off by pensioners. For obvious reasons, state education was not designed to be controlled centrally. Local children, local schools, local solutions. Not the big boss man in London.

The tax-payer funded private model costs big bucks to maintain, not least because the ‘state’ becomes a (willing) captive of the market. Look at the water industry. The water companies are essentially owned by hedge funds or other private equity providers. The water company and your bill is their cash-cow funding, to be distributed God-alone knows around the world. This money disappears from the British economy, as do the taxes that they should be paying here.

This is almost the model being used in health now and will be the model for Gove’s new-look public/private model. I say almost, because it will be your taxes that will be redirected into the pockets and offshore tax havens of education companies. Big profits, big bonuses, big tax avoidance; smaller salaries for teachers, fewer training opportunities, less money on actual education for children. Any increases in spending will be at the behest of the companies and will be lauded as good for education, but will be about swelling their bank balances. OK, Britain is hardly democratic, but this is simply government by corporation.

The introduction of the market will bring instability and risk into the sector. Think of what happens in football. New head teachers every year,replacing management and teaching staff, kids get different teachers every term, are they trained, who knows?

The private system of education, especially the big ‘Public’ Schools, are the cradles of ideology! What else but ideology could explain the grip that these schools have on the strings of power, political, social and economic? Like, for ever! Was it not Wellington who said that Waterloo was won “on the playing fields of Eton?” Actually, it was won by men who had never been to school and could not read or write. But that’s British history for you. What school you go to determines your future, no matter how good or bad the education. ‘They’ (the elite) have their schools, which offer a fast-track to wealth and power. Changing Bogsworth High to the Lord Carpetright Free Enterprise Academy will not change this one iota.

Most state school teachers are interested (sadly) in IKEA furniture, football and cookery programmes on telly.

Ah, the evil teaching unions. Because it’s so easy to negotiate pay and conditions with corporate private sector bosses ON YOUR OWN, isn’t it? And ALL headteachers are kindly souls, who would never resort to bullying their own staff, would they? It’s not as if teachers have some of the highest rates of suicide amongst professionals, is it, or the highest death rates amongst newly retired professionals? Oh, they do. If the actions of a union stop at least one person from feeling that they have nowhere to go but suicide because of the actions of Offsted or a tyrannical head, then I say good.