Education

Education has traditionally been one of the main policy areas to come under public scrutiny at each general election.

We all want an education system that works, we all want an education system that allows for parental choice and the achievement of the individual.  We want a state education system that mirrors the private education sector - at least Mr Gove does - and yet we do not want to pay for it.

The fundamental issue currently affecting the UK's education system is that of commercialisation.  We have commercialised the examination system so that there is money to be made out of education and examination entries and achievements.

Education policy has been formulated following the whims of successive Secretaries of State and Ministers for Schools, without any regard for the wealth of educational and pedagogical research that already exists.

This is the system that we need to change.  We need to revisit our expectations and move away from an education system that believes 'one size fits all'.

We need to rethink the way we allow our children to be examined at the end of their secondary careers.

Currently there are a number of commercial organisations who sell their examination entries to schools, colleges and other providers.  Because schools are judged on their GCSE results, teachers and Heads of Departments will naturally gravitate towards those examinations with the highest pass rates.

This means that the standards are not truly comparable, and it is in everybody's best interests for learners to pass the examinations.  So what happens when learners do not pass the examinations?

The recent fiascoes over GCSE results and changes to GCSEs is what happens.

And how do we change the status quo?

The obvious answer is to remove the commercial aspect from the examinations system.  This means unbridling the way we measure a school's success from their examination results.

It means taking the examinations system out of the hands of the commercial organisations.

So here is the proposal:

1. All formal examinations funded through the EFA should be authored and administered by the regulator
2. Commercial awarding organisations will be given CRITERIA from which they will need to write a syllabus
3. Schools and providers will be able to pay for the syllabus and teaching and learning materials that they feel will best aid their learners
4. Each annual examination series is set based on the criteria - the examinations will be administered from start to finish by the regulator
5. GCSE examinations should be at the end of the two year study period - unless there are particular learning needs for which there needs to be a separate examination system

Secondary education cannot be a 'one size fits all' operation and although the comprehensive system went a long way to addressing the issues inherent in mixed ability teaching, it also threw out some interesting ideas from the previous system.

We have a current obesity dilemma and a generation of youngsters unable to prepare themselves a healthy meal.

What is the connection?  The removal of any kind of general domestic science class from the secondary syllabus.

We have a tranche of employers insisting that they do believe that GCSEs truly represent a learners ability and we have the apocryphal stories of learners who have achieved GCSE English at Grade C and cannot read and write to an acceptable level.

We have GCSE subjects that are examined via internal controlled assessments that are teacher marked and externally moderated, and multiple choice questioning.

What we should have is 'closed book' examinations that are externally set and marked.  Where a learner cannot be expected to achieve under these circumstances but can demonstrate skills and ability, then other examination methodologies can be introduced.

Special Educational Needs

It is particularly more obvious in schools, but there has been a gradual shift towards the 'mainstreaming' of those learners deemed to have certain 'special educational needs'.  These can be physical, mental an dpsychoolgical needs that make these learners more time consuming and labour intensive than other learners.

These needs can range from dyslexia and mild Aspberger's to quite severe physical and mobility limiting issues.

It has become the norm to remove these learners on the fringes of disability from specialist schools and other providers and place them in mainstream schools.

This is fine, provided the system is there to adequately support these learners, which it clearly is not.

In a specialist school, all members of staff receive at least the minimum basic training in dealing with the very different needs and difficulties of all of the learners in their care; specialist health care is onsite or nearby, including specialist mental health teams.

In mainstream schools, there is neither the time in the curriculum, nor the staffing levels to allow for the student to staff ratios required, nor the staff training, nor the fully trained staff and fully equipped space.

Education is something that all of these learners can only do once, and we should make sure that the way we design our educational system and the academic measures we use to judge them, cannot be a system that only benefits those in the mainstream.

There are inherent dangers in this kind of mainstreaming and we are possibly seeing the initial consequences -     if there are learners with identified learning difficulties within a group, then the teacher is forced to teach to the level of that learner, and not the level of the top of the class - we are no longer allowed to let the weakest fail.

The inevitable consequence of this is the 'dumming down' of the entire education system to ensure that the very weakest, who should actually be elsewehere where they can be better supported, do not fail, to the detriment of the gifted and talented who will succeed, in spite of their disadvantages.

This is inherently more unfair than the separation that we called marginalisation.  If learners require specialist attention, then we should remove them from the mainstream and concentrate the currently thinly spread specialist resources into smaller, specialist delivery centres.  We could thus relieve the current system of the expensive obligation of accommodating learners whose chances of success in this system are minimal.

Think I have an issue?  Look at the statistics: learners identified with particular special needs show higher levels of consistently higher achievement than those in mainstream education and those in mainstream education where there is currently no SEN provision demonstrate consistenlty higher GCSE grades across all subjects.

It doesn;t take a genius to work out that trying to mass cater to the varying needs of our young learners is failing those at either end of the spectrum.

A return to the more divisive, though more successful special needs education with the newer, fresher attitudes to disability and lifelong learning will provide better resutls for all of our learners - let's try it and see.