| Topic: | Re:Re:Cuts to Schools Building Programme | |
| Posted by: | Adam Gray | |
| Date/Time: | 20/07/10 18:03:00 |
| Well, ok Suzanne but with respect that's a terribly bleak outlook. Do you believe in comprehensive education or a system of grammar schools and secondary moderns? Should schools from less affluent areas with lower attainment have resources targeted at them to give their pupils broadly the same life chances as those who go to public schools? How should places for secondary schools be allocated: by lottery, by catchment area, by fees or by selection? Is it more important to have a surplus of places to enable parents to choose schools more easily even though carrying surpluses is by definition wasteful and expensive? Is it right that Education Maintenance Allowance that helps students from the poorest backgrounds stay in education until 18 be axed by the Government while the tax exempt status for private schools is protected? Is it right that individual schools hold millions in their own reserves while there is an overall shortfall of spending on education? I'm just using those six examples not to start a debate on them but merely as issues where ordinary people - not Ed Balls and Michael Gove, but Putney parents, Putney students, Putney residents with any interest in education whatsoever - will take very different views and which it is right should be hammered out in the public realm. I feel pretty strongly about some of those questions - don't you? If yes, that's a political view you hold. You should have a means of being able to express that view given the amount you no doubt pay for state education through your taxes. You can't take politics out of education because those crucial issues are the crux of politics. Are you really saying that the community should be denied the right to decide for itself how those issues should be resolved through the only mechanisms available to us: elections, elected representatives and accountability? Of course, the way that debate is conducted matters and it should always be elevated above tit-for-tat yah-boo nonsense. But to say that those who fund schools should have no say whatsoever in how they operate is, to me, an undemocratic and worrying path to go down. |