Blunderwall

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for New Labour’s own Agent Orange. First he is to be investigated for a late declaration of £100K in donations that apparently came from something called the Progressive Policies Forum (PPF), then he is ’supported’ by Gordon Brown who said Hain had be guilty of ‘an incompetance’. With the country’s most famous graffiti artist in the news this week I thought it fitting to make this week a ‘Bungsy’. There were some amusing variations on a theme for this weeks title but the BBC has certain standards to maintain.

Clinton down but not out

After victory in Iowa, the polls suggested Barack Obama was about to confine Hilary Clinton’s challenge for the Democrat Presidential candidacy to the political dustbin. How wrong they were and everyone who listened to them (me included) when Clinton swept to victory in New Hampshire to reel Obama back in. You’d think by now we’d have learned that the only poll that counts is the real one.

Democrats on the March - image courtesy of the BBC Politics Show, Barker Gallery

Fifth of schools below ‘GCSE par’ - more New Labour educational hypocrisy

According to the government:

Almost a fifth of England’s state secondary schools do not yet meet the government’s new “floor target” for GCSE attainment, league tables show.

In 639 schools, less than 30% of pupils got five good GCSEs including English and maths, the target for 2012.

Link

New Labour’s hypocrisy on education never ceases to amaze when it claims to want to improve standards. Would a political party remove the necessity of qualified teachers to lead classes as New Labour have done?

This government introduced a policy change very quietly a short time ago which meant that unqualified, unregulated and untrained people known as ‘cover supervisors’ could be called up and now go into classrooms and lead classes in the absence of a qualified teacher.

In every school in the country cover is required every day - that means if you have a child in State school there is a very good chance that they will had a lesson this week led by a person whose only qualification need be ‘a good command of English’.

So from the same government that believes there are ‘17,000 bad teachers’ in the UK I would like to ask just how many unqualified people are stood up in front of our children in our schools? And do they seriously believe that this will help raise standards?

Still think New Labour believe in ‘Education! Education! Education!’?