Dogma? You want to counter dogma in education?
And how is reinstating selection into education anything other than dogma. If you want to remove the over-influence of the privately educated élite, you do not do it by replacing selection by finance and birth with one based on an exam at 11 years old.
This is not choice. Parents do not choose to send their child to a grammar school, the school selects the child. And at one moment in that child’s life. If a child is not at that point at 11, then they ‘fail’, irrespective of how they develop in the future.
This is not about choice, this is about the dogma of retaining the divisions in society. Of ensuring that the ‘tory’ aspirations are pandered to whilst ignoring the adverse effects this will have on the rest of population.
Why does it have to be on the basis of the creation of a new breed of excellent schools? Why is it not about the creation of all schools being excellent. Division, segregation, alienation will never do that.
There was a moment when, during your acceptance speech outside Number 10, you sounded like someone who was really interested in equality of opportunity. I was surprised, and not entirely convinced, but it made me pause – for a moment.
It didn’t last, because you are using political dogma to rule decisions. Overturning an intention of equality of opportunity within education is political dogma, of the worst sort. And you are using the country’s future as your bludgeon.
You have run the educational system for the last 7 years – a full secondary school life-cycle. You have exponentially expanded the academy / free school option, as well as endless tinkering with everything else. Do we take it that you are admitting that you have failed?
Are you saying that, we have fundamentally failed at moving the education system forward, so we will move it backwards?
In which case what is next for us to look forward to? As your changes to the Welfare State hasn’t produced the outcomes you hoped, can we look forward to the return of Workhouses?
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