dumb dumb dumber

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

where the controller leads with populism in this society is not worth going to .... the real challenge is not audience size, but the state of culture and knowledge in the UK ... this is a much wider challenge than R3 but it is one which R3 should face up to and not push to be the first among the lemmings of British populist culture

imho it is not that the establishment in politics education &c have surrendered to populism but that they have willed it as a necessary part of the neoliberal agenda that requires stupid consumers and electorates ...

some forty years ago i met a Trade Union activist, a draughtsman, who was arguing then that the mindfulness of work was being eradicated in major UK corporations .... how prescient he was ....

it still makes my spine shudder that Estelle Morris cancelled the requirement for foreign languages at GCSE because of truancy rates .... see her own A Level progress and see the graun for further dispiriting news

those who moan that education standards have declined in Britain are correct, according to the OECD.

see Peston's commentary


the decline has been too long in the making and cuts across too many changes of government to see this as a party political or left/right issue; imv it is much deeper than that .... but class and history do have their parts in our downfall ...

in the meantime how welcome it is to see the new DG arguing for the Information and Education values in the BBC mission ... let us hope that both he and the Controller of R3 can live up to it ...

[gurnemanz]

The Grauniad link re Modern Languages is truly depressing. It confirms worst fears that language teaching provision is gradually losing its critical mass and becoming inviable. Aeolium has also linked to it today in the thread I started on this subject. The article does point to a tiny ray of hope: "There are snippets of good news. Entries to GCSE and A-level Chinese are up". Alas, even if GCSE numbers may be slightly up, no consequent rise in A Level or degree course participation is guaranteed - too little, too late.

The general findings of the report seem to be in line with similar trends in the gap between rich and poor in the UK. The elite end of our education system may be excellent, but the lower ranks are generally badly catered for.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

some years back i was involved in research on small to medium firm performance .... the excellence of a few was followed by a large tail of low performance .... it may be a national tendency to just fail in the main with one or two spots of excellence ... as far as i know schools follow the same distribution

Broadly speaking, The UK is mid-table overall in most international rankings of schools. But one major failing in the UK education system is the ‘long tail’ of poorly performing schools and pupils compared with other countries, particularly at the secondary level. A significant part of the explanation for this is the stubborn link between pupils’ socio-economic background and their educational attainment. Part of the problem is that while current funding arrangements give more resources to local authorities in areas with more disadvantaged children, the evidence suggests that these resources fail to reach them effectively. The recently introduced ‘pupil premium’ is an attempt to attach additional funds directly to disadvantaged children but survey evidence suggests that schools generally still do not use these funds specifically to help disadvantaged pupils.