Another Balls up from New Labour

Far be it from me to agree with a man who talks to plants but from time to time the Prince of Wales speaks an awful lot of sense. His concerns about Ed Balls’ latest wacky scheme to reform primary school education should be taken very seriously indeed.

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it, I say. But our education system is broke. It needs fixing. But carefully, delicately, sensitively. The children’s secretary’s latest effort is akin to Edward Scissorhands trying to thread a needle.

Under his new reforms, the 13 stand alone subjects will be hacked down into six ‘areas of learning’. Give this guy a couple more years and he’ll be deciding we need to strip schooling down to the three R’s and learning by rote. The measures include bundling together subjects such as geography, history and citizenship (whatever that is) into ‘historical, geographic and social understanding’. Confused? Your kids will be.

So, subject content ‘must be reduced’. Sure, I can understand that. The bright ideas being offered up? Want to hear them? If you’re holding a hot drink I suggest you put it down.

Ministers have suggested that certain subjects could be taught together. For example, history and art. What a great plan! Your children will be coming home from school having painted a beautiful portrait of Queen Victoria but with no idea who she was or when she ruled, as their wasn’t enough time in Historarty this week to cover that.

Let’s get serious. This is gimmick-laden, vote-winning nonsense and it threatens to do a lot of damage to our children. What would you prefer your child learnt at school? World War Two or Google Earth? Dickens or blogging? This isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous. Global warming is all over the news. Technology is in the home. These are things children will pick up naturally.

Oh and your five year olds are going to be having sex education lessons. That ok?

At primary school your child will be encouraged to become an airy-fairy, wooly-thinking, eco-friendly technophile. And then they’ll be thrown into secondary school where they’ll have to grapple with alien notions such as ‘subjects’. The future 11 year old won’t have a clue what learning ‘English’ or ‘Science’ means. And then they’ll be expected to sit exams.

The left hand really doesn’t know what the right is doing. The real problem here is that New Labour don’t know what it wants. They want to please all the people, all the time. They want to win votes. To win elections. But when it comes to clear, positive policies that will help make our education system the envy of the world once more. Well. We get ‘mathematical understanding’ instead of maths, ‘scientific and technological understanding’ instead of science and ‘physical development, health and well being’ instead of PE.

We get words instead of actions. We get gimmicks instead of policies. We get short-changed.

And in the meantime, our children get a shoddy education.

@2 years ago