Education issues
Civitas, 20 April 2007
BBC News Online reports this week that ‘Penalty notices or on-the-spot fines for parents whose children play truant do not work’. According to a study by Kingston-upon-Thames LEA’s principal education welfare officer, Ming Zhang, the government’s truancy tackling strategies have failed. The main conclusion of Zhang’s report is that irresponsible parents, whom the current truanting mechanisms primarily target, are not to blame for truancy. Whether this is the case or not, one thing’s for certain: fining parents isn’t getting errant pupils to school.
The government shifted its focus on to parental responsibility following observations that many children were truanting not only with their parents’ consent but actually with their parents. Although this is undeniably happening, the current one-pronged strategy ignores the underlying factor: unsatisfactory schools. In the last five years the number of secondary school pupils playing truant at some point has risen by about 40%. Perhaps parents have become 40% more irresponsible over the last half decade, but more concrete is the evidence that school has become more disaffecting. Teachers forced to focus their attentions on bureaucracy rather than teaching, cramming rather than educating, and disseminating whimsical ever-changing curricula, topped with over-sized classes is as unlikely to get kids jumping out of bed in the morning as it is to improve their life chances. However, the Government’s decided that the solution actually lies in sending persistent truants a text when they fail to turn up (something 400 schools will now be doing).
One thing’s for certain, the teaching unions aren’t going to come up with any useful analysis on this report: not simply because they all seemed to agree that the problem lies with parents rather than schools, but because of the odd things they have been coming up with at their recent conferences. As we still try to digest the National Union of Teachers’ Baljeet Ghale’s pernicious ‘over-reactions’ to just about everything, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers has now condemned a character from the BBC drama Life on Mars – which, notably, had already finished – for setting a bad example by using homophobic language. When, flipping through just pages 1-3 of today’s Times Education Supplement one reads that markers are selling exam tips as schools desperately try to artificially improve results, a North London school is forking out £1 million to…ditto and the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce has described the UK education system as a ‘national disgrace’, the language of a fictional TV character, however offensive, doesn’t seem like it should be the teaching unions’ top priority. What planet are they on?
New Labour has an underlying strategy to most aspects of domestic policy that recognises it’s far easier to penalise those who are generally responsible than it is to get those who are irresponsible to take responsibility. Fines only work against people who are willing to accept them and the big problem groups will neither accept them nor are they really expected to by the Government because of it’s morally relativist apologist tendencies.
The problem is exacerbated by the ideology of one size fits all education, and the obsession with getting people into further education and higher education regardless of whether it actually suits the individual. The only way to force everyone through this sausage factory approach is to lower or debase standards, rather than keep standards high by investing in a pragmatic approach of achieving high standards that range across trades, vocational and academic education and training.