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Public Services

- Education and Health

(Martin as a teacher in a comprehensive school)

Having myself spent a number of years as a teacher in comprehensive schools and married to a wife who has spent most of her professional life as an NHS nurse and health visitor I care greatly about our public services...

Education - dealing with the real problems facing our schools

As a former teacher who has recently taught in both some tough inner city schools as well as other less challenging schools I find the Labour government's education policy one of the most disconcerting aspects of the last 10 years.

There has been the repeated failure of the Labour government to grasp that poor behaviour by a minority of pupils is the major underlying cause of much underachievement in schools - not just by those pupils themselves - but more worryingly, it is significantly interfering with the education of other pupils in many schools. Unless we tackle this fundamental issue - then no matter how much money is poured into schools - the education of the decent majority continue to suffer.

Since I started my teaching career more than 20 years ago, there has been a steady decline in the standards of discipline in schools. This has not been the teacher's fault - we have excellent teachers - who are now better trained and better equipped than ever before. But some of the blame lies with the government - both for failing to support teachers properly (although the present education white paper does take a timid step in the right direction by giving a proper legal standing to school discipline) and for actively promoting a number of alternatives to the traditional family which which have been clearly shown to produce much higher rates of poor behaviour and school exclusion than traditional families.

* Teachers need and deserve far more support from the government - school discipline needs to be put on a much stronger legal footing. Schools should be able to legally enforce such things as school uniform - which has been clearly shown to be one of the key factors that make good schools. Children are very savvy today - they know their 'rights' and all to easily can accuse teachers of actions that can ruin the career of good, decent teachers, or at the very least result in them being suspended for months at a time, before finally being told that there is no evidence against them - and they are free to return to the classroom - often emotionally scarred for life.

* The Social Justice policy commission set up by David Cameron - and chaired by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith showed very clearly that some types of family relationships are far more likely to produce children with problem behaviour in schools and educational failure than others. Children coming from traditional married families with both a mother and a father - are very substantially less likely to be involved in poor behaviour or or simply 'giving up' on school work - and they are also much less likely to be involved in taking drugs, juvenile crime, teenage pregnancies and a whole range of other damaging behaviour. In a free society everyone has the right to choose which sort of relationships they enter into. But government has a duty to promote those that produce the best results not only for society as whole - but more particularly for the next generation of children yet to be born. Yet this Labour government has both downgraded the importance of marriage - which undeniably produces the best environment for children to grow up in - even to the extent of withdrawing support for national marriage week - and at the same time actively promoted a range of 'alternative family types'. The Labour government's promotion of 'alternative family types' actively supported by the Lib-Dems (who gave Labour these ideas in the first place) has massively misled huge numbers of ordinary decent people about the effects that some of this may have on their children. Iain Duncan Smith tells story of being given quite a hard grilling about the negative effects of unmarried parents on children by a BBC interviewer. Afterwards the BBC interviewer told him that he had asked so many questions about this because no one had ever told him about this before and he and his girlfriend were now going to have to go away and do 'some hard thinking'. There was an ordinary decent man - who really wanted to do the best for his children, but who had been misled by Labour and the Lib Dem's active promotion of 'alternative family structures'.

Re-introducing selection - based on behaviour!

As a positive step towards tackling the poor behaviour of the few that ruins the education of whole classes, I favour reintroducing selection - based, not on academic ability, but based on behaviour and parental support. The majority of decent pupils and their parents should be able to apply to any of the 3 nearest secondary schools to where they live (not just those on low incomes in big cities as in the Labour government's education white paper). However, those with poor behaviour records and parents who do not support the school in disciplining their children (rarely more than 20% in even the most difficult inner city schools) - would only be allowed to attend their nearest school (and poor school behaviour like crime does tend to be concentrated in only a small number of areas). Secondary schools need to be given additional funding for each child with behaviour problems - so that significantly smaller class sizes and additional teaching support can be provided to those with a high proportion of such pupils. These strategies have been shown to work in the special units for pupils excluded from normal schools - in one of which I worked for a while as a supply teacher. There are some amazingly good teachers that I have seen in such 'pupil referral units' - but it is unacceptable that those working in such challenging environments are paid exactly the same as other teachers. Teachers working in such units and schools need to paid additional allowances.

Meanwhile, if this were to happen, the majority of ordinary decent pupils can be allowed to learn in classroom environments geared to their needs - rather than being continually deprived of the the teacher's time and energy by poorly behaving pupils.