newsjunction.co.uk

The decision by 94% of delegates at the National Association of Headteachers’ annual conference in Brighton to boycott next year’s Sats tests is as alarming as it is typical of the bloated public sector.

It’s also a damning indictment of teacher’s language skills…

boycott
• verb refuse to have commercial or social dealings with (a person, organization, or country) as a punishment or protest.
• noun an act of boycotting.
— ORIGIN from Captain Charles C. Boycott, an Irish land agent so treated in 1880 in an attempt to get rents reduced.
Source: OED Online

Customers boycott, not staff! And if they still refuse commercial or social dealings, what about their salaries?

The action means headteachers will refuse to prepare for and invigilate next year’s key stage tests, leaving more than a million children without the SATs results vital to accurate ability setting at secondary school and parents ability to access school performance. All preparation for Sats will stop from this September after the agreed on Saturday to ballot members on boycotting the tests for seven to 11-year-olds.

This isn’t a boycott, it’s a dereliction of duty.

And it’s inspired more by teachers shirking being assessed than anything.

Has Labour decided to go retro?

Unemployment, negative growth, state intervention, Nationalisation, firms going bankrupt, a truck load of government debt,ministers wrongly dusting off the old copies of J.M. Keynes they were given as a joke Christmas present and had been using to prop up that wobbly table…the economy has a 70s feel already.

Now the Education Department is at it. Sorry, I mean the Department of Children, Schools and Families, or whatever it’s decided to call itself today.

They’ve decided in a report costing a no doubt huge amount of taxpayers’ cashdebt that;
Children should go to school even younger - presumably to minimise family life, despite the most successful systems Internationally starting later and recognising the social and educational value of family.
English, Maths and Science should be abolished in favour of six broader areas of learning entitled Understanding English, Communication and Languages; Mathematical Understanding; Scientific and Technological Understanding; Human, Social and Environmental Understanding; Understanding Physical Health and Well-being; and Understanding Arts and Design - I guess because they like to confuse parents, create acronyms and talk nonsense.

How very 1960s it all is. It didn’t work then, and won’t now. It’s just pure insanity.