Finland makes broadband a legal right

Finland makes broadband a legal right for its citizens. Uruguay gives a laptop to every primary school pupil with plans to extend the provision to older schoolchildren next year. What are we doing in Britain? Arguing over whether formal education should start at five or at six years old.

I have theory about education in Britain. That there is a state conspiracy to see its people less well educated to better suit them to the totalitarian state the major parties seem to be inching toward.

While more and more of us go on to college or university, the quality of education seems to be falling. At the same time, the cost of higher education is being put beyond the reach of ordinary people. And this is done by the people who got where they are through free higher education paid for by the taxes of our parents and grandparents.

There have only been two major and successful revolutions in the UK. In 1215 when the Barons forced King John to sign Magna Carta and the English civil war. This is because the rulers, be they king or commoner, elected or appointed have known not to push too hard. Because the British people are essentially loyal, forgiving and accommodating. But the two instances stated show we will not be pushed too hard or too far.

Business Managers for Schools

Schools minister Vernon Coaker says a business manager could help schools ride out the recession, claiming they could save schools thousands of pounds per year.

The claim is that they can save head teachers up to 20% of their time to devote to teaching.

Well, I think it is just another bureaucrat creating bureaucracy to give jobs to the boys.

Margaret Thatcher did this in the 1980's. While she destroyed manufacturing, she created thousands of non-jobs paying intellectuals huge salaries to sort out finances and to manage in the National Health Service. Most weren't worried about people. The onus was on cutting costs. We've all seen the result of that.

Not only is this an issue, but also the move to privatise public service industries by the back door by introducing such jobs. Once the principle of 'business management' is accepted, we are on our way to privatising education. And isn't it odd that this idea has been thought up at a time when the government is meeting strong opposition to their attempt to introduce private academies?

Here are a few figures I have put together. Not scientific or statistically accurate. But accurate enough, I believe to give some idea of what we are heading towards. I got my figures by a Google search any one of you could try.

 

	Average Salary	Minimum Salary	20% of Salary
Head Teacher	£ 100,000.00	£ 70,000.00	£ 20,000.00	£ 14,000.00
Business Manager	£ 50,000.00	£ 25,000.00

 

So you can see that even paying a business manager the minimum salary of £25,000, while saving 20% of the average salary of £100,000 of a head teacher (£20,000), the difference is £5,000 which presumably the business manager will have to save (cut) from the budget just to break even.

Pupils are already buying their own books. Where will it come from? Education is non-profit making and one of the most important public services we have. Do we want to see it brought to its knees like the health service?

So is this just another 'jobs for the boys' and/or a 'make it look like we're doing something' exercise?

Either way, we have seen what managers did to the health service. Do we want it to happen to our schools?

 

Dumb Policy Department

Where does this government get its ideas from? Does it have a 'dumb policy department' hidden away? They now want to teach sex education in primary schools. Apart from allowing children to be children for a few years at least, can't they see that when sex education was made compulsory for 11 year olds we saw an explosion in teenage pregnancy to the point it is now the norm?