KWIK FIX or LONG HAUL?

“Outstanding” is how Ofsted rates Ecclestone Mere Primary School.  “Outstanding,” not once, but three times on the trot.

About one in six of the children is eligible for free meals and about one in six has special needs: a pretty ordinary intake, you might think. But these children are happy and friendly, and they do well in Sats.

Philip Friend has run Ecclestone Mere for 25 years. Not one for a kwik fix, he nurtures the school family. When Yvonne Kirk joined the school in 1985 as a newly qualified teacher he recognised her quality, and marked her as his likely successor. She became his deputy and has been acting head since September 2008 when he stood to one side to help the heads of four other schools.

What a contrast all this is to the current vogue for wheeling in high powered executives to turn failing schools round, like company “doctors” trying to salvage bankrupt firms.

Long term commitment and far sighted planning like Philip Friend’s are among the essential ingredients for making healthy schools. How unlike the frantic games of ministerial chairs played by our soi-disant leaders!

DIOGENES

Baker to Balls: Coxcomb to Cock-up

Budget Day 2009: a day to remember for its revelations: in Parliament, of the government’s fiscal profligacy: in the Commons’ Select Committee on Education, of bitter recrimination over the last SATs fiasco. The Treasury gives us a tale of financial overextension and a mountain of national debt: the Edukremlin sits on a growing bric-a-brac of incompetence.

The government has been spending (our) money beyond its (and our) means and now must pinch public expenditure. In particular, for twenty years money, money, money has been flung gaily at education, education, education with scarcely a thought and with far too little result, starting from the specious grounds for ‘reform’ invented by the ‘88 Act. The result since then of brushing professional advice aside has been misjudgment, miscalculation and the noise of crashing programmes.  Somebody should list them and then calculate the total cost of all this reckless adventure.

The Chancellor wants to encourage professional talent to reinvigorate the economy and social progress. How about calling in the professionalism of educationists at all levels – first the massive resource of all teachers, and going on to academics, researchers, local authority education officers and advisers?  All this was for the asking in ‘88 but it was spurned – to be replaced by armies of bureaucrats, agencies, consultants and other privateering buccaneers who have multiplied on the fat of the land for decades. You want to cut waste, Mr Chancellor? Ask us old hands about it since you don’t seem to know about it, and we’ll tell you, gratis.

Mr Baker inherited a huge potential for rapid development in public education on sound foundations and then with glib self-congratulation in ‘88 he ditched it; the pitiable Mr Balls is now floundering in the mud at the bottom of the Baker ditch as its walls cave in under the pressure of layers of bureaucratic ineptitude.

Juvenile

PS. Those who know their Cumbrian Lake District intimately will recognise that minor eminence at the back of Skiddaw known as Great Cock-up Fell (OS coordinates available on request). I intend to take a photo of it soon. It will do nicely as a memento for Mr Balls to hang on his wall at home whenever he cedes office (there is a Little Cock-up as well, but Mr Balls surely deserves the view of the higher peak).