See - I tellt ye!
In fact, teachers and headteachers - we've all been trying to tell you for about 40 years now. And by you, I mean parents, politicians, lazy-assed b$ast$rds that think all they have to do to deal with any kind of social problem is to pass it on to the schools.
You know what I mean: kids sent to nursery - and to primary 1 - still in nappies, unable to chew their food (oh yes, I've met them), their behaviour totally out of control. I'm not talking about 2 year olds throwing a tantrum or kids with special needs. Teachers know how to deal with them. I'm talking about children with no idea about socialisation, who will arrive in your class behaving badly and will go on behaving badly unless someone takes action.
Not the teachers. That's not what they do. Nor should they. In case anyone's forgotten, teachers do education: reading, writing, maths, social subjects, technology, science, art, drama, music, a foreign language. They also manage to squeeze in anti-bullying, sex education, breast feeding, cycling proficiency and who knows what else. I have to say if you want education done right, 20 minutes on a Friday afternoon is probably not the best way to go about it.
And now finally Ofsted is spelling it out down south: we can't keep passing on society's problems to schools, which don't have the staff or the resources or the know-how to deal with all this. What we are giving our kids is tokenism.
Are you happy with that? I'm not.
There's a connection here with what we're doing to our hospitals: it's called passing the buck. We don't invest enough in our health service, so we expect A&E to handle problems that rock up at hospitals. If they can't handle things, police officers are called to deal with the fallout.
The French spend 10.9% of their GDP on their health service. In the UK, it's 9.7%. The USA spends an eye-watering 17.2% but we're talking privatisation here.
You know what I mean: kids sent to nursery - and to primary 1 - still in nappies, unable to chew their food (oh yes, I've met them), their behaviour totally out of control. I'm not talking about 2 year olds throwing a tantrum or kids with special needs. Teachers know how to deal with them. I'm talking about children with no idea about socialisation, who will arrive in your class behaving badly and will go on behaving badly unless someone takes action.
Not the teachers. That's not what they do. Nor should they. In case anyone's forgotten, teachers do education: reading, writing, maths, social subjects, technology, science, art, drama, music, a foreign language. They also manage to squeeze in anti-bullying, sex education, breast feeding, cycling proficiency and who knows what else. I have to say if you want education done right, 20 minutes on a Friday afternoon is probably not the best way to go about it.
And now finally Ofsted is spelling it out down south: we can't keep passing on society's problems to schools, which don't have the staff or the resources or the know-how to deal with all this. What we are giving our kids is tokenism.
Are you happy with that? I'm not.
There's a connection here with what we're doing to our hospitals: it's called passing the buck. We don't invest enough in our health service, so we expect A&E to handle problems that rock up at hospitals. If they can't handle things, police officers are called to deal with the fallout.
The French spend 10.9% of their GDP on their health service. In the UK, it's 9.7%. The USA spends an eye-watering 17.2% but we're talking privatisation here.
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