General Chat

David Cameron

What is that, exactly

Sorry....really cross when he talked about a 'good school place;


HA ha

GOOD SCHOOL PLACE IS WHERE PARENTS WILL DO ANYTHING TO GET THEIR LITTLE DARLING A PLACE IN THE MUST HAVE SCHOOL,BY DOING ANYTHING MEANS RENTING A HOUSE IN THE RIGHT AREA JUST SO YOUR DARLING IS IN THE RIGHT CATCHMENT AREA WHILE RENTING OUT YOUR HOUSE TO PAY FOR IT,,,PITY THE POOR KID WHO FAILS TO ACHIVE THE GOAL THE PARENTS WANT

Or is it a place in a private school?
Then you can become a politician, patronise those who didn't go to private school and mess up their education and chances of 'bettering' themselves.

the other advantage of attending a private school is a maximum of 16 pupils per class, and nomatter how thick/obnoxious/lazy/psychopathic you are, you are guaranteed a job above your intelligence through the 'jobs for the boys' network.

Oh, and before I am accused of being jealous, my brothers went to a private school - hated it, the system and most of the twerps in it :-| :-|
When I was young, the worst threat my parents could give me (and they used it) was 'We'll send you to boarding school'

Thankfully, my brothers remained 'grounded' in the real world.

I put that down to me and my sister not taking any bullpoo.

Young people do not choose to go to a prep or private school they are sent there. To judge somebody negatively simply because they went to a private school is plain daft. Or vice versa.

Private schools as with state schools vary wildly in quality and what they have to offer, caveat emptor.

A smaller class size will not help much if the teacher is unable to teach regardless of his academic credentials. Unfortunately there are a great many distinctly average teachers.

Neither of the two major parties seems able to take on board that without smaller classes and better teachers i.e. a lot more money state education cannot improve. Instead as with many other policies they opt for exhortation, doing down the profession and recruiting Rosy Scenario.

Economising on education tends to increase spending on police and prisons or as Mark Twain put it "closing schools is like feeding a dog it's own tail and it doesn't fatten the dog."

Faute de mieux those that can opt for the best they can find. Do you really blame them?

Reasons for sending children to private school vary too as some occupations and locations make it extremely difficult to properly educate children at a day school in the UK.

Social climbing will not get parents far if they wish to get their children into the better public schools - they are picky about the potential student having some brains.

It is perfectly true that a poor education is a millstone around a person's neck which is very difficult to let go. Thus it behoves parents to get the best education possible for their children. It may or may not be a a state school it may or not have a strong vocational element. Different people have different needs and aptitudes.

Where Cameron goes wrong is to see education as analogous to fighting for a seat in the 6:03 to Weybridge with the unlucky ones left behind. He is also wrong in seeing education as primarily a means to make money. As a result the fine arts are being emasculated in this country.

Good education is something that everybody needs. It is also something that the UK needs our educational standards are a long way behind where they need to be.

"Everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated." Al McGuire

Did I not read somewhere last week where Cameron is not sending his child to a private school ................ but to a state school??

Admittedly a very good state school, wither an excellent reputation

and why castigate someone who sends their child to a private school JUST BECAUSE???



there are all sorts of reasons for sending a child to a public school, and yes a lot of them are because "papa" did

................. but some of the reasons come down to the fact that the state schools in the local area are the pits .......................


the parents are not wealthy, but decide that they will make sacrifices in order to send the child to a good private school in order to give that child the best possible start to get out of the rut, especially if the child is showing potential of having more than few working brain cells.

One of the parents works so that the whole of their salary can be used to pay the school fees

they don't take expensive holidays

they do not drink, or go out regularly for expensive meals


and that goes on for 10 or 12 years



are you just jealous of someone willing to do that for their child??

I have no objection to which school a child is sent to, I do however object to the very limited options that the majority of parents have

Statements like 'a good school place' sit alongside 'we're all in it together'................some more than others I think!

Some families are without food and heat, a good school place is not an option, they have to take what the state offers which unfortunately is not always 'good'

Our church primary school, which is in a working class area built on a mining heritage, has an excellent reputation and is vastly oversubscribed. Once again as in the past, there are over 100 applications for 45 places.


Of necessity there has to be a criteria of admission as things are not run on a 'free for all' nor a 'first come first served' basis.


The first criteria is if a child is in care, closely followed by church attendance, siblings already in school, baptism, distance from the school etc.


If parents wish their child to attend this school, then they must adhere to the criteria - it is entirely up to them - the choice is theirs. There are other schools with good reputations in the area.


I was told on Wednesday, of a family who were found to have been forging the signature of a church official in order to gain admittance.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." (William Butler Yeats.)

I wish I had paid more attention in class!

Of course the number of pupils in a class is significant!
If you've got 16 pupils, you notice them. If you've got 35, some will slip through the net.
An Academy in West Sussex is 'twinned' with Winchester College. One of their plans is for the teachers to swap - ie Academy teachers teach at Winchester, Winchester teachers teach at the Academy, so the Academy teachers can 'learn' from their supposed superiors.
It hasn't happened yet, but I can't wait!!

Up until recently, you didn't need a teaching degree/pgce to work in a private school, yet, apparently they were /are better teachers than those in the state sector.

Well said, Maggie.

I object to public and private schools registering as charities and getting tax relief.

http://oedeboyz.com/2014/08/29/a-very-unusual-charity-eton-college/

One of my rellies went to Wykeham's School. It does not seem to have done him any harm - he is now a senior hospital consultant with a pretty comfy nest nr Hursley.

Is this the W Sussex twinning scheme you mean? It seems to be working ok.

http://www.winchestercollege.org/midhurst-rother-college

I doubt if any hard pressed state schools teach A levels in classes of 35. Although it is a long long while since I taught maths 20 is about top for A level, 30 for GCSE with an optimal max of 16/25. Highly talented kids need to spend at least some time in much smaller classes. By and large state schools utterly fail in this which is why so few of their kids make it to to Oxbridge/Russel unis.

Kids with educational problems also need extra resources and small classes at least some of the time. State schools mostly fail here too. Instead the whole class is dragged along bored out of its mind at the speed of the slowest who are unhappy and disruptive.

It is often said that the failure of the UK education system ( compared to say German or Scandinavia) is down to not growing the tallest poppies as tall as they might be. Though there is some truth in that the real failure is the abysmal level of maths and English of so many. Foreign language teaching is so bad/non-existent that even the Foreign Office / GCHQ et al are having to scrape around for people who can speak Russian, Arabic or even French and German.

A modern economy cannot afford to have a grunge class with as much as 25% of the population. It may suit Cameron & Osbourne's vision of Britain but it is not for real. The choice is to fix it or to go on selling off the country to the Chinese.

Thus it is disappointing to see Labour already committing itself to paying for better primary education (hooray) from uni funds (boo) and caving in to the demands of the teaching unions. Yes, people can teach very well indeed without PGCE. If James May decides to become a teacher he probably won't lack for offers.

One thing is for sure. So long as attitudes to education are based on such sterile and outdated ideas as "our people and the plebs" or conversely "public school boys are all twerps" we won't get anywhere.

carpe diem

Teaching on Saturdays, with the top few percent, who volunteer to go to the lessons isn't teaching in the a class on a normal day to day basis.
They mooted teaching 'normal' classes, but so far haven't.

I never said the privately educated were all twerps, I said most.
A lot have absolutely no idea how the rest of us live, and quite frankly don't appear to care, or even want to know.
MP's are a prime example of this.

Illiteracy is no new thing, either but is costing the country a lot of money, and damaging the lives of many.

Statistics from 2010:
20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate and a third cannot add up two three-figure numbers
The prison population is some 85,000. More than three-quarters of them cannot read, write or count to the standard expected of an 11-year-old.
It is difficult enough to get a job in the UK at the moment. It is even more so if you've just come out of prison.
The rate of reoffending drops from 90% to 10% if the person leaves prison and goes straight into the world of work.

Every reoffender whose act lands back inside costs the country £250,000.
And that is before we think of the human cost, the disruption to victims' lives, the dislocation of our society.

So, more money spent on state education, including smaller classes, would not only benefit society as a whole, it would save the country an awful lot of money.

'I never said the privately educated were all twerps'

Maggie, I'm sure you are right, it just appears that most who are, are on TV!

My opinion ;-)

Gins :-D :-D :-D

As I said at the beginning - my brothers went to private school, and I wouldn't call them twerps (not very often, anyway) :-D
They certainly didn't use the 'old boys network'. One is a bonsai pot maker, who wants to retire - but people keep asking for his pots.
The other is retired, but spent some time as a print worker for a newspaper, then worked at Esso - in a manual job, and is now a driver for the local community bus. :-D

By TV public school twerps do you mean Jeremy Paxman ?
Surely not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvern_College

Or maybe you are alluding to Stephen Hawking who is very good at working the media as well as being easily our top notch man of science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans_School_%28Hertfordshire%29

Then again you may be thinking about James Dyson the vacuum cleaner impresario not averse to maths and amazing things you can do with a screwdriver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_School

Chips on shoulders are a heavy weight to bear.

Rollo, MP's are on the TV a lot.
If you are going to give a few examples - let me give you one.

Boris Johnson - a twerp who's got where he is through friends/family/connections, or a serious, intelligent, decisive, hard-hitting MP?

Actually, getting back to the West Sussex/Winchester College mentoring.
Winchester College tried to get involved with the Duke of Edinburgh's Scheme - which isn't run by the Academy, but by volunteers, but, nevertheless they believed their input was necessary.
So, their children, and tutor went out with the 'locals' for a practice walk.
The local children aren't allowed to take mobile phones - they're meant to use maps and a compass. The Winchester College children were encouraged to use their mobiles as 'it was easier'!! :-|

So, more Winchester College children would pass their DofE than 'local' children, but they couldn't read a map!!
Is that really better education?

The volunteers decided Winchester College are no longer allowed to 'assist' with their DofE students - they'd rather the children passed on their own merits.

I remember Ian Hislop being interviewed and he said he attended a MINOR Public School....Got right up my ex husbands nose as it was his old school and Ian was in his year. Not that they were ever friends, Ian had more sense I expect:-D

Chris

:-D :-D :-D Chris.
Reminds me of the 'I look up to him' sketch :-D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2k1iRD2f-c

'Major' public school, 'Minor' public school, state school

This 'updated' one is excellent too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSahEDRjvw