Failing to tackle the problem

There was a great article in the Sunday Times this weekend by Chris Woodhead about Ed Balls [Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families] and his plan to save failing schools in Britain. It kinda blows out the whole "Academies are the saviour to all the world's ills" ideal that the government have been promoting over the last few years. It questions how important local government should be to the standard of education and promotes private funding in education. For a while I've been of the opinion that the only way kids can be truly successful in schools is if there are people at the top who genuinely want them to be successful, this is currently not the case, the failures in teaching and behaviour management cause mass disruption in every class and there's no real motivation to get it right. I think it's pretty incredible that for a school to not be considered a failure less than 30% of students need to pass 5 A*-C GCSE exams before the age of 19. Wow. Most 19 year olds will pass a GCSE exam, if you can get them to stick around that long, how can that be considered an achievement? Let's be real here, how many schools are failing?

READ: Failing to tackle the problem- Chris Woodhead