Education, Education, Education?

There is much that is wrong with education in this country, and despite the massive spending under Gordon Brown many people feel that the quality of education is going down.

Yesterday the Daily Telegraph published two items which must raise disquiet.

1) School playing fields are being sold off at a rate of almost one a day. Sport England has revealed that in 2006-07, the most recent for which figures are available, no fewer than 360 school playing fields were sold by councils in England.

Despite promising in their manifesto in 1997 that the practice would be ended, something like 2,000 playing fields and 2,000 smaller fields have been sold.

You may blame local councils which are desperately trying to balance their books, in order to meet central government imposed tasks and standards and with inadequate finances, but the blame ultimately rests with central government. Of the sales in 2006-07, in 21 the ministers overrruled objections from Sport England in confirming planning permission to sell. The government has not brought the sale to an end, and seems unconcerned at the problems facing local councils.

2) A former head of one of the government's flagship academies has claimed that indulgent attention to misfit students has often deprived able students of the attention they need. The schools are becoming more and more under the domination of Whitehall and losing what little independence they had. He sees the Department for Cchildren, Schools and Families as imposing too many policies of a social nature on schools.

We were familiar with the idea that disruptive students, who have behavioural problems, reduce opportunities for other pupils. Now we see that the cloying hand of Whitehall, requiring schools to act more like social workers, is also part of the problem.