This is an obscene piece of buck-passing on the part of the DfES. For 10 years schools have been under pressure to contain thier budgets and standardise their academic performance, while thier community function has been undermined by the government's parental choice inititives. All of these things mitigate against treating children as individuals, with dire consequences for those at the bottom of the pile - not just children from minorities, as highlighted here, but white working class children, or those with special needs, mental problems, etc.
In a manufacturing enviroment, it makes no sense to keep the defective parts - they get thrown out and written off. The government has spent the last decade turning Britain's schools into academic assembly lines - and now they turn on the teachers who have been forced to adopt the logic of the asembly line, and try to blame them for stereotyping kids. It's pathetic.
The DfES has no concept of what teachers actually go through. I know several teachers and most have been involved in dismissals - without exception, they regard it as a personal and professional failure for any child under thier charge to be expelled or suspended. But if a child is posing a safety risk to other pupils and staff, or seriously damaging the learning of others through disruption in class, what choice do they have? Schools desperately want the resources to treat these cases individually, but the government won't give it to them, so they have to be excluded - moved on, filed under 'someone else's problem'. Only a DfES mandarin could seriously believe that teachers don't lose sleep over that situation.
It's absurd to compare school exclusions with police stop-and-search laws. Even post-MacPherson and De Menezes, police accountabliity is practically opaque. In a system where police can
kill a man for carrying a table leg and get away with it, you would have no chance whatsoever of holding an individual officer to account for a stop-and search incident.
Schools, on the other hand, are regulated and inspected to within an inch of thier lives. OFSTED can perform a full inspection on any school at short notice, get access to any area of the school, comment on individual teachers, and make recommendations about school staus and funding which determine it's future. Can you imagine the shitstorm the police would kick up if the government tried to impose a similar inspection regime on them? It absolutely
would not happen.
Here's a point I was going to make in response to your last post, Matt, but I didn't find the time. In a sense, OFSTED has done the job it was set up to do. There are no consistantly 'bad' schools in the UK state sector now, which is a victory for OFSTED, because in the 80s there was a genuine (though exaggerated) problem with the culture in some state schools, and their accountability to thier communities. Obviously there are still transitory management issues at individual schools, but they don't persist because government and local councils now have such sweeping powers to remove and replace senior staff, or even the entire school. So why has this had such a minimal efffect on academic polarisation along class lines (other than, arguably, to make it worse)? Because a school is only as good as it's intake. This is the deeper problem behind the superficial rhetoric of 'failing schools' that the creators of OFSTED didn't address - either because they misdiagnosed the original problem., or (more likely) they baulked at the sheer scale of it. Far easier to blame the teachers, who are close to hand and can be directly punished/controlled through thier pay packets.
If you surveyed teachers in Britain, hardly any of them would say that they spend too much time on pastorial work and assessing individual pupil's needs, and not enough on thier subjects - if they felt that way, they would be lecturers, not teachers. The overwhelming majority of teachers want to spend more time on individual care and less on assessing academic performance against universal standards. So if the government is serious about giving schools the power to operate within thier communities and work with children on individual development, it has an army of teachers willing to take thier work in that direction. What holds it back is a plain lack of political courage - because it would mean reversing the parental choice reforms that treat schools as services in a free market, and families as isolated consumer units, and it would mean ploughing a lot more taxpayers money into eduction to set up the extra-academic funtions that would be needed in schools. And as I've already said, governments are only prepared to write blank cheques to incarcerate children, not to educate them.
Even as the funding pot gets smaller, the demand on schools gets bigger: increasing immigration is putting extra pressure on schools to find translators and fund basic english classes. If the government had the vision and political courage, it could act now to set up a new breed of inner city schools that focussed on integrating the individual child, from whatever academic base or cultural background they happened to start on, into a mutually benficial multi-ethnic community with the school at it's centre. This would be a huge step in addressing the alienation behind so many of the problem currently apparent in the UK, from the south London shootings to the tube bombings. But I'm not optimistic. The DfES is stuck in a time warp of leafy grammar schools prepping tomorrow's future stars for oxbridge entrance, while the grateful proles go off to learn a useful trade, doffing thier caps as they leave - like Alan Bennett's
The History Boys on permenant loop. Because if you look at the civil servants and policy advisors who make the decisions, that's overwhelmingly the background that they come from.
In case after case, from parental choice to PFI initatives like the Paddington Academy (see
the spin ws.
the reality), the DfES panders to the imagined predudices of middle england while treating the futures of underpriviliged kids with contempt. So when those kids go off the rails, obviously, it's the teacher's fault.
Gahhh! *blood boils*