Saturday 2 May 2015

Free schools are not pushing up standards, we need to address the key issues on education

“Are free schools the best way to push up standards in education or should the resources being used for these new schools instead be used to provide for improvements in existing schools?”

It goes withour saying that education is important. We need a school system that delivers first class education. We need pupils to leave education armed with the knowledge and the ability to think for themselves,  in order to get on in life, both in work and life itself.

These are the things politicians should bear in mind when they consider education, how to defend what is good and how to improve what is bad and constantly strive to make education better.

Unfortunately Free Schools, seemed to be based more on ideology than on improvement. They have centralised the funding away from local authorities and to the hands of Whitehall. How this makes schools free is unclear. I fear that if changes or cuts to funding are made (the ideological axe still hangs ominously over public services) how will schools make representations to a distant unaccountable bureaucracy?

Our schools need investment, as we've seen over the last few years in Helston, with the c block fiasco, the government have avoided the main problems from the coal face and focused on top down solutions. I believe that the funds diverted to the Free School experiment would be much better invested in schools.

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