The 'Barn Door' approach to education

Ed Balls has announced fresh moves to improve the teaching of 'The 3Rs' (which for the benefit of the uninitiated refers to Reading, Writing and Arithmetic - or as they are currently known Literacy, What?, and Numeracy), with a drive to help children with their spelling and handwriting skills.

This is a quick win policy initiative from the Government carrying a virtual guarantee of success given that any move for improvement from such a low base practically cannot fail. Sadly it is also Ball's Balls.

Unfortunately for the several currently living generations in this country enduring lives blighted by underdeveloped basic skills this initiative comes rather too late. These are people without any ability to manipulate numbers. These are people who cannot speak or spell competently and confidently in their first (and typically only) language; and if they could how would we know when they have no pen-craft.

I've of an age now when I can say I've interviewed, recruited and worked with people young enough to be my children. I've engaged people in a professional capacity in a global management consulting practice, people with quite good degrees in quite robustly academic areas of study awarded by reasonably well regarded institutions. And these people were modestly literate and numerate, but they were smug and self-confident. What matter, then, that they had no idea how to put persuasive text together without the aid of the copy/paste functionality of their word processor.

These people are not precisely the creme de la creme; but they're never the less among the brightest and ablest of this country's people or it would be reasonable to use that as a working assumption.

Behind them stand the massed ranks of the tragically under-educated, ill-disciplined and ambition less. They call talk back radio and complain that squaddies earn half as much as stackers of baked beans. They have no idea how little stackers of baked beans earn, but that matters little when set against their confidence, their ability to stand up and voice an opinion however ill informed it might be.

For the remainder of their lives they'll suffer for having never been taken to task, criticised, marked down for poor grammar, syntax, spelling, handwriting or plain factual inaccuracy. They'll never rise above the level of your average talk back radio participant, but because they can persuade a station researcher they've got something to say, they'll get to say it, on air, and be heard by millions: and that's what matters surely?

Why am I pissed off for this? Because even here where the 11 plus survives only the best 10 percent will get a place at a decent school. The rest are stuck in a sprawling complex of a high school that hauled itself out of the shit by re-styling itself as a specialist centre for learning (in IT), where massed ranks of students are unkempt, foul-mouthed and angrily drifting towards a life spent filling out Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit forms.

When I'm in this mood I'd cheefully axe all welfare payments (and introduce a flat income tax rate of 10% on indexed earnings starting at say, 10K).