How to Stigmatise Children (Properly)

Well obviously, as pointed out by John Banks who speaks for teachers, one doesn't hold children back a year, even if they haven't achieved the standards established in reading, writing and arithmetic for progression to secondary school. That would stigmatise them. There they'd be in a swollen class dominated by younger kids who'd 'look' at them and wonder why they were there.

This is an important issue because currently the standard operating procedure for dealing with children who cannot read write or add up at the end of seven years of primary schooling is to boot them up to secondary comprehensives where they are someone else's problem (at least until they've collected enough ASBOs* to qualify for a place at a juvenile detention centre en route to prison).

It is the Tories who are proposing holding struggling children back until they've achieved a sufficient proficiency in the basics.

Labour and the teachers unions have let off one of their stink bombs in the direction of this preposterous idea.

As an alternative it is proposed that children who fall behind are given either (a) one on one tuition using an army of retired teachers, otherwise ex-teachers and wet behind the ears newly graduated teachers or (b) summer schools.

Of course it is a top-notch notion that those who couldn't cope the first time around be brought back into the profession and that those who weren't able to secure a proper teaching job in the first round of recruitment are deployed to work with those most in need of the ablest teachers. And the most demanding teaching is obviously going to appeal to those who've only just got used to being able to put their feet up.

The reality is that those who are still up to it and worth much chop take up private tuition when they either retire or quit the profession.

So as as well as being a perfect job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable teacher training college graduates and a way of supporting the government's ambition to demolish barriers to employment for the over-60s, and a stratagem for reducing unemployment numbers among former educationalists this is the absolutely ideal way of delivery total humiliation to struggling primary school pupils.

How much better to pull them from regular classes at Year 5 or 6 in front of those they've grown up with (sometimes from nursery) and stick them in special dummy tuition. Now that's a Proper Job, as they say out west.

* This is an Anti Social Behaviour Order, for the benefit of those outside the UK. It is a wizard wheeze of the current government; intended as a reprimand, regarded by those upon whom it is bestowed as a Badge of Honour.