Jade Goody's dying wish indicts our failing education system

Verity

I don't see British TV so Jade Goody was only in my peripheral vision. When she crossed my consciousness in newspapers, obviously, I thought she was beyond ghastly.

Yet, in facing death, she has shown a gallantry and grace that has touched me. Her concern is for her children, of course, and she has middle class aspirations for them. She is having them christened before she dies. She's doing what is within her power to do, and one can only imagine the energy such determination is taking up. And she is doing all this aware that they are too small to remember her.

Mitch

See!! even she can see UK state education is a joke.

Verity

And speaking of our education system, which you were, are you aware that students in Singapore take A-Level exams to get their O-Levels? The normal O-Level has been discarded as being too stupid.

How did Britain's education system become one of the trashiest in the world? In only 12 years. Oh, wait a minute ... ! And it was deliberate and done with malice.

Tom Pride

Another issue that her sad situation highlights is that having paid 40% tax on her earnings, if she wishes to bequeath her young children directly with the funds to provide for their education and other needs (rather than through her husband) after her premature death, Inheritance Tax will take another 40% chunk out of the excess over the zero rate band (currently £312,000).

Ten years of Gordon Brown’s fiscal drag is shown up starkly here – the zero rate band is far too low, way below any reasonable concept of “rich”. Shed his crocodile tears not even getting her name right, while his policies negate her efforts to provide for her children. Can’t see the fairness or morality in that myself.

wonderfulforhisage

The problem that Gove will face it that Dave is too frightened of the horses to allow him to do what is necessary.

AntiCitizenOne

> Parents don’t have to fork out for the best education, as it should be.

Er, yes they should! Parents should be paying for educating their won children, then they might think about what's being taught rather than using it as a crèche!

Alison C

Lets not forget that this government also INCREASED the age of the first cervical cancer screen to 25, from 20 in 2003. That's many years for young sexually active women to potentially catch HPV and then perhaps develop an aggressive cancer, and then not be screened until it's too late.

Thanks, Labour!

Alison C

Slightly OT but I just read http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5768727.ece

Frank Field says tear up the new deal. FF is a sensible man. Cross the floor!

Hawkeye

wonderfulforhisage said: "The problem that Gove will face it that Dave is too frightened of the horses to allow him to do what is necessary."

Christ almighty - the number of doom and gloom merchants who forecast failure is staggering.

Let us wait and see what Cameron actually does. Even if he did nothing it is better than Gordon "Headless chicken" Brown's hyperactivity. Maybe Cameron will do nothing - I do not know and no one really does. Let us vote him in and see. Let us damn him if he fails, not damn him before he starts.

It would be well to remember that Thatcher excited no-one and all the pundits expected her to be very lukewarm and "do nothing". Talk about getting wrong!

Tiberius

Verity: Britain's education started to be trashed in the 1960s along with most of the other social structures that had bound the nation together for hundreds of years previously. NuLab has gold-plated its decline, also along with most of the other social structures.

Wilhelm

Verity says ''I don't see British TV ''

God, your lucky.

Wilhelm

School is not for education, its a babysitter for parents to get rid of their children. Thems the facts.

C Powell

Verity: well said. Jade has indeed shown more dignity and courage in facing her premature death than many might have expected. A lesson to us all, perhaps, that even the apparently irredeemable are not necessaily so. It is always said when a young woman, especially one with such young children, dies and I hope that her children will get a better start in life than she did.

Robert

The EU's "blue card" plan to attract high-skilled immigrants to Europe will cause European governments to invest less in education. Governments tend to spend little on education in the first place but with an immigration policy tailored to get skilled workers from abroad, "they will use it as an excuse" to cut back on the country's own costly educational programs, Aristide Zolberg, a professor at New York's New School University, said at a Belgian federal research and documentation center.

Wilhelm

Hypocrisy in the Media Part 973

The press called Jade, Miss Piggy. She thought East Anglia was abroad, the papers called her the thickest person in Britain and made out thickness an endearing quality. ( I dont ) She bullied Shipla Shetta, the papers called her the most hated woman in Britain. Now she gets cancer and the papers are calling her Mother Theresa. Go Figure.

Susan Hill

I think Michael Gove may surprise you. He`s no pushover and his plans for education - a least those revealed so far - are the best reasons for voting Conservative. Which is more than can be said for some of Cameron`s dafter notions. Now pray he keeps Gove at Education shadowing Ballsup, and doesn`t get shunted off to Transport. In fact come to think of it, one of the best things Cameron could do would be to get the jobs sorted properly and then leave people to get on with them, not shuffle like a demented patience player every five minutes.

Bill McCall

You are all damned, it appears. This is a debate emerging from the activities of a brain-dead specimen of what Britain produces in its education system. Oh, it's not much different to what exists elsewhere in the world, almost always the product of a left wing liberal progressive minority using it's leverage over legitimate governments.
Unfortunately, from afar, there's little hope one can see in David Cameron and his legion of 'wet' conservatives, who have no idea what conservatism really is, and are shaping their policies (if that's what they want to call them) on trying to please those same lefty progressives on whom they must rely to claim government.
A no-win situation if ever there was one.

Fergus Pickering

It would be nice to pretend, wouldn't it, that our Education system got bad only in the lasst twelve years or so. But that isn't true at all. I got my free schooling in the fifties and early sixties and there was nothing wrong with it then. By the seventies it was MUCH worse. I talked to a primary school teacher who told me he taught hispupils eEnglisj grammar whenever the head teacher was away and couldn't stop him. My wife was a niversity teacher. She dyes the steep decline from the mid-eighties. Almost overnight the 2:1 degree went from something thetop 30% got tp something the top 70% got. It was done by fiat. The teachers were just ordered to do it. And they did, because if they didn't they got into deep shit. We were lucky. Our children were educated in East Kent - GRAMMAR SCHOOLS you get me. They weren't as good as the schools we went to, but they were adequate. I wonder if they still are. But theTories are as deeplyimplicated in this as the Socialists. And the Lib Dems? They're probably the worst of all. It CAN be fixed, but only by unlearning all the folly of the last forty years. Grammar and sums at primary scool. Languages at Secondary school. Proper science not stuff about drugs and nutrition. Fewer exams but exams that actually examine something.

wrinkled weasel

Hawkeye, a rather old fashioned way to predict what Cameron does is to follow the form book. This cannot be done with Cameron as he has yet to leave the starting gate. We are reliant on his decisions about fairly minor things, such as his failure to back Patrick Mercer, David Davis and others and his failure to provide a credible alternative to the very real issues that only the BNP will talk about in public. And for someone who went to a "good" school, his early attempts at appeasing the anti-selection lobby are most telling.

Little, Jade, in her world of black and white, without the benefit of polls and focus groups and Islington dinners, has spoken for the many, not the few.

If you don't want to be one of the 8,000 odd who die in hospital with c.Diff as a contributory factor, or MRSA, you go private, since the chances of cross-infection are lessened by being in a private room.

If you want your offspring to be able to read and write before they reach their teens, you go private. There is no point in quoting figures (though the estimate is that a quarter of 14 year-olds fail to reach basic standards) because, as others have said here, Labour has lowered the bar to the point where GCSEs are worthless anyway.

Jade is responding to what she thinks is going on, and I dare say she has had more first hand experience of it than me or David Cameron.

Verity

WW, I agree with you that Jade is responding to what she thinks - knows - is going on.

And she doesn't want that for her children.

Any more than Cameron would want it for his.

Jade is sacrificing her own death (which could be comfortable and passive) in the cause of her children - who she acknowledges are too young to remember her - getting a sure foot on the rung of the educational ladder.

I think she is heroic.

Verity

WW writes of Cameron "... We are reliant on his decisions about fairly minor things, such as his failure to back Patrick Mercer,".

Not minor to Patrick Mercer. There was no "failure to back Patrick Mercer" given that Cameron or his people manufactured the cause for his sacking in the first place. This was one of Cameron's manuactured publicity stunts, except a man's reputation was at stake. And it didn't matter how many black squaddies came forward for Mercer, it was a done deal publicitywise.

The huskies on the ice floe in Norway didn't give a shit either way.

This was the first clue I got about David Cameron - bigging himself up by sacking a military man. How pathetic!

Chris

Judge not, lest ye be judged, Wilhelm.

Helen

he taught hispupils eEnglisj grammar ...My wife was a niversity teacher. She dyes the steep decline ...

And your point is... that if my offspring "went private" they would learn to rite as good as you? ;-/

Ian C

Well done Jade. I have never had anything to do with Big Brother and its by products but whatever she has had to do she has done. While I don't commend her for how she became notorious we can surely all commend her for how she is now using that to the best.

I hope she dies in peace and her children grow to be worthy of her desire to do her best for them. God Bless her.

Wilhelm

Chris

Im judging the hypocritical newpapers not Jade, get your facts right, kid.

CS

***Er, yes they should! Parents should be paying for educating their won children, then they might think about what's being taught rather than using it as a crèche!***

Er...parents do pay for educating their own children. It's called tax.

Can we please lose this notion that Jade is in some way unusually brave. Does anyone know anyone who behaved in a cowardly way whilst dying of cancer? Of course not.

What's truly hideous about this society is that all this supposed educating of people about cancer that Jade is bravely doing comes about for no other reason than that she's a celeb. That's the only reason the media are paying any attention.

Jade achieved her fame and fortune by dint of playing up to and celebrating an image of a thick fishwife from the underclass. And nearly lost both when we found out that that often includes being a racist bully.

A close relative of mine was born into far greater poverty than Jade and left school early to support the family. But, far from celebrating her lack of education as a badge of pride, she worked to gain qualifications to enable her to have a career as a schoolteacher. Yet when she was dying of cancer, there was no media circus. No sickening sight of Max Clifford screwing his pound of lucrative flesh from her death. No fat media contracts to enable her to leave her children to scrape by on so much cash that it would trigger the inheritance tax threshold.

By all means sympathise with Jade's situation but please don't fall for the line being pushed by her publicists that she in some way represents the best of British.

Fergus Pickering

Oh don't be silly, Helen. I mistyped that's all. You get a bit worse at physical things like that when you get old. But I assure you, my good woman, that my mind is still fine, and what I say is true. But then you know it's true, don't you?

John

The Verity conspiracy theory about Mercer’s sacking is ludicrous because it was Mercer’s own indifferent rhetoric to a Times reporter that caused him to be sent to the backbenchers in shame.

Mercer said "The offence I have obviously caused is deeply regretted", and deeply regretted by Cameron because his party suffered the recriminations that forced the sacking of Mercer. Indeed it was no "publicity stunt" and no plot of Cameron’s that sent Mercer into the cold political outback.

A publicity stunt is designed to attract the public’s attention and that sort of attention Cameron and his people much prefer not to have.

Chris

Don't call me 'kid,' lest I tell you how old I am, Wilhelm.

Paul

"She dyes the steep decline from the mid-eighties"

Nothing to do with Grammar Schools. It was 1987 ; the first year of the GCSE, replacing old O/CSE exams.

Teaching Computer Science at that time, remember quite clearly looking at the 'A Level' paper that was designed for GCSE students and realising the O Level students could answer the questions already.