Recognising the best

loopylou

edcucational? iit?

hmmm... there's a point here somewhere.

Andy

Despite all Labour has done to try to drag the best down to the lowest level in education, there are still some universities head and shoulders above the rest. We need to encourage aspiration and excellence, not besmirch it.

Holly ......

Ah the unions.
That body of people who claim to represent the worker, yet have played to Labours tune for years.
The Sun ripping lefties, that will be put back in the museum when Labour are swiftly booted out.
Their belief is,even a useless teacher is a teacher and must be protected at all costs.
Yeah right.

Boudicca

The Tories won't succeed in improving UK State Education until they have reduced the influence of the vested interests in the Local Education Authorities and the dinosaurs in the teaching Unions.

steve

what we need is not graduates with excellent degrees in maths, but those with excellent behavioural management skills. Teaching kids to GCSE maths does not require a degree in maths, rather skills to get the kids to engage.

TrevorsDen

Re the PBR

The Times
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/budget/6728716/PBR-will-be-less-ambitious-than-Budget.html
says
'The Chancellor will not attempt to cut his borrowing target for four years from now, despite widespread calls to bring the deficit down faster.'
'Michael Saunders, chief European economist at Citigroup, said the decision not to increase the scale or speed of cuts would "absolutely increase" the chances of a fiscal crisis in the next year. '

The govt do not care about the economy. They only care about preserving the fig leaf that all is OK and the crisis is over. If the story is true the PBR will be yet another fudge.

john

The NUT is dominated by a small group of far-lefties. Witness their annual conferences.
Most teachers are liberal/conservative types who never attend union meetings.

Dennis Churchill

The education establishment is anti-meritocratic which accounts for what is wrong with the system in the UK.
25% of Scots said to be illiterate.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6943751.ece

James

If you want to see the damage the silly socialist view of higher education can do, you need look no further than Wales. There is the full complement of expansion in the lower echelons of the university sector (notably Glyndŵr University and SMU), a thoroughly bonkers scheme to deliver higher education through further education, and the magnificent coincidence of the choice to put the new medical school in Swansea, where there are two Labour-held marginal constituencies. Meanwhile, Cardiff, the most globally significant university in Wales, is woefully underfunded compared to universities in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. And worse still, Lampeter, our oldest university, has been underfunded to the point of all but going bust.

egh

Hmm. So grammar schools are elitist, but 'good' universities aren't? Maybe there's a need to hunt out the hidden Marxists in all this - apart from the Unions, that is!!

p.s. How are they measuring 'good' science these days? Expertise in fiddling data, is it?

Frank P

Incentivise??

Why not just encourage, or reward even? Cut the Orwellian Newspeak!

Holly ......

'25% of Scots said to be illiterate' and two to be innumerate....Darling & Brown.
Great, Smashing, Lovely.

Fearless Frank

Steve:
what we need is not graduates with excellent degrees in maths, but those with excellent behavioural management skills. Teaching kids to GCSE maths does not require a degree in maths, rather skills to get the kids to engage.
Are you saying that what we need is good teachers? Hard to tell, really - I must have missed the jargon module!

Moraymint

My daughter is studying Astrophysics in her final year at the University of Edinburgh.

Memo to Gove

Please make cheque payable to Ms Moraymint.

The Huntsman

30 years after the advent of Margaret Thatcher some elements of the Unions still have their grip on the nation's windpipe.

If Cameron wants to cheer people up a bit he might propose another round of trashing the unions and their baleful influence on our national life. Cutting off the political levy making it an 'opt-in in writing in triplicate' would be a good start.

When I was young the Scottish education system was held up as one of the best in the world and self-evidently better than England's.

Now, after 50 years of Socialist hegemony in Trans Hadria has rendered 20% of them unemployable by anything other than a government basket-case scheme.

What an achievement: to render 1 in 5 of your fellow citizens stupid beyond belief.

Hysteria

seems a reasonable plan - any chance of it being retrospective - ?

If they are going to incentivise this way (Frank P - sorry - we use this word all the time where I come from) then surely they should be rewarding those who go on to add real wealth to the country. Why not go further and support technical education/apprenticeships?

Just because the degree is hard, does not automatically mean the holder will go on to add to the economic good, and hence "pay back" the support.

Robert Eve

Has any trade union ever got anything right?

Karla

"It is absurd to think that all universities in this country are equal. Some are better than others and iit makes sense to recognise that when working out who we most want to incetivise to teach in our schools."
Yes, ladies and gentlemen; the Emperor has no clothes.

Colin

Following on from Moraymint...

Memo to Gove:

Please make a cheque payable to UK Taxpayer...

Why is this man still in the shadow cabinet?

General Zod

This is a good idea. Nowhere near enough good graduates go into teaching.

The union carping would have all graduated going into teaching receive the same, so the bad, the mediocre and the good would all receive the same. That's the way they want educational outcomes to be (and they currently get what they want).

Screw them!

Holly ......

Interesting piece on prisoner voting rights.
Are the government going to be forced by Europe to give prisoners voting rights?
Anyone trying to find out?
Maybe one of the things getting smuggled out of No10 while we are all chuntering about climate change/inheritance tax.

True Bred Pomponian

We also need more men in teaching. Can this scheme be extended to include men going in to teaching, or is CMD too much of an uber-feminist to allow this?

Dorothy Wilson

Boudicca & True Bred Pomponian are both absolutely right.

And is nonsense to argue that all universities are equal. Around 4/5 years ago I did some volunteer mentoring on a Young Enterprise project at one of the local ex-polytechnics turned universities.

My estimate was that about 50% of the group of 20 or so students I dealt with should not have been at university. Indeed a good few of them were in for a bitter let-down because their understanding of what the careers they were studying for [eg Human Resource Management] entailed was completely wrong.

These students would have been much better to have studied for an intermediate qualification at a college of FE - those who were capable of doing so could have up-graded to a degree later. And what a pity the colleges of FE have become the Cinderellas of the educational system.

However, the real problem I had was with the staff. They kept changing their minds over what they wanted from the students. My fellow mentors and I were asked to prepare the students for one thing only to find what they were expected to do had changed. The dates for assignments were brought forward and then pushed back and so on. It was all pretty appalling - and depressing.

More recently, I have been trying to help someone with a PhD [in particle physics] from a good university get into a job. Unfortunately, he is a victim of a system that encourages universities to persuade the intellectually bright to study for a doctorate. After all they can undertake the detailed elements of the research that earns the universities the grants they need to enable the academics to pursue their pet subjects. Even more unfortunately when those students gain their doctorates and decide they do not want to stay in academia they are spewed out into the job market with little in the way of employability skills. Even such skills as being able to put one's point forward in a meeting seem to be totally lacking.

To me to this is a total waste not only of the taxpayers' money involved but of the time - and emotional effort - these students put into their studies. There seems to be something very wrong somewhere.

Sorry to go on a bit - as you may have guessed all this is something about which I have a good many concerns.

Holly ......

Could we be suspended from Europe if the government do not allow prisoners voting rights?
Anyone trying to find out?

Michael Booth

Hang on, Gove also said this:
"We'll develop a Troops to Teachers programme to get professionals in the army who know how to train young men and women into the classroom, where they can provide not just discipline but inspiration and leadership."

What the ..??????????

Cogito Ergosum

What graduate with a good degree would want to waste their time pretending to teach an insolent bunch of undisciplined layabouts?

Only if they were paid ENORMOUS sums of money for maintaining Labour's "let's pretend" policy inour schools.

Hysteria

Micdhael Booth

what's your point?

Wilhelm

How can anybody take Michael Gove seriously.

He looks about 12.

Ian Walker

I disagree entirely with the need for teachers to be degree educated anyway.

Think of all the experienced, intelligent professionals that the economic cycle chucks on the scrap heap in their 40s and 50s, where a years worth of training would turn some of them into excellent teachers with at least a decade of working life left.

Dorothy Wilson

Ian Walker is absolutely right. The rot in education accelerated when teaching became an all graduate profession. the university authorities then needed to come up with something to fill in the 3 years of the course and turned to sociology and social engineering. The teaching profession then lost sight of what should be its primary purpose - to teach children to read, write and add up and then use that as the foundation stone on which to develop their education, themselves and live their lives.

Also, perhaps we should introduce a rule that no-one should be allowed to teach until they are around 35 years old and have some experience of life.

2trueblue

Dorothy Wilson, agree with all of your statement except the latter bit... You will not attract people form other fields in any great volume. We need a mix as with everything in life, I have nothing against young talented teachers in the profession. We have lost sight of the basics which are the building blocks of progression. I get furious when I hear about allowing children to express themselves, and using this as an excuse for not getting the goundwork done.
Rewarding those who study the more technical and scientific subjects ahouldbe encouraged as we need them to rebuild our future. It should not just apply to those entering the teaching profession.