The public sector delusion

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an amenability towards doing a spot of teaching? They still seem terribly averse to the whole idea. During the first lockdown, 60 per cent of young children received no virtual lessons at all from teaching staff, and one in five pupils over 12 was given no work to do, according to the Children’s Commissioner. Virtual lessons shouldn’t have been terribly difficult to arrange, but most of the time there were none. My own daughter had no virtual lessons from March to July (which is why she’s no longer in the state sector). She did, however, complete five physics papers and, being scatty, sent them — one after the other — to the wrong email address. Nobody noticed.

When we contacted the school to inquire about online lessons we were told mimsy stuff about how our priority should be to protect her mental wellbeing during this terribly stressful time, yada yada. One head teacher in the north-east reported that almost her entire staff were sitting at home on their arses doing nothing at all. When lockdown was lifted on 4 July it was gently suggested that perhaps the kids might get a bit of tuition over the summer, but the unions went berserk. They seemed to demand a kind of permanent lockdown where they never have to teach anybody anything at all. It seems highly likely to me that the kids will be given no exams next summer, thus freeing the teachers from even the mild rigours of preparing their charges for tests. In that weird anti-lacuna of activity between lockdowns, whole classrooms of kids were sent home for a week or so if one of them showed as much as a sniffle.