The Government has just announced that vocational qualifications are no longer going to be counted in the League Tables.
This is terrible news. Without Hair and Beauty, Travel and Tourism and Generally mucking About, how on Earth are schools like mine going to fool decent, honest parents into believing that we are just as good as the one down the road that spends all day teaching fuddy-duddy old subjects like 'Maths'.
The truth of course is that we shouldn't be competing at all. Schools like ours should be allowed to teach an entirely vocational timetable along with basic Maths and English (which is more than we teach them at the moment). We could also try and give the pupils a few other useful skills such as timekeeping, perseverance, motivation, money management, debt avoidance, basic cooking and how to avoid being taken in by advertising.
The academic kids should be sent to academic schools and be taught by academic teachers.
4 comments:
"The academic kids should be sent to academic schools and be taught by academic teachers"
Which of course used to be what grammar schools were for (and presumably still is in those areas which are lucky enough to still have them).
While I have nothing against hairdessing as a vocational course per se, I had to laugh when I read earlier this morning that apparently "an NVQ level 2 in hairdressing is worth the equivalent of six GCSEs, but students never cut hair because health and safety regulations ban the use of scissors" Says it all, really!
H&S does not ban the use of scissors, either the course doesnt require that they cut hair (which is weird) or someone is worried that they wont have scissors at all after the first lesson, or Kylie will stab Britney. Of course, we cant have grammar schools or any other such elitist stuff, because that would require someone telling little Romeo that he isn't as bright as the kids hes been beating up for the first few years of his school life. All kids are equal, dont you know.
I don't teach (thank God!) but some of the little secondary shits I encounter on the bus make my blood run cold. To be honest the girls are usually worse than the boys.
I've encounter girls from lots of different schools (it's not as if it's just an unrepresentive handful or one particular bad school).
So far I have heard 13 to 15 year old girls talk in intermit details about their sex lives, others performing a when Harry Met Sally moment for a bus load of people, others talk about the insults they have openly hurled at their teachers in class, some have smoked pot whilst still in uniform, the 'F' and 'C' words are used openly in front of young children, women, and elderly and yesterday...Four of the little darlings sat on the top deck:
"Ey...look; there's Jane Brown! She got expelled for punching a pregnant dinner lady in the stomach..."
And then we got..."'E comes from Chelsea, dunn 'e?"
"Is Chelsea a country?"
"Nah"
"A continent, then?"
"Nah - it's a town innit?"
"What town is it, then?"
I truly believe there is no hope!
I don't live in our around London or even in an inner city, but in the suburbs outside the city boundaries of a large city - God help us all!!!!!
Quite!!
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