Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said the Government had corrected “an obviously nonsensical position”, adding that ministers must “do their duty” by closing all primary and secondary schools to contain the virus.
An expert in epidemiology, is she? Or just another union leader out to get her members paid for doing fuck all for a couple of months?
If this works, perhaps the schools can be closed permanently, and the kids learn over the net.
But I’m sure that the mums’ would scream to high heaven if they had to put up with the little brats at home all day.
Now is the perfect time to bust the Union. She wants to close the schools and let her members to stay home? Fine. Close them and fire all the workers. Derecognise the Union. Hire back anyone who wants to come back on condition they are not members of that or any other Union.
If only Boris had some balls.
In a Zoom meeting, Mary shared her thoughts on the little ones in Reception and Year One, “who are mucky, who spread germs, who touch everything, who cry, who wipe their snot on your trousers or your dress”.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11694555/mary-bousted-schoolkids-suffering/
“Now is the perfect time to bust the Union. She wants to close the schools and let her members to stay home? Fine. Close them and fire all the workers. Derecognise the Union. Hire back anyone who wants to come back on condition they are not members of that or any other Union.”
No need to do all that. Now is the perfect time to introduce education vouchers. Give parents the money, let them spend it at schools that actually want to educate children. Once the teachers face the sack because their school is bringing in no revenue they’ll soon change their tune about whether teaching can be done.
Incidentally is there a possibility that one reason the State is doing so badly in the covid crisis is that its disproportionately staffed women who are a) disproportionately overweight and more susceptible to the virus and thus more scared of it and b) being women more risk averse anyway? Could this be the real reason the government is shit scared about the NHS collapsing? Not that it couldn’t cope with the resources it has, more that most of its staff are too unfit and haven’t got the bottle for the fight and going off sick at the drop of a hat? That it could collapse due to the ‘angels’ running in the opposite direction from the crisis?
The Civil Servants in the Department for(?) Education seem to be really cr*p at their jobs. They seem to specialise in giving their Secretary of State advice which then has to be reversed. But the blame always falls on “The Government”; never on the *rseholes who produce the cr*p.
A Secretary of State who was any use would have got a grip by now – preferably by administering an industrial strength purgative.
I fear that a grand coalition of people* that stand to benefit from the covid hysteria** is too much to overcome.
A 3rd-rate pandemic with a sustained 1st-rate hysterical overreaction
*Largely statist cunts
** a disease for which: 99.7% survival rate; avg age of death about 1.5 yrs (I think it is) HIGHER than average age of death all-causes 2019; most people seem to have to have a test to know they’ve got; a not insignificant number of people have to be convinced to have a vaccine for; is not even in top 10 causes of death for 2020; ‘deaths from deliberately conflated with deaths with.
SMFS–You are too old to be naive. Johnson is BlueMarxist scum–he goes beyond BlueLabour with his greenshite capers. What REAL Conservative PM would have put up with and done nothing about the BBC /Sad Dick Khan’t BLM fireworks on NY Eve. I would have used H&S raid as an excuse to shut that caper down. Though I wouldn’t have needed to as both the BBC and Office of London Mare(sic) would have been abolished in Dec last year. About 1 week after the Election.
Johnson is a big part of the problem not any sort of solution.
But I’m sure that the mums’ would scream to high heaven if they had to put up with the little brats at home all day.
I love children (not in a 1970’s BBC radio DJ way) but they really are horrible little bastards and lockdown is exactly like Lord of the Flies, if those kids had iPads and called you “a homo” for insisting they wash their hands after doing a shite.
Agatha Trunchbull did nothing wrong.
I’m with Ecks on this. Current batch of pretend Tories are gutless. Simple answer to this is to insist the schools are opened. If the teachers don’t turn up, they must be striking. So no necessity to pay them. Either kids get taught or the government saves money. Win/win.
“the little ones in Reception and Year One, “who are mucky, who spread germs, who touch everything, who cry, who wipe their snot on your trousers or your dress”. ”
Well yes.. Because that’s ..’yknow… kids.. And that’s just the girls.. The boys actually are worse, and rebel against being treated like girls and the expectations of Disney Princessism.
Then again.. I have never encountered anyone high up in the echelons of primary teaching ( almost exclusively pedagogues..) who actually understood or liked kids. Their offspring are generally bundles of frustration who unurprisingly inevitably lash out..
The Union says it wants certainty and no last minute U turns so how about if schools are closed the government reduces school holidays in a preset order say no spring half term, reduce Easter to a week, no summer half term and then possibly reduce the summer holidays to 2 weeks
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/teachers-union-leader-pushes-to-keep-schools-closed-as-she-vacations/ar-BB1cp8ti
Teachers union leaders, mind you I would.
Three-quarters of the function of schools is child-sitting. There’s no reason that can’t continue without qualified teachers present (replace with discipline / welfare staff). And since teachers insist that online remote learning is feasible, let’s develop that further. Hire the best teachers (10, 5, 1?) in each subject and have them record lessons at various ability levels for replay in all schools. No need for each school to have lots of specialist teachers, just a few good ones with generalised skills for interaction and progress monitoring.
Teachers are showing us that most of them are not needed.
Remember, the teachers’ unions are there to advance the interests of the teachers not the children.
@PFJp yes, that has been happening. I’ve covered a number of classes where the teacher has uploaded a lesson and I’ve just had to sit there pressing play and pause on a laptop.
As a supply teacher (who only gets paid if I show up) my reaction to the delayed return of schools is ‘great, yet more lost potential earnings’Andty 🙁
corrected “an obviously nonsensical position”,
quite so. closing schools made no sense last time so why repeat the nonsense.
Kids crying and wiping their snot on the teachers? Not when I was in infant school four decades ago. Back then it was: march into cloakroom, wash hands wash face, file into classroom, call off register, Billy yes miss, Charlie yes miss, Jilly yes miss, Mark yes miss…. then sit down at desks. End of day clear all the desks, tidy all the bookcases, put chairs back. What’s happened to this country? Bring some Japanese teachers over.
What’s happened to this country?
Cultural Marxism.
Bring some Japanese teachers over.
I wonder how much you’d have to pay them to come? Put it this way, I’d rather learn Japanese and move to Japan to teach there rather than be a teacher in the UK state system.
I’ve recebtly dropped out of university, for the record I’m almost 50. I thought it might be a fun thing to do now the kids have left and are at uni too. Was actually at the same uni as one daughter.
Honestly, what I saw on offer was not worth £9 let alone £9k. Literally had one lecturer in a live session talk about his “doggies”, and his concern over them not wanting to go for a walk or eat. The “doggies”, were stuffed toys. I may post that on YouTube.
I watched one of my daughter’s lectures, and the lecturer could barely manage a coherent sentence. Of course not are all as bad as this, but this is a red brick Russell Group university, in fact the original redbrick university. If the pinnacle of education in this country is this bad, i hate to think what schools are actually like.
As a previous poster says, teachers should be concerned. Some parents have likely already realised that schools do very little teaching, sure there are good examples but I expect Pareto and Price(?) have something to say on effectiveness of the vast majority. I expect that most accomplished children achieve what they achieve in spite of the educational offering rather than because of it.
But if we’re going online, then fuck it, pick the top ten percent of teachers, have them produce the material, and sack the rest, in an online world they have no value.
let’s develop that further. Hire the best teachers (10, 5, 1?) in each subject and have them record lessons at various ability levels for replay in all schools. No need for each school to have lots of specialist teachers, just a few good ones with generalised skills for interaction and progress monitoring.
One thing we are discovering from Covid, is just how bad this idea is in practice. Yes, I’ll give you that it should work in theory. But then the Spud can tell you how awesome his ideas are, because he works from equally vacuous theory.
At “various levels” eh? That sounds so easy. Maybe you could record a couple of videos and show us how easy it is. Because people don’t work at nice neatly defined levels. (For the record, I have recorded a whole bunch of such videos, so I know exactly what is involved.)
One of the signs of a really bad teacher, is one who farms out their teaching to videos. Because it isn’t teaching. If you think that teaching is about telling people stuff and they understand it and then can do it, then you have entirely the wrong idea.
Even university students are finding it hard to learn without personal interaction, and with younger students it is a non-starter.
Covid won’t spell the end of distance learning, but it sure will knock it back badly. Too many people have tried it for the hucksters to be able to sell it as a panacea.
Creative destruction does cause rather a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
PJF : “Three-quarters of the function of schools is child-sitting.”
Yes. And yet there’s no alarm bells going off. And no hangings in front of the Department for Education.
A Secretary of State who was any use would have got a grip by now – preferably by administering an industrial strength purgative.
They are unsackable. This is the problem – the usual colossal fuck up results in the resignation of a minister, scrutiny moves on and everyone else stays in place to fuck the next thing up. Nothing changes. “Why is the government so shit at everything?”, wails everyone.
@ Rob
Not quite – but most managers don’t bother because it is too much like hard work and they are better off putting in the time and effort elsewhere. My wife once regaled me with how her new enthusiastic manager had finally got rid of a chronically idle and incompetent woman who should have sacked ten years earlier – it took over six months and two tribunals and hundreds of hours of the manager’s time. She (the manager) just would not have had time to do her main job properly if she had tried to sack two at once – and if a male manager had tried to get rid of her he would have been accused of sexism making it even more difficult and time-consuming.
Priti Patel is being accused of bullying because she shouted at someone far bigger than her when his incompetence drove her nuts – but he’s gone. Major drama in the media demanding that Home Secretary should be sacked because a Civil Servant who failed to do his job resigned …
Yes, tell civil servants they *can* be sacked for laziness and incompetence; keep the protection for those who are good but don’t parrot the party line.