government stats · Torchwood

Torchwood gives boost to government figures.

John

A friend of mine and regular Torchwood watcher has emailed about last week’s showing. Apparently, and to cut a longer story short, a bunch of aliens had landed and was demanding 10% of the world’s children. The UK government (who were not portrayed in a very sympathetic light) quickly decided this was reasonable enough, and had a discussion about how to pick the 10%. They concluded that it wouldn’t make sense to get rid of the best kids, so they’d take all of the UK’s 10% from schools that were at the bottom of the league tables. At some point one of the ministers made a comment along the lines of, ‘what would be the point of having the tables, if we weren’t going to do something like this’.
Perish the thought, but such a manoeuvre would boost the success stats at a stroke, wouldn’t it? Would this be the 10% for whom one-to-one tuition is supposed to be offered in Key Stages 2 and 3 classes from next year, thus saving the Ed Balls lots of money? Of course, to make any significant impact, the percentages would have to be the 44% of boys and the 34% of girls ‘who left primary school in 2008’ unable to ‘read, write and count to the current minimum standard’ (Policy Exchange document, p.11).
Look out for reports from government minsters that aliens have landed and that negotiations are afoot.

5 thoughts on “Torchwood gives boost to government figures.”

  1. Desperate times mean desperate measures John. Joking apart, these children certainly seem expendable. How can so many children leave primary schools, let alone secondary schools, without basic skills? Why aren't Head Teachers and Schools accountable? Although to be fair, they are too busy trying to meet the Government and LA's other Agendas.
    DL

  2. Would add that the latest push in our area is 'creativity' and how schools can support the community. For goodness sake, about a quarter of the kids can't even write a sentence.
    DL

  3. Anonymous said, "Why aren't Head Teachers and schools accountable?"

    They are of course accountable – accountable for implementing the appallingly bad literacy tuition advice promoted by the DCSF. It is the fundamental weaknesses of Progression in Phonics, Playing with Sounds and their successor, Letters & Sounds as well as documents such as Support for Spelling that leads to 50% of pupils failing to achieve reasonable literacy. The real question is: How do we hold the denizens of the DCSF accountable for demanding that teachers follow their dreadful pedagogical advice to schools? (And don't make the mistake of thinking that the 50% who do become literate do so as a result of those same DCSF teaching programmes. They don't and would have become literate whatever methods were used to teach them!

Comments are closed.