The Guardian and The Independent are today both reporting Terry Leahy’s attack on Gordon Brown’s ‘woefully low’ standards in education.
It’s the usual complaint – huge amounts of money spent for a very poor return – though for the UK’s largest private employer (Tesco) to voice such an outspoken attack is highly significant.
Leahy claims that standards are too low, that government bureaucracy is stifling and that government ministers spend too much time meddling. As a result, employers are ‘having to pick up the pieces’, he says.
The DCSF, of course, issued its customary denial and claimed that standards have never been higher, etc. etc. (Does anyone believe anything they say any more?), while the director general of the lobby group of the CBI, John Cridland, declared that Leahy’s concerns were echoed throughout industry as a whole. So whom do we believe then?