Got five minutes? Then please pray

Here are just four of the things that need our prayer - if you have five minutes to spare - please read and pray (and discuss these issues with others) - Thank You:


Iraq and Syria
In Iraq those who oppose the ISIS forces, or are from different sects within Islam or different faiths, are being put to the sword or fleeing for their lives.
Churches are desecrated and bear the writing shown below - proclaiming that they are now the property of the state.
In Syria, in the northern province of Raqa, ISIS militants have killed at least 85 soldiers - more than 50 being summarily executed (which is murder and a war crime) - UN spokesman says:
'Some of the executed troops were beheaded, and their bodies and severed heads put on display in Raqa city.'
This is as much of a humanitarian tragedy as the Israel conflict - and yet is now generally unreported - please pray that people will understand what is going on and will call upon their governments to act.

'Property of the Islamic State' - on the wall of a former Christian Church

Israel
It is right to pray for the peace of Jerusalem - and for that of the Palestinian territory.
To pray that those who fire rockets into Israel would stop and choose a path of dialogue and peace.
To pray that the nation of Israel would remember that the law calls on them to act with proportionality and to avoid retaliation that endangers those who under the law have protected status.
It is right to pray that the US, rather than vote 'No' and turn its eyes away from the humanitarian tragedy that is this conflict makes a stand for that which is right, moral and courageous.
That those nations who fuel this conflict through arms, political means and self-interest seek instead justice, mercy and peace.

Why can't we be friends?

Ukraine
Please pray for those who sift through the wreckage: For their protection and their sanity as the engage with such a scene of loss and devastation.
Pray for the relative and friends of those who were lost and for their protection and support as they come to terms and live life without loved ones.
Please pray for the political situation and for peace and commonsense to come to the fore.
Please pray for those who seek power everywhere that they would understand the results of their actions and, even if they will not repent, step back.

The greed of men is paid out with the lives of the innocents

Education
Please pray for the education of our children in this country of ours as Academies fail to deliver, reforms of the student loan system look likely to increase the fees Universities can charge and schools are seeing more and more teachers leave, or crumple, because of the pressures on them
Pray that education is seen as means of delivering a well-rounded and fulfilled population - it's about living to our potential, not maximising our earning (isn't it?)

Money and Education: when did it become such big business?

That's Education?

Or is it?

I am increasingly finding myself less and less enthralled by the deconstruction of the state education system that is Academies. In fact I wonder what on earth it's all about for it appears to be a system which, in the main, benefits those who provide the things rather than those who attend them!

When we started off with Lord Adonis and the snake oil product that is the Academy I was ambivalent for it merely represented yet another meddle with the education system. As things progressed I found that where at first those who were seeking to run such things were expected to bring money, expertise and the like, it soon descended into a situation whereby companies (sorry trusts) were given land, property and more besides with nothing more than notional commitments. This has to be questionable at so many levels.

Then we had a marvellous happening whereby at a meeting about our new Academy a senior member of the County education structure informed us that an Academy was a good move for a failing school. 'But we're not a failing school,' we cried. 'But you've failed your OFSTED,' came the response (which pantomime like was met by a, 'Oh no we haven't!'). A few weeks later OFSTED arrived and it became a failing school (hmmm!).

It then transpired that, becoming an Academy, removed from the school any need to have 'qualified teachers' (and this has shown in the case of some I've met!) and standardised pay scales, freedom of information requirements and so much more. The schools have been removed from the state system and the main beneficiaries are, it would seem to me, be those who run them (did I mention that one high ranking education official left to join the board of one of these trusts?) not the pupils.

Now as much as I like conspiracy theories, and I can see that this is a great way of funding the Croney culture of the previous Labour government (as continued by the current bunch) and feathering nests of supporters and perhaps even engaging with some form of social engineering in that the proletariat and resettled back into their proper place. After all we need people to make stuff, load the vans and deliver it now don't we?

I read recently that the 7% of school population who go to fee-paying schools make up some 25% of the university population (and I mean Russell group, not some of the newly mown entities that are appearing).

One of the pupils I have heard of recently (living on the Autistic Scale) came out with a crop of E grades - and yet that's not what their potential suggests. I'd say 'that's life' but then another I've come across has equally poor grades, and another, and another and ... One of the parents on Twitter wrote that their child had collected grades a few weeks back and been told that they shouldn't bother to come back!

I'm confused as to what I'm looking at and at a loss what to do about it.

Ask questions and you're fobbed off, or ignored, such that the result is even deeper concern.

Ask for statistics, statements and the like and you're told that what you are seeking is 'proprietary information' and not available in the public domain - for this is market forces and education is now an industry which is competitive - each provider in competition with the other and seeking to harness the market forces to their own benefit.

I hear of 'hostile takeovers' of schools and see Gove and his ilk fiddling whilst our children's futures burn before them on a pyre dedicated to political dogma and social-engineering.

Education is not, as so many seem to think, about 'maximising potential income' but about maximising and realising the potential within each and every child to be the best they can in the areas in which they are gifted and have a desire to be engaged in. It is about finding out how to motivate and educate our children to be the best people they can be at every level (and I don't see how calling teachers by their first names and having them discuss their love life, woes and whatever aids this in any way either).

My role as a minister in the place where I am is to stand up for the weak, oppressed, marginalised and under-resourced and to be honest, one of the biggest groups I am find that fits this bill is our children. So I hear the stories and offer sympathy to parents and children who are not apparently being well-served by the system - but I know I need to do more than pay the lip service that this all too often represents.

So here I am, concerned and confused, but not going away.

The children in my patch deserve more than that - Jesus demands more than that!

Watch this space

And whilst you do - please pray for:

The teachers who are increasingly under pressure

Our children and their families as they seek to develop and grow, that their aspirations a might be met and those who are weaker find them themselves supported by the system

The education system in this land of ours that it would work with open-handed equity and benefit pupils and not those who operate the schools.

Time to sack OFSTED?

The news that some one thousand schools previously considered by OFSTED to be 'outstanding' are to be re-inspected causes me great concern for a number of reasons.

My first concern is how inspectors can assess a school as 'outstanding' and then suddenly reconsider their assessment as the teaching was subsequently regarded as "not have reached the highest standard". "The teaching was below standard," doesn't cut it because it it was then the school wasn't outstanding, was it?

This doesn't speak of poor teaching but substandard inspectors and this should trigger an investigation into OFSTED and, as we so enjoy our blame culture, inspectors and those who control them should be in the dock. It's inspectors that should be rolling here nit schools and their heads!

Of course we could always look to a conspiracy theory approach and wonder to ourselves whether there might be some future correlation between this re-inspection and the creation of more academies (which according to some of the reel Akademmix put it recently: 'Academisation' or 'Academification' - bunch of blinking loonies!!!). If this occurs then the inspectors are substandard at all, they're much worse and so is the source of the intervention and unseen direction.

In an education meeting recently I was shocked to hear a head speak of how some schools were being placed in 'special measures' so that they could be taken over and made into academies as a 'hostile take-over'. Boardroom terms for education, shocking and yet fitting as we see our schools taken out of the state education system and transformed into academies where freedom of information, parent governorship and many other aspects of schooling that we have taken for granted are no longer.

I'm happy to see inspectors work with the schools and any rise in standards has to be good but I'm not so sure that 'no notice' inspections are the right way to go. The few days warning schools get now is stress-inducing enough, but to have an inspection just descend is destined to put already overworked teachers into a place where the stress will be ever present and will be detrimental to the good running of our schools and will cause more stress-related departures of extremely good teacher.

Let's look at the realities:

Budgets are being cut and so teachers have to make choices:

a. Teach and because the budgets for TAs (Teaching Assistants) are reduced they also have to clear, do presentation work and the many subsidiary tasks that are not part of the teaching role proper.

b. Spend more and more time on the processes and paperwork that will be needed to satisfy, and provide audit trails, for the OFSTED inspectors and ignore the TA tasks.

c. Do the TA work, the lesson prep', the marking, the teaching, the clearing away and the various roles within the school (special needs, curriculum and the oh so many other little areas like after school activities, visit planning, the PPA - for which support is going by the board for some because of budgets and staffing issues) and all the required paperwork and see how long it is before a different career (or breakdown) beckons.

d. Just teach and be resigned to just making do and doing enough (which will work until the new disciplinary process sees you gone by the end of that term).

e. Place a knotted hankie on the head, stick a pencil up each nostril and consider the future as a retired teacher and wonder what your CPN will be like and what pills you'll be on!

I fear our education system is becoming commercialised and removed from the state and the pressures and manipulation of means and methods are leading us to a very bad place indeed. So if you're a parent or a dogcollar - get involved and join your local governors, friends of and anything else that will get you involved and informed . . . Hug a teacher (well say "Thank You' anyway - you won't get an ASBO for that!) TODAY!

I guess these words from a recently retired teacher who left on medical grounds of stress after their second OFSTED in as many years sums it all up:

What's the difference between OFSTED and a plastic surgeon?

A plastic surgeon tucks up features . . . . .

Education - Declining Standards

I'm not sure whether the place we inhabit appears to be in educational turmoil and decline because of the imminent coming together of schools to form academies or whether we are seeing something that is even more worrying.

Actually, as far as I am concerned, and regardless of the reasons, I don't think it can be any more worrying as we have children at varying stages of education, primary and secondary, and they appear to be suffering.

When you get letters from teachers that are spelt wrongly, hear of lessons where the teacher has to be searched for by the kids, bored of waiting, because they haven't turned up and teachers who appear to lack even a rudimentary knowledge of the subject they are supposed to be teaching, one gets just a little concerned!

We live in a place which had five secondary schools serving the educational needs of those living here. Then came the spectre of BSF (Building Schools for the Future) which decided that one failing secondary would become an academy and the sixth forms from the other four schools would be closed to form another (sixth form) academy. Buildings were knocked down and things started to happen with the sixth form provision and then things changed and it transpired that the money was gone. No replacements for the demolished buildings and educational bedlam!

Then things moved a pace and suddenly the secondary school where the sixth form is to be is also to be an academy and the remaining three schools are to become a multi-campus academy too! Five become three and five sixth forms become one in the name of giving us more choice! Seems the mathematics is as poor as what the speling is!

Teacher I've spoken to are looking at their options regarding jobs, after all one of the big benefits of the academies (for those who run them) is the fact that teachers don't have to be registered teachers, anyone can be a teacher at an academy! The upshot of this is that you can bring in the best from industry and commerce, but as you have to pay for what you get and there are no national pay scales from non-registered teachers, I am assuming that financial expediency rather than academic prowess will dictate here. Pay peanuts and get monkeys appears to the potential here.

Each member of staff negotiates their own salary and they apparently sign a non-disclosure agreement, which means collective bargaining and parity goes out of the window - ingredients for a happy and content ship or one containing mistrust and dissatisfaction?

Not only that but the government have now changed the academy programme such that whilst, initially, those companies and groups looking to run an academy had to bring in money, this has progressed via a mere promise of money to the situation now where we just hand over our schools and pay them!

The schools are outside the freedom of information act and are effectively a law unto themselves. The governors, as they once were, vanish and there is potential for one parent on the board, but this is not a requirement and so it will be a 'done to', rather than 'done with' situation.

All in all, what we appear to have before us is a most unsatisfactory removal of our schools from the LEA (Local Education Authority) state school system into an independent and potentially unsatisfactory general school system. Students are cherry-picked to get the grades that win prizes and for the lower level students the path they will follow will set them on the way to blue-collar, drone-like, futures that the comprehensive education system removed.

All in all, the recipe for a decline in education and a destruction of the state school system which has served us well and once made us the envy of many nations. Not any more I fear!

Still, they're looking at the NHS next, plaster anyone?

Pax