Sunday, August 26, 2007

Labour ministers admit they've failed on education?

JUst wanted to do a quick post about something on the Fabian's Fabians website. It's not about their recent poll on average earnings that Tory Radio and Croydonian mentioned yesterday, but instead their latest issue. It is an Education Special and runs with the headline "Can Gordon Brown fix education?"
After ten years of Labour government, can Gordon Brown fix education? This summer's education issue of the Fabian Review sees interviews with the new Education Secretaries, Ed Balls and John Denham, plus agenda-setting pieces from Tom Hampson, David Blunkett, Louise Bamfield, and Fiona Millar. Read the Fabian Essay on social mobility by John Van Reenen and Stephen Machin.
Excuse me? "Fix" education after ten years of Labour? Is that an admission that they've failed then? And if they;ve got "agenda-setting" articles by ministers are they too conceding that they've failed?

4 comments:

Chris Paul said...

There will always be headroom for progress in Education. There are some structural problems as well as local ones. Like the hold outs in South Bucks with their damned selective schools for example. And faith and segregated and bad and good and free and ragged and comp and specialised and special needs and special measures and so on and so forth.

"Fix" is the wrong verb. Although it has the benefit of being three letters unlike "Bring a step change to" but hey ho that's journalism and webology.

Always trying to use one word when five are needed.

dizzy said...

Riiight.. so they just used "fix" because it was shorter, and it's merely unfortunate that talking about "fixing" something implies it is broken.

Anonymous said...

Chris,

If you don't like the word "fix", may I suggest "improve"? If you are blindly optimistic perhaps "dramatically improve"?

If you really think that "bring a step change to" is the most appropriate phrase then perhaps that explains how 10 years of "improvement" under Labourhave brought us to the current situation.

Anonymous said...

I fixed our shed roof today because the rain was getting in, I could have brought a step change to it by, hey ho, that would have been a f****** waste of time.

Bit like responding to a Chris Paul comment or blogpost, I suppose?