Education
April 29, 2010 7:10 PM
Britain's historic success was borne out of innovation, artistry and skill. To climb out of our massive debt and stay out we need a future workforce that can invent and manufacture things that compete with the best the rest of the world can offer. Crucially, we need young people to feel motivated to excel. That cannot come from an educational environment where league tables trump real learning or where degrees are downgraded as Peter Mandelson suggests or students saddled with huge debt as Conservatives and Labour policies have ensured. They need an education way beyond that which I received at King Charles I School in the 1970s.
Government's overweening approach to education must change. Three decades of creeping control-freakery has demonstrated mistrust of teachers by government. Obsessive ministers have shackled them to league tables and tests designed more to "prove" the success of Department of Education than to prepare young people for adulthood. This has forced schools to chase the best pupils and exclude those more likely to fail. It has funnelled teaching into box-ticking rather than nurturing students' strengths.
To change this, we have to return trust and responsibility to teachers, heads and local education governance. The Liberal Democrats would start by shrinking the bloated national curriculum and allowing schools to build their own suite of courses based around a simpler core subject menu.
Rather than the mythical, league-table based "parental choice" that encourages an admissions post code lottery, Liberal Democrats will offer students a real choice of academic and vocational paths between schools and colleges to suit different talents. In higher education we will phase out tuition fees to first degree level and give equal support to vocational training and mature students whether full-time or not.
Most important of all are the first few years of schooling. So we will invest £2.5 billion in cutting primary class sizes to 20 and to offering a "pupil premium" of about £2500 per child to schools who take on children from deprived backgrounds so they have a real chance in life. In Worcestershire, schools would have received £20,005,654 of that sum this year - an investment an investment funded by simplifying Labour's testing and inspection culture that would pay dividends to us all in the future.
Through this and more detailed polices, we hope to create a fairer, more flexible system of education that will enrich our lives and secure our future.
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