This is why Dear old Gordon can say he has succeeded with the apprenticeship schemes the Government is pushing.

It bears absolutely no relation whatsoever with what normal working people think of as Apprenticeships where you had to complete 5 years, often as an indentured apprentice, which involved proper structured training, day release at college for either City and Guilds, HNC or HND qualification.

Its where most of our qualified engineers, toolmakers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, draughtsmen, project engineers, designers, and proffessional management used to come from.

The rest who left School either did lower skill manual/office type jobs (nothing wrong with that) or went to University.

NVQ’s are now the standard it would seem. Dumming down again.

We just seem to get dummer and dummer, and talk it up.

Its one of the reasons we are failing as a Nation

Many talk the talk, but cannot walk the walk.

And then there are the hours. Good teachers will have to work nearly every evening in term time and some of their holidays dealing with various school related stuff as well as marking. A lot of them organise out of school activities and the like.

Good teachers also do an inordinate amount of pastoral work and this involves some very trying calls and meetings with often less than committed students and poor quality parents.

Modern teachers are very highly skilled indeed, and are paid peanuts. The pension is some small recompense. Someone with an equivalent level of professionalism would be 50% to 100% more in private business.

All these problems and the staff exploitation are entirely attributable to the Stalinist monopoly that is state education. Mrs Lola and I joke that she goes each day to attend the ‘state indoctrination centre’. Producer capture is endemic. Funds are short yet eye watering sums are squandered by Whitehall bureaucracy and the Local Authorities. The quality and rigour of exams has reduced each year and nowadays teachers literally spoonfeed the answers for coursework to the children. There is no excuse not to get a GSCE (or whatever they are called) as the teachers do all the work for the children.

At the same time many parents have no sense of value of for the education that is provided for free. Both they and their children see school as some sort of sentence that must be gone through before getting out to work. Of course there are excellent students and great parents, but their ambition is swamped by the dross.

The whole system is an utter mess. The stop go capital funding has started agains so no headteacher can make any sensible plans.

BTW I also have some contacts in FE and some of the stories coming out of there now about how central government is reneging on funding and seeking constructive dismissals for vice chancellors as scape goats would make your hair curl.

Overall this is more evidence that New labour couldn’t run anything. They couldn’t even run a bloody bath. The sooner the whole ‘New Labour Project’ is consigned to history the better. Mr Redwood, old son, if you get in you’d better show me that you can actually successfully manage something. If your lot fail as well…..