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have been briefed “off the record” by the most senior conservatives that moving jobs to india and using indian nationals here on inter company transfer visas working for (named companies-ed) etc will all be part of the “cost cutting” approach used in the public sector

If its true I would like to see it “on the record”

Personally I would like to see the widespread abuse of inter company transfer visas stopped, and some sense in these areas

Isnt Somerset County Council Conservative? Have they not outsourced much of their work to IBM? Are you sure absolutely none of this is being done using (foreign-ed) resources?

Reply: I know of no policy to ship loads of work out to India. Anyone running the UK public sector does from time to time offer outsource contracts to see if that is better and cheaper, and these can be open to overseas as well as to UK companies. As you contantly remind us, multinationals can also choose who to hire to fuflill their contracts. It’s not a plot, or some secret policy.

Basically OFSTED, TDA SSDA, QCA, LSC should all be scrapped and rolled into one little DFES ball that is the servant, not the master or inquisitor of schools and teachers.

Schools and teachers should left alone to continue educating young people could do a vastly better job left to their own creative and professional nounce; and collaborating between schools at the local LEA level.

Mrs T reformed the general world of work and nationalised industries – the next Conservative government must do the same for the state.

Independent schools show directly how all the infrastructure isn’t needed.

I think it would be good for each parent to know how much the education of their children was costing ( with LEA /Govt over heads prorated appropriately ) and business rates on the same basis as an independent school would face.

Once people see the cost of education, they would be a lot less relaxed about how its delivered.

Just look at the impact of the “cost of MPs” and the personal tax liability from Brown’s borrowing binge of the political debate.

The left will fight like tigers to prevent this – but education is the left wing swamp that most needs draining.

Apart from the Primary School statistics being collected in a fashion that could be kindly described as cretinous they are gamed to a ridiculous extent.

I removed my son to private in Year 6 for precisely this reason ; I didn’t want him to waste the whole year practicing for tests that have no benefit to him whatsoever.

2. League tables might tell us little, but their introduction made PRIMARY schools much more concerned about their standards.

Standards held till about 1987, when the new GCSEs came in. Because these were trivially easy, A-Levels had to be watered down. I actually remember picking up the first post-GCSE syllabus and sample papers and wondering what I was going to teach for two years.

The “marketisation” of exam papers then dragged standards down and has been doing so ever since aided by the desire of the idiot minster of education of the day to spout tractor stats about exams.

You cannot have a market in exams because a ‘good’ exam means different things to different people.

League tables tell us nothing we don’t know already viz. which schools have a poor intake, and are gamed anyway.

I have been in the education business for 30 years dealing with children at primary level.

In brief, here are the facts about standards.

Throughout the 80s, the standards fell and fell and fell as teachers were allowed to do as they pleased.

Then, in the very early 90′s, the Tories introduced school league tables; and the standards stopped falling.

Since that time, the standards at primary level have more or less stayed the same; perhaps rising slightly.

However, given that middle class parents usually engage private tutors and/or tutor the children themselves, it seems likely that those primary children who do achieve high levels are doing so on the basis of work done outside school.

As such, it seems to me that it is very important that government does, indeed, continue to intervene in schools in order to ensure that the teachers do their jobs properly.

As an aside, I would also point out that boys are being PURPOSELY disadvantaged by those in the higher echelons of our educational system. They have a feminist mindset that dictates that anything that helps boys more so than girls is ‘sexist’ – and must be thrown out – whereas anything that helps girls more so than boys is taken up with enthusiasm.

Your exposure of the expenditures in government departments shows that a socialist government just loves to waste taxpayers money. It also proves that you can cut public spending without cutting frontline services. I truly hope that your party can get that message over to the public in the run-up to the next election.