Views from Frank Adam in Sedgley:

Bury South Labour Party

- Frank's Column, November 2007

Despite funding and improvements  our Labour Government is still faced with nearly a sixth of secondary schools that still have fewer than 30% of pupils achieving five grades ABC - even though that represents a 50% improvement on the two post - 1945 decades.     It is time remember how schools were paid to reinforce and advance successes in the late century, and throw the majority to non - academic work.     However in two major wars the forces training was geared to getting every recruit qualified.    Strange to say it is not just a matter of discipline and money, but they help if applied to sound initial training.  

People who claim that under rthe old underfunded scheme everybody still left school capable of reading arenot entirely to be trusted.   Children associate with their own ability equals, and if the claim were true throughout the system, the forces would not have had to run their own education corps and exams to make up the education of candidate NCO's and technicians.

We used to cut teacher pupil ratio as we advanced  from primary classes of sixty before 1939, to grammar classes of thirty and sixth forms of less than a dozen, to Oxbridge "tute sessions" of two students and a don.   In contrast the Army  treated recruits to four NCO's and an officer to train a recruit platoon's 28 privates.  No messing, malingering and dodging there!

I have seen my own primary classes of 48 cut to forty in my adult career and to thirty by the Blair government.    What we need now is not just, "phonics," but enough class-assistants and volunteers in top infants and bottom juniors to "soak" the pupil body with enough  supervision to hear each child read as an individual each day.   Then there will be a decent chance, excepting a few medical cases, of getting all to start by succeeding, instead of learning to fail from the start.  Meanwhile if we are to get every child to achieve in secondary we need a similar salvage operation in first form, now Year 7, pending the above primary suggestions delivering in five years' time.

If we want every,"brick in the wall," then we have to pay to lay the first courses true, and teach success. Success and  morale that goes with it  bring more success.    It would not do any harm to recruit some strict school welfare, alias attendance officers either - and back them in court.   Peculiar!  Very odd!  How after a century of class snobbery sneers at being clever, suddenly within a generation it is assumed that everybody can be educated to private (teacher-pupil double ratios) standards on public sector budgetary skimping.

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After the most shambolic US presidency for a long time, the race for the succession is on - and not short of half truths.   Giuliani contender for the Republican candidacy has taken a swipe at the NHS  chances of curing prostate cancer - but he did not mention the sixth of the US population that has no medical insurance whatsoever dropping through their figures faintly in their statistics.  

The USA has reason to claim to be the wealthiest economy per capita, and absolutely, on the planet;  yet it does not have the lowest infant mortality figures.    That social top of the league goes to European countries with what the US right wing call 'socialised medicine' and damn because it would give the government anti-libertarian information - as if the government were ever short of a sub poena to take whatever information it might ever want in the name of security, or any other excuse.  Some of us remember the Mc Carthy panic and read about the Know Nothings.

                          

-  FDA