Poor teachers face tougher regime

[Win2Win Racing]

Plans to make it easier for underperforming teachers in England to be sacked are to go ahead, but critics say it could be a "bully's charter".

More... (http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/education-16535191)

[Win2Win]

Did I hear right on the news? About 17 teachers have been sacked in the last 10 years and the process takes over a year? :crazy: No wonder our kids are a thick a treacle. I know of no other job that takes over a year to sack someone :doh1:

[barneymather]

Sad to say the teaching unions fight tooth and nail to prevent teachers from being sacked, and the rationale behind this completely escapes me. Why keep someone who's not up to the job in a job? I can only assume it's sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of union leaders.

I'm not interested in bashing teachers, as like nurses and police officers, a good teacher is of immense value to society. There are people with a bad attitude in every profession, but out of hundreds of thousands of teachers in this country, are we really expected to believe there are only 17 who can't hack it in the classroom?

If we must have passengers and incompetents in the public sector, let them mess about in council offices all day, not ruin the futures of kids who have the misfortune of being 'taught' by buffoons or lazy swines.

Whatever you think of the party he belongs to, I believe Michael Gove genuinely wants to protect children from those who should be embarrassed to call themselves teachers.

[Godspot]

Whatever you think of the party he belongs to, I believe Michael Gove genuinely wants to protect children from those who should be embarrassed to call themselves teachers.

Nope! Gove is a raging zionist who protects war-criminals & child murderers.

He's with the 1% & needs out of politics.

[scoobydoo]

Gove is a raging :censored: hypocrite...criticises teachers on strike for 1 day but in his younger days he went on strike for 4 months...typical of todays politicians. They want to be somebody, anybody... but principles and beliefs...you must be joking.

[barneymather]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one I'm afraid, at least with regard to Gove's wish to boot out p!ss-poor teachers from the classroom.

As for Gove being poacher turned gamekeeper, although it's par for the course of MPs to say one thing and do another, most of us move rightwards along the political spectrum as we get older.

I was very much of the left when I was in my late teens and early 20s, but now in middle age I look at those who populate this area of poltiics and see a group who are every bit as bigoted as their worst enemies.

Their ideas may be sound perfectly reasonable in principle, but they simply don't work in practice. In education terms, grammar schools - often the only route to a good university for gifted poorer kids - are abolished and every kid is dragged down to the same mediocre level.

What about all the other kids who aren't gifted, some will ask. Well, as unpalatable as it is, not everyone can climb to the top nor do most people actually want to. That doesn't mean those who don't automatically get high exam marks are abandoned, just that those who do and who aren't from an affluent background are given the help they need.

Shirley Williams should hang her head in shame for the education policies she presided over in the 1970s which blocked the path to university for many working class kids. Lives were ruined simply to appease a bolshie Education's Secretary's warped logic.

Of course, this was when going to university meant something and was long before Tony Blair lowered the bar by several miles and allowed even the worst polys to call themselves a university and let everyone and his auntie onto a degree course.

To quote the immortal Winnie Churchill (for excitable forumites, Tory he may have been but he did stand four-square against the Nazis and was a man even his political foes admired), a man of 20 who isn't a liberal hasn't got a a heart, but a man of 40 who isn't a conservative hasn't got a brain. :biggrin:

If, as a stroppy 21-year-old, you'd tried to tell me I'd hold very different views 20 years down the line I'd have called you all the names under the sun and may well have offered you a knuckle sandwich as a side order, but as I say, most of us change as we get older. Unless you're George Galloway. :rolleyes: