On the Guardian thread about teacher shortages and how they could possibly have come about, I posted some government policies to keep teaching recruitment and retention down:
1. Encourage the press to run stories saying that teachers are lazy and that there are thousands of bad ones.
2. Get the head of Ofsted to say the same.
3. Keep this up for decades. (both main parties)
4. Bring in hundreds of measuring and assessment systems, levels, targets, tests, exams, which then breed more 'rehearsal' tests and exams.
5. Bring in a punitive, rapid, unsupportive inspection system which ignores the fact that scores are attached to children so that if you're in a school where there has been turnover the inspectorate say that has nothing to do with us.
6. Run a new kind of school where the salaries of management are not open to public scrutiny.
7. Allow interest groups to open schools which take on proportionally fewer SEN, EAL and FSM pupils than nearby LA schools.
8 Allow covert selection and exclusion process to take place around these new kinds of schools because the LA schools have to pick up the pieces.
9. Use international data as if it is holy writ and ignore evidence that suggests that comparing countries does not compare like with like, that some countries which are 'top' are selecting. Obscure the differences between the countries by only talking about 'places' in the table, without ever making clear whether these differences are 'significant' or not.
10. Use China as an example of utopia in education without making a comparison between the two societies - as if education exists separately from the societies that produce the respective education systems.
11. Make sure that very nearly all the people running the state education system from government have no, or very little, state education experience themselves.
