Education and learning.

I think I sort of hit on something that has been bugging me last night.

It seems to me that education is becoming exactly that, education and not about learning to live or gaining useful skills.

The kids from our valley school were introduced to a range of things and skills from an early age.

The school was an organic part of the community, the community would throw in money that larger schools found incredible.

12 years ago the school barbecue raised 1500 pounds or put another way about 30 pounds for every pupil on the roll.

But that was the school as part of community and community engaged with school.

Education to me has started to feel like a production line, the targets that should indicate good performance but set within a broader framework of learning have become the sole aim of the school.

Children are components moving along the line with the ones that the system will not engage defined as: dyslexic, autistic, ADHD,ODD.

Problems individualised and externalized.

The system is fine, the boxes are all ticked.

In social work too; did the stat r happen? Was it inside the time framework?

Tick Tick, that's fine.

Did it address the issues robustly? Was it properly recorded? Did everyone concerned turn up?

The important questions do not generate simple boxes for ticking.

So important things are not measured, because they do not generate simplistic boxes for ticks.

You can run a service that does not even get to worst practice, do all the process badly but on time and you come up with a gold star.

A few years back everyone talked about how the introduction of MINIMUM standards in foster care would drive up practice, how wrong they were. They defined the minimum you could get away with and that's what everyone now aims for.

Small wonder Social Work is a mess.

R