Licensing teachers: nonsense!

Even Michael Gove eventually rejected the idea of licensing teachers on the grounds that it would add to an already overburdensome administrative system in schools. Only a privately educated Labour spokesperson for education could succeed in providing teachers with one reason for agreeing with the worst Education Secretary in modern times!

     Presumably Hunt has accepted hook, line and sinker  the coalition propaganda about state education, promulgated yet again in another TV series, which clearly is set to ignore the best aspects of comprehensive schooling, and to focus instead on trainee teachers` failure to discipline effectively challenging behaviour? Exciting television viewing, perhaps, but hardly a reliable enough source of evidence for a trained historian?

    Hunt clearly still has not grasped the fact that this Tory-led government has an ideological agenda, aimed at a two-tiered sytem of education, whilst privatising as much as possible. State schools are now providing such a good education, Gove had to change the examination system to reduce the amount of success achieved. Schools are full of enthusiastic, "motivated" and extremely hard working teachers,who are "passionate about their subjects"; well-prepared lessons,which inspire and challenge  the most hard working set of schoolchildren the country has ever had, abound, with more lessons observed, teachers appraised and learning assessed than ever before, not to mention the role played by Ofsted. Hunt has already gone on record in supporting Performance Related Pay for teachers, a system that all teachers see as totally unfair and impractical, and now he is proposing this licensing scheme! Does he not visit state schools, talk to teachers, parents and pupils, and have meetings with union leaders? Teachers have been driven to distraction, even resorting to strike action, by non-stop criticism and attacks from Gove for nearly four years, and now this; teachers and students deserve better. It makes one wonder whether Labour actually wants to win the election!