All being well, he should be able to put it right in about an hour, he went on to tell me, but life, and his job, was being made difficult because the local council doing resurfacing work had happily resurfaced over all the access points to water pipes. Surely there are maps and diagrams intended to avoid such things happening. It’s great when two departments that should be ale to cooperate just get in each other’s way!
We were fortunate; the water supply resumed mid- to late-morning. I heard that some people in other parts of the village had no water until very late in the afternoon. And, sensible people that we are, we always have a jug of water in the fridge and so were able to make coffee for breakfast as usual. In fact the only true disruption was to the washing up which had to be put off for a while.
This morning I read an article based on a book called “Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes” by Diane Reay. As the title suggests, it was all about the disadvantaged lower orders. Children receiving free school meals and pupil premium (a special funding to the school intended to provide extra help for disadvantaged pupils) are 27% less likely to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C. Half of these free school meals children are concentrated in just one fifth of the schools in the country.
Similarly four-fifths of children from working-class minority ethnic families are taught in schools with high concentrations of other immigrant or disadvantaged students – the highest proportion in the developed world, according to a by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. More statistics were given but the basic message was that things have mot really improved in anything like the way we thought they would or indeed in the way that fought for back in the 1970s.
Some of the comments were interesting, especially this one from someone who called himself Sir Someone or Other:
“Perhaps if the schools paid more attention to basic academic rigour in English and Maths starting in primary schools say at age 6 onwards we would see better standards. Of course it's fun learning about history etc. but no good if you have no grasp of the basics. Only an hour a day day. Schools can use material used as lead up to the 11+.”
I suppose that if you have, or give yourself, the title “Sir” you might think that way. I wonder if he has been in a primary school to see how much time actually does go on English and Maths and how hard it is to squeeze in the other stuff. Oddly enough I can remember a time when head teachers used to tell us that we were all teachers of English, no matter what our subject specialism.
Oddly enough again, I read recently about a primary school where the head had decided that all the children would learn to play a musical instrument and that all would be involved in choirs. Art was given enhanced importance as well. All lessons in all subjects would involve arts and music, even Maths and Science. Astonishingly, that school did really well in SATs!
As we plan to pay out large sums of money to leave the EU, I wonder if any will be left to fund education at all. Meanwhile, I have a sense of shutters coming down on the UK, isolating us from all sorts of things. The European Medicine Agency is planning to move to Amsterdam post-Brexit and the European Banking Authority to Paris.
Interestingly, a Spanish friend of mine, someone who opposes Catalan separatism and wants her country to stay united, has been posting stuff from a forum called España que bonita eres to the effect that the Catalan Nationalists lost Barcelona the chance of becoming home of the European Medicine Agency.
So it goes!
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