Letters From A Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

It’s nice to see you getting back to your job, after doing a superb job of humiliating yourself at this years Budget.  It seems that you have picked on faith schools over the past few weeks, but annoyingly I find it hard to argue with your findings that a lot of faith schools are breaking the law on school admissions.

Parents will always want to do what’s best for their children - guaranteed.  They will try to bend the rules wherever possible to get the best deal for their children, and I daresay if and when I become a parent that I will be willing to pursue every possible avenue to get the best education for my children.  If, however, faith schools encourage this behaviour by getting parents to make ‘voluntary payments’ of almost £1,000 a year when applying for their child to attend a particular school, everything starts to fall apart.  Any school found to be breaching the admissions code should be heavily fined or shut down - there is simply no other way to deal with this outrageous abuse of the admissions system.  Michael Gove and myself agree that the system as it stands is not particularly impressive, but rules are rules and no school should escape punishment for so flagrantly breaking their legal obligations.  The fact that faith schools even exist makes my stomach churn and you don’t seem to be doing anything about that because Labour are so obsessed with appeasing religious groups, but at the very least you should crack down hard on those schools that feel the rules don’t apply to them.

I respect parents wanting to do what’s best for their children, but state-funded religious indoctrination is bad enough without parents having to pay towards getting their children into these state schools.  No doubt you will be tempted to do very little about this as Labour always avoids conflict with religious groups due to their unfortunate absence of a spinal cord, but I live in hope.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

You are having a rough time at the moment, aren’t you!  Not content with being part of a government that is clearly in a terminal slump, you have dug a sizeable hole for yourself with all your cheeky antics.

First, there was the infamous ‘So what?’ comment, when David Cameron highlighted the ever-increasing tax burden on British families after the Budget.  Your desperate attempt to get out of this mess by claiming you said ‘So weak’ instead is even more embarrassing.  One would have thought that after such an awful howler in front of the world’s media you would keep your head down for a while, but you kept on digging.  Today you stand accused of burying bad news on education to deflect attention away from the failing schools admission system, and then I find out that your department is happy to abuse our education system by flooding school lessons with lies and propoganda about the Iraq war, leading some to accuse the government of trying to rewrite history.

I have no sympathy with you on any of these counts.  I hope that the public’s perception of you takes a hammering over each and every one of these stories because your arrogance and disdain towards education and political integrity is totally unacceptable.

Yours in loathing,

A.Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

I give up.  You just can’t make your mind up about education.  This nonsense about the diplomas is getting out of hand, because you haven’t thought your plans through.

The new 14-19 diplomas are a joke.  That’s not my opinion; it’s the opinion of the universities and employers who are incredibly reluctant to accept them because the qualifications are not sufficiently rigorous to be put on a par with A-levels.  So what is your solution?  Scrap A-levels.  Great plan, honestly.  I can really feel all the time and effort that’s gone into this.  Your new diplomas do not have anything like the academic challenge that A-levels provide, despite A-levels being made so much easier over the past decade or so.

What your ridiculous plans fail to accept is that we need a strong academic and vocational route through compulsory education, but this is not possible if you try to make them somehow ‘equivalent’.  Academic and vocational studies are clearly not comparable in terms of the skills and knowledge that pupils acquire, so will you please let this socialist nonsense go and finally admit that you cannot have exactly the same qualification for two completely different areas of study and you do not have to give everyone the same certificate.  We need to design parallel systems of training for further study and workplace training (like France, Germany and Sweden) instead of trying to put it all under one umbrella heading.  Vocational training is just as important to this country as academic studies, so stop trying to bring academic studies down to the level of your terrible vocational qualifications - why not start improving workplace training and apprenticeships (which are also a joke)?

Yours in frustration,

A.Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

Are you beginning to see how Labour have failed society?  For all your talk of rising ’standards’ and investment in education, the truth of the matter is that children in this country are suffering and no longer feel safe.  Anxiety and childhood are a dangerous mixture that can have serious consequences when the children get older.

This is a not straightforward issue that can be solved by throwing money at it, just in case you were considering that option (I seriously hope we don’t hear about some stupid headline-grabbing new initiative in the near future).  As always, I believe these problems can be traced back to the family.  The report released today documents how “anti-social behaviour, materialism and the cult of celebrity” are taking over children’s lives and parents are doing little or nothing about it.  Watching too much TV, feeling anxious, lack of respect for teachers, no cohesive family life, involvement in gangs, unsafe streets, unsuitable computer games, childhood consumerism - it all comes back to the breakdown of families.  Parents need to provide a secure, loving environment for their children.  If both parents work full time and are exhausted when they come home, children will stare at the TV for hours every night or sit on their mobile phone chatting with their friends for hours.  Without any family interaction, the bonds between parents and children never fully form and are almost impossible to build from scratch when the children are teenagers.  It is time the government stepped in and increased paid maternity and paternity leave to give children a chance to bond with their parents.  The benefits system also has to be changed to encourage families to stay together and make sure that at least one parent can be there for their children every evening.  Furthermore, the advice available to parents of young children should be massively expanded and ‘parenting classes’ should be offered to everyone (and linked to the benefits system) to provide families with a wide support network.

You can’t measure the dangers of the dissolution of family life across the country, but there are some easy ways to try and prevent it.  I don’t encourage state intervention in most circumstances, but supporting strong families and helping to build enduring relationships between parents and children is most definitely an exception to the rule.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

You’re not on a good run at the moment, are you?  Only a few days ago I sent you a letter about your patent contradictions regarding child safety, and today you pin your name to proposals to increase the number of faith schools in the country.

In this day and age, when religious and ethnic divisions in communities cause riots, promote misunderstanding, increase tension and cause the police and local people immeasurable difficulties, do you really think we need to make things worse?  Faith schools contribute to segregation - how anyone can disagree with this statement is beyond me.  We need to get different groups within the same towns and cities working alongside each other, going to school together, going to the same places and shops etc, and this isn’t going to happen if you draw a clear religious line between them.

I couldn’t care less which religious group it is that wants more faith schools.  Obviously for historical reasons, the majority of faith schools are Christian, but even though England is still technically a Christian country (probably moving towards secular these days) I am still vehemently against rejecting people from a school on the basis of their beliefs.  Education is about precisely that - educating people.  It’s not just about Science and Maths and French, but also about showing children what the world is really like.  What is the point of keeping children in a ‘bubble’ when they are at school, only to walk outside and see what a diverse culture we live in.  The secular nature of schooling coupled with respect for every religious group is fundamental to promoting good relations in every community around the country.  David Cameron says that our society is ‘broken’ and faith schools hinder efforts to fix it, which is why I’m appalled that he supports faith schools as well.

Yours in anger,

A.Tory

Dear Ed Balls,

I’m not entirely sure how to start this letter, seeing as I cannot make my mind up as to how your brain appears to work.  Since your appointment as Children’s Secretary, you and Uncle Gordon have been trying to make out that you care what the public think and that you are concerned about child safety.  Yer, right.

Why don’t we start by looking at your plans described in the Guardian this morning about improving online safety for children.  You have the nerve to say that when children surf the web, “it is about making sure they can do so safely, as far as possible, without being exposed to harmful or inappropriate material. I want children to enjoy new media without their childhood being harmed.”, and yet you still haven’t vetted the 300,000+ users of the new database that will hold personal information about every child in the country or worked out how you will police the database - which would be the perfect opportunity for those who wish to harm children to get access to their home address, school details etc.  A slight contradiction.  The fact that you and Uncle Gordon are turning to the Citizen Juries i.e. glorified focus groups to make us feel like you give a damn about our opinions is laughable and insulting at the same time.  If you and Uncle Gordon really care what we think, where is our referendum on Europe?

Let’s face it - Cameron is right, our society is broken, and you haven’t got a clue how to fix it.

Yours in disdain

A.Tory