Letters From 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 Jim Murphy,

How dare you make such disgusting remarks about David Cameron and the Conservatives.  It is you who should be apologising for what you have said, not David Cameron.

Let me start by clearing up a few points which you have ‘accidentally’ missed.  Firstly, David Cameron did not say that trips to Auschwitz were a gimmick - he questioned them on the grounds that Labour are making schools pay £100 towards each pupil that goes, rather than paying for the trip in full.  The fact that the government deliberately tried to hide the small print is what makes it a gimmick, not the nature of the visit.  Your deceitful spin is outrageous and you should be ashamed.  For you to say that his remarks are ”sick and an insult to the memory of those who have suffered and to the experience of the survivors who still live with this today” is shocking and shows how completely ignorant you are.

But even though Cameron doesn’t think the trips are a gimmick, I certainly do.  Why should the Government start paying for trips to Auschwitz?  And while we are on the subject, what right did the Government have to introduce a ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ at a cost of £500,000 a year?  Why don’t we have a day to mark the 2,000,000 that Pol Pot killed in Cambodia, or the slaughter of 1,500,000 Armenians at the hands of Turkey in WWI, or how about commemorating Stalin wiping out around twenty million people through a forced famine in the 1930s, or Japan killing millions of civilians in WWII, or China killing tens of millions over several decades in the second half of the 20th Century in both China and Tibet?  Well? Can you explain this?  Holocaust Memorial Day and sending children to Auschwitz are both gimmicks and the Government has no right to elevate certain atrocities above others and tell me which historical events I should mark and which I should not.  Let schools educate children, not idiotic politicians and bureaucrats.

Get your facts straight before you start accusing others of being sick and insulting - you and Ed Balls are the only guilty parties here.

Yours angrily,

A.Tory

Dear Michael Gove,

Your appointment to the Shadow Cabinet now seems a distant memory, although at the time it was certainly well-received.  You have made some worthy Commons announcements since then and have given some clues as to how the Conservatives will approach education should they form the next government, but the public have yet to see any noticeable transformation in your stature.

As the Labour Party churn out more nonsense initiatives this morning, you are presented with yet another opportunity to make a name for yourself.  This may not be as straightforward as you might hope seeing as the grammar school cloud still hangs over your head.  As a Conservative I still have no idea how the Conservative Party would structure our schools and qualifications, and David Cameron’s obsession with the utter disaster that is City Academies is most disheartening.  Labour are happy to keep sticking the knife in whenever the Conservatives criticise their hapless education policies because they know the Conservatives are too scared to make any major announcements and reignite the problem of having to make decisions about selective education that could split the party (again).

Although you are highly regarded in the Conservative Party, the voters know precious little about you and your policies - which will inevitably make them very nervous.  Until you and David Cameron make a definitive stand on some unanswered questions, education will remain a very vulnerable spot for us.  Labour need to score some easy points right now, which is why sidestepping education simply cannot continue.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory

Dear Mike Baker,

Thank you for your article on the BBC News website about pupils rating their teachers.  I am very interested in education and was educated in schools and universities from the age of 4 to 24, so like most people I’ve seen many teachers and sat in many lessons ranging from sheer brilliance to absolutely dire.

It was fascinating to read your accounts of trying to judge the quality of teachers, seeing as you will be helping to judge the national teaching awards being held soon.  Your mention of the www.ratemyteachers.com website, which had proved very controversial in the teaching profession, reminded me of how differently people perceive teaching as a career.  The unions have always and probably will always resist any attempt to put extra pressure on teachers.  I would agree that teachers do have to put up with a hell of a lot in terms of bureaucracy, stress, etc but at the same time I’ve always felt strongly about the lack of controls over the quality of teaching in our schools.

To cut a long story short, you basically can’t fire a teacher for being rubbish or incompetent.  You can only get rid of a teacher if they engage in gross misconduct or something along those lines, which is usually difficult to prove.  It horrifies me that once a teacher has been given a job at a school, they have that job for life regardless of whether they are any good at it.  I’m sure everyone at some point experienced some diabolical teaching, but to think that a teacher could get away with it can’t be right.  Getting students to rate teachers may sound ridiculous, but it can offer an insight into a classroom that a formal observation (where a senior teacher sits at the back of the class and watches a lesson, in full view of all the other students) never will.  We often forget how many teachers the pupils meet in just a few years at secondary school - and I would be willing to bet a lot of money that they can easily tell the difference between the good ones and the bad ones.

Teaching as a profession needs reform for all kinds of reasons, and schools being unable to get rid of sub-standard teachers is certainly something that needs to be looked at.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory