Matblack said:
In all honesty I believe that the Labour party have done an OK job in the last few years. Yes, Iraq was a huge **** up and Blair is a sicaphantic twonk but they have taken taxes and turned them into a better economy and improved the health service and education marginally. However the ethical and political stance of the LDs appeal to me more and hence get my vote
MB
Improved education??!
I work in education and I can assure you that all Labour have done is siphon funds back out of it. They have year on year failed to increase the funding by the same amount as inflation, usually around 1~2% below it. Might not sound much but when you're talking millions of pounds, its a significant cut. Each year it gets harder for education to pay the necessary cost-of-living increases annually, let alone any pay rises. The government put in this great thing called Proffesional Standards Payments, which they give to teachers who are at the top of their pay scale. They funded it for the first year with money explicitly set aside for it, and gave us a plan to cover x years of PSP. Then what did they do the very next year? Withdraw PSP funding, and left us having to pay PSP with money we hadn't got,
alongside the inflation increases. Most colleges are being forced into mergers with others to get some economies of scale. So far in this area I can think of 6 or 7 colleges that have merged, and I've seen the huge fallout from it. Whilst economies of scale have been good, the new infrastructure they have to use is abysmal and education standards have dropped. Again.
Labour has failed to take the bull by the horns and make the major change to the education structure after putting Mike Tomlinson to work on it for over 2 years. He came back with a frankly superb structure, produced in consultation with virtually all major colleges, teacher organisations, education thinktanks and what have you, it was a huge improvement over the fiasco we've got now and met all their criteria, but because the new education secretary wasn't prepared to make major decisions (and still isn't) it has been totally scrapped. Not even sidelined.
They did an absolute classic not 4 months ago. Withdrew all money from the Learning and Skills Council. The LSC had its financial year changed to March 31st. The government took the money out at the end of december and forced every institution that gets funded by them to run off their reserves for 3 whole months (imagine the salary bills alone..) before we'd get the money back. Education is not a cheap business and a good number of places had to take large loans out to survive. This particular time of year is one of the most expensive in education with the large amount of coursework projects being done, exams costs and god knows what else. Easter is usually used for major building work, but with no money most places have had to put off scheduled maintenance tasks. Some colleges came shockingly close to bankrupcy as a consequence of the withdrawl, and yet all this was so the government could give the LSC some money to start the new financial year with. All the whilst this is going on they've poured tens of billions of dollars into the war in Iraq. Talk about having priorities wrong.
This from a Labour government! They've always been the champions of education, arguing for more money to be put in, but we've not seen it these last two government terms. I'll admit outright, I'm a socialist in my political views, but I strongly dislike this labour government. They are in no way socialist.
