Balls Builds Loony Schools

Ed Balls's plan to replace traditional subjects with 'thematic' lessons | Education | guardian.co.uk

Ed Balls continues New Labour's 'progressive' plans to completely fuck up education in Britain. Here are some of the things his new bill will introduce in 2011:

• Introduce a new license to practice for teachers, which they will have to reapply for periodically in order to prove their fitness to teach;

• Give schools greater flexibility in spending their budgets and encourage them to set up federations to share resources;

• Allow the introduction of a new school report card setting out the quality of services and pupils' achievements in each school to give parents better information than is currently available in exams-based league tables;

• Introduce a new register for home educated pupils run by local authorities.

Not even home schooling will remain out of the clutches of the incompetent state.

That won't matter, though, because:

There is greater emphasis on children's happiness and wellbeing. The bill also makes personal, social and health education – including sex education – mandatory in primary schools for the first time, though parents will still be allowed to opt their children out of lessons until they turn 15.

Ah, that 'wellbeing' bollocks again.

At primary level subject-based teaching will be eliminated in favour of thematic areas of learning:

The bill will legislate for the new primary curriculum, starting in September 2011, to reorganise traditional subject areas such as history and science into thematic areas of learning, such as "historical, geographical and social" lessons. The aim is to try to ease the pressures of the cumbersome curriculum on schools and give schools more freedom to do cross-subject thematic lessons.

Best thing most concerned parents can do is make sure they stock up on old-fashioned books full of unfashionable facts and get their kids to read them at home, because they sure as hell aren't going to learn anything in school in the future.