Clouded by wishful thinking? About evolution and relativity? That doesn’t even make sense. What on earth has this got to do with school standards?

John, there is no ‘equal opportunities’ lesson. No ‘human rights’ syllabus. And what if there were? You do sound like the confused and paranoid person I am sure you are not, really.

The theory of evolution isn’t an ‘ism’, John.

Do you really have a problem with rational science, equal opportunities, cohesion and human rights? Are these things you a) associate solely with the left, b) would rather were not put before children and c) think constitute an ofsted inspection?

Are you actually for real, or is this just some massive but pointless wind-up?

Strikes me there was no shambles within the scope of the 11 Group response, more a single failure.

Whatever the sequence of events and command/communication between and within the Navy and Bomber Command, within Fighter Command things were generally working ok while Leigh-Mallory was a single point of failure. If his staff were too frightened of his response if they bothered him with an urgent message that was his failing. If only he hadn’t ‘politicked’ his way across from 12 to 11 Group, things might have been different. One of many ‘ifs’, I know. Also one of several apparently inexplicable things about fighter command tactics and strategy 1940-42 that can be traced back to Leigh-Mallory.

Is everybody in your universe ‘politically motivated’? Feared and loathed as they may be, I can’t see how ofsted are any more politically motivated than traffic wardens or violinists.

Coursework, and the occasional fiddling of it, are common to all schools that teach to GCSE. The threat of being purchased by a corporation – ‘acadamisation’ – is what drives state teachers to do it, while for private schools it’s down to more immediate financial considerations.

Ultimately, GCSE grades are becoming a bit less about the kid and bit more about the ability of schools to maintain their independence and/or income by ‘upping the metric’. It’s not really a public/private or a left/right argument – it’s more the triumph of the philistine with a spreadsheet over those that value real education.

I doubt they’d have me, John.

It does sound like you have a very personal problem with some specific person or people that you encountered in your past, John.

Were you sacked for wearing that fetching red armband in class?

Seriously, teachers have absolutely no time or space to spout any kind of ‘claptrap’. They have many ever-moving targets to meet and the fact that children are any more than fact-spouting rote-chanting automata (which is what recent education policy has actually been about, if you’d been keeping up) is down to the fact that some manage to be truly inspirational as well – even though it would appear the British right would much rather they weren’t.

Yes, we face many challenges. I know it’s ‘outside the box’ for a rote-thinker, but many of them arise from a staus quo in thinking outliving global realities. We need generations who can think of alternatives, new ideas, old ideas repurposed, new understandings and new ways around problems that we haven’t worked out yet. A generation who won’t just repeat old mistakes. For that we need generations who know how to think, who can critically assimilate the ideas of others, who understand the world around them in all its complexity. In short, if we give a damn about the future we need our children and grandchildren to have a liberal education.

Yes, that was a speech.

Um.. does anyone remember what ‘liberal’ means? If anyone is telling children what their beliefs should be, they sure as Hull are not ‘liberal-minded’.

We are not American. Let’s stop getting that word wrong.

Alan, where is this all from? Did you get the bits that are (at the very least) dubious to anyone with kids in the school system – (exclusion from lessons for views.. how on earth would that work in the school day?) – from our esteemed and famously credible tabloid press? And when you think about it, why exactly shouldn’t a kid ask their teacher to sign a petition?

If it’s actual liberal-mindedness you have a problem with, then.. well I guess some people are attracted to narrow prescriptive thought, others are not. I just hope my children’s teachers are not.

I have been reading around all of this. I had no idea that the formerly high-brow ‘conservative media’ now contains articles that simply abuse non-conservatives and seem to be an excercise in thinking up names to call liberal thinkers.

According to the National Review, the latest news is that opponents of Trump are ‘pantywaists’.

RpR, taken with the actual latest news that those famously pantywaisted US immigration officials are going against the President but with the law* and not enforcing the immigration EO on the ground, isn’t there just a little part of you that thinks the USA is embarassing itself?

*interestingly it was a state challenge from a red, ie ‘minority’ or ‘loser’, state to federal law that did this – so much for ‘control’.