'free' schools

[abdoujaparov]

Out of interest, according to your philosophy, if your kid didn't want to be home schooled and instead wanted to go to a school, you would let him, right?

[abdoujaparov]

Was you or your wife home schooled ?

[abdoujaparov]

So what made you do this ? Bad experience for you or your wife ?

[eFestivals]

I always have to smile when you post... Its always so dumb

We have (so far anyway) resisted the temptation to run our schools "for profit"... Sweden didn't and that article covers the issues that running schools "for profit" could bring... The Swedish system is very different to the UK system in many other ways. The UK system protects itself by offering national exams instead of the schools giving their own....

So it has little or nothing to do with the "free schools" (or Academies) we are currently running in the UK...

So while our idea in some form comes from Sweden to think the two are remotely similar in the way they have been implemented is stretch at best...

1. the UK 'free schools' model is modelled fully on the Swedish model.

2. just as selection is included in those Swedish schools, so is 'for profit'. And those same ideas were contained within the original plan for the UK, tho removed because in the short-term they're too politically difficult to implement. That won't be the case once free schools have properly undermined the current state system, which they're specifically designed to do (it's their very purpose).

3. even last week Dave Moron was banging on about making out schools as 'competitive' as possible - and you're not making them as 'competitive' as they can possibly be if there's no selection and no 'for profit' motivation. The fact that there's nothing which demonstrates that 'competitive' schools deliver better results for the students that use them doesn't enter his head.

So the swedish model has EVERYTHING to do with the 'free' schools that now exist within the UK - if those swedish schools didn't exist, it's very unlikely that the tories would have coime up with the idea themselves, and they certainly wouldn't have had an example to use to suggest they wouldn't fuck up the education of kids.

What we've got now and what we'll get in the future are of course different things. But we wouldn't have what we've got now if there wasn't that plan for the future - the whole point of 'free' schools is to re-introduce selection and to allow businesses to leech onto taxpayers money.

There's three very important things that the tories learnt while out of power:-

1. the public will not accept the destruction of the NHS.

2. the public will not accept the re-introduction of grammar schools

3. the public can be hoodwinked about 1 & 2 above by going at things in a different way to how the tories have gone at them before.

The tories have changed their methods, but they're still tories. All but the dummies know what that means.

[eFestivals]

Our free schools are not allowed to run for profit...

Our free schools do not allow selection...

It would require an additional act of parliament for that to be the case. So you are wrong. All you have posted is your fear on where it might lead ? Which I share and agree with. But that is confusing facts with fear....

To be wrong I'd have had to have stated that free schools can be run for profit now and work a selection procedure now, or have said that such things can be done within the existing legal framework.

I've said neither, so I cannot be wrong on the basis you state.

What I have posted is where it *WILL* lead, not where I fear it will lead. Where the tories wish to take the idea has been long explicitly stated (and was implicitly stated again by Dave Moron just last week), and once the idea has run for a bit so that the existing state schools are undermined, that's where they'll take it with the public's full consent.

Unless you think the public is going to say "I don't wish to send my kid to the school with the best financial resources which leads to a better educational output for the students that go thru that better funded school"?

Edited September 12, 2011 by eFestivals

[eFestivals]

You said it was FULLY modelled on the Swedish system... It would appear not... Unless you think issues of selection and profit where small issues, which you clearly don't...

It is fully modelled on the Swedish system. What something is modelled on and how that model is implemented can be different.

The reason that it's not identical to the Swedish system is for political considerations - what the public will stand and what the tory's coalition partners will stand. So a compromise in implementation has had to be made, but in the eyes of the tories this is only a temporary compromise because the current implementation will bring about the circumstances where those other things can be introduced at a later date.

It doesn't have to be identical to be fully modelled on the Swedish system. The differences don't affect the model it was taken from.

[kaosmark2]

interesting article in The Observer about how the Free School concept in Sweden (which is where 'our' idea comes from) isn't truning out quite how they'd hoped

http://www.guardian....ools-experiment

[jump]

not totally on topic, but definitely connected...

'British children among the least happy in the developed world'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14908194

[fred quimby]

reminds me of how some people are castigated as being selfish for wanting to take their kids to festivals