Has education money been spent wisely?

My experience suggests not.

"Driving up standards" - the cry of the politicians - was, I believe, counterproductive in the dead end secondary school that I taught in.

In practice, the struggle to achieve as high a number of high grades as possible, can be a disaster.

Fine if you're one of those that are just below a "C". You get all the help possible to drag you over the boundary wall to success. If however you are a potential E or below and seen as an impossible task you can easily be cast aside and treated as a nuisance that may stop the rest climbing up.

You can be encouraged to get on quietly failing in your own little corner and be left to rot.

Youngsters in this position often give up completely on formal education and switch to developing antisocial skills - something they can learn to be good at.

Students that were enjoying education and feeling good about themselves in year 9 suddenly at year 10 change their attitude and become 'unmanageable' - fulfilling their predicted role of being a failure.

Part of this problem is to do with the National Curriculum introduced in the '80s. Boys for instance were being taught hand skills which they could become very good at. Yet these skills weren't rated under the new curriculum and were taken off the syllabus. Instead the students were expected to solve problems in a nonsense mechanistic way:

"Right three ideas and show why two are rejected and the third is good"

Not in their range of thinking at all.

By contrast cut a piece of wood at a right angle so that it's 147.3 mm long - no problem plus or minus 0.1 mm.

This I think, meant that students were taught that they were failures. They carried this into 'adult' life developing their antisocial abilities by mixing with each other in activities that hit out at the establishment that had called them "failures".

Many people in adult life are now resentful of 'the system' - the one that they saw themselves failing at. They find it emotionally painful to stop and analyse where they are going so that many don't waste their effort in this direction.

They end up seeing themselves having little to do with those that appear to be succeeding in the system and resent associating with these "successful" people. Instead they can occasionally hit out against the smug bastards who make out they know where they are going.

Result : increased division in our society.

Blame the government system of education and not the teachers!