Friday 13 March 2009

“Children’s Services”

How is child protection by Social Services the business of OFSTED? This is essentially the same question as that of how someone like Sharon Shoesmith, with a background purely in education, was ever put in charge of such things. Which is essentially the same question as why there are now departments of “Children’s Services” at all.

Much like the po-faced insistence that absolutely everything (not anything, everything) aimed at children has to be “educational”, it seems to depend on the assumption that going to school is the only thing that children ever do, so that the only people who really know anything about them are professional educationalists.

Underlying this is, I suspect, a public school idea that children actually live at school, at least during term-time. But in fact the school day now ends so early (quite often before three o’clock in many secondary schools), with the holidays still as long as ever, that children spend very little time indeed at school these days.

2 comments:

  1. I don't think professional educationalists know much about education either. They know about finding your way round the bureaucracy & PC bullshit which is much more valuable in the +50% of the economy that is government than actual achievement.

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  2. That depends what you think education is. Eduction, of course, is not the same thing as training. And private schools are more academic than state ones.

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