Guest Lecturer, Mike day

Today, our Guest Lecturer, Mike Day gave us a lesson of general Educational policies, with specific concentration on Wales. Firstly, one must consider who education is for, and why it is needed. It is fair to imply that education holds many purposes, one interesting view point is the idea that education can keep people 'safe.' Whereas this is clearly debatable, if you consider the large amount of bullying that takes place in educational setting, on a more long-term scale, this viewpoint is a fair one. (Massachusetts Appleseed Center, 2009) a company in colloboration with legal service provides and education organisers showed that out of 968,000 students who enrolled in the school year, 2006-2007 in schools within Massachusetts, over 64,000 of them were excluded for at least a day. As the title of the report clearly states “Keep kids in class: Breaking the school to Prison Pipeline,” such behaviour as a child could evidently lead to criminal offences within adulthood.

When considering who ‘education’ is for, it is also perhaps vital to consider who should develop it. There appears to be two candidates for this position, politicians and practitioners. Politicians, at first, seem appropriate, they supposedly ‘respresent’ people, and hold the purse strings, yet it is important for us to remember that they are not experts, so do they possess the right skills and knowledge to make accurate decisions? An anlternative option is practitioners, who, unlike politicians, have the ‘background’ to make precise judgements . However, often, you will find that practitioners often see the subject from their perspective, and are unable to take a wider view. A resolution to this is perhaps a ‘meeting of minds,’ in which strengths of the two are used.

One must also wonder, where an educational policy should develop. Should it be on a more global scale, such as a UK level, or perhaps a more local scale such as the school specifically or perhaps its Governing body (or even the choices in between, such as the Welsh Government or a Local Authority. If we consider educational policies on a grander scale, such as UK level, even though standards have been rising, many problems still desperately need to be addressed. ( Machin and Vignoles, 2006) highlight the fact that British education, in the Post-war period there have been several attempts to reinvent the UK educational system. Concerns including the poor ‘stay-on-rate’ and exam achievement were at their highest in the 1980s and 1990, yet, despite improvements since then on, many schools are still underachieving. It is perhaps in schools like these that a Governing body would be more useful and perhaps more successful. It is fair to suggest that a Governor, will accurately know, specifically, what is needed for their school to improve. The (BBC, 2003) shows that the Governing body works closely with the head teacher and collectibely work together as a team in order to better the school in which they work. However, one could go on to say that allowing each Governing body (of which there are many in the UK) to generate their own Educational policy could perhaps be very costly.