Tyrrell Burgess

Just think: about half the children in the schools the nation provides leave them at the earliest chance they get. We spend £2000 million a year on education, five per cent of the gross national product; we bend every effort to provide ‘roofs over heads’ in building programmes of £100 million a time; we take three years to train each new teacher; we debate the need, nay the inevitability, of a new Education Act; there are no fewer than five Ministers in the Department of Education and Science — and every year well over 300 000 boys and girls tell us in the most certain and unequivocal terms what we can do with it all. Of those who stay on, a third can stick it for only one year longer. It is customary in education to seek reasons for this failure in the children, their families, their backgrounds — even their with others, objectives which attracted middling support from the pupils. More important, only 47 per cent of teachers attached importance to helping towards a career and even fewer (33 per cent) to things of direct use to jobs. The report itself reflects the teachers' attitudes by expressing this conflict of view in terms of the ‘short term’ interests of the pupils and the ‘long term’ objectives of teachers. Well, it depends how you look at it, but one cannot get away from the conflict.