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 “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 in fact children spend very little time indeed at school these days.
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Much like the po-faced insistence that absolutely everything (not anything, everything) aimed at children has to “educational”
ReplyDeleteExcept for libraries. Which are "leisure", or, if you are lucky, "leisure and culture". Or if you are unlikely "leisure and sport".
Truly the entire local government ethos, seemingly across the country, even far from the heartlands in wealthy bits of inner London of where the profoundly destructive "progressives" live, has been poisoned, the 1960s and 1970s worm that pollutes from within the 2000s apple. A unwanted and unsought for, unelected, coup d'état of the metropolitan and blind and self-styled "élite". A curse upon their house.
And consequently little in what remains of the public sector barely works as it should, if at all. And sometimes with the most ghastly consequences.
"the 1960s and 1970s worm"
ReplyDeleteOnly a half-truth. These things were not part of mainstream culture or society until the Eighties.
Certainly, proper local government was a mainstay of normal life in this country until She decided to exact revenge for Her long-dead father's loss of his seat on a council.