England has pursued education policies as retrograde as those in the U.S. for many years. It has a national curriculum and national tests. It turns over schools to businessmen who are willing to invest enough capital to privatize them. Forgotten in these grand schemes are the teachers, without whom there is no education.
The BBC reports that more than 50% of current teachers may quit in the next two years due to working conditions.
“The survey, conducted by the National Union of Teachers, found 61% of those wanting to leave blamed workload and 57% desired a better work/life balance.
“Two thirds of the 1,020 primary and secondary school teachers questioned felt morale in the profession had declined over the past five years.
“Schools minister Nick Gibb pledged to tackle excessive workloads.
“The findings of the survey are timely, because last month the five main teaching unions warned of a crisis in recruitment and retention, although the government maintains the vacancy rate has stayed stable at about 1%.
“The survey, undertaken with a representative sample of teachers, also suggested many were unhappy with some of the government’s plans.
*76% said forcing schools that require improvement to become academies would damage education
*62% said the plans for 500 new free schools would also damage education
*54% were not confident the new baseline test for four-year-olds would provide valid information about a child’s ability
“General secretary of the NUT, Christine Blower, said: “This survey demonstrates the combined, negative impact of the accountability agenda on teacher workload and morale.
“Teachers feel that the Department for Education’s work thus far to tackle workload has been totally inadequate.
“Meanwhile, nearly one million more pupils are coming into the system over the next decade. The government’s solution so far has been to build free schools, often where there are surplus places, and to allow class sizes to grow.
“Add to this a situation where teachers are leaving in droves and teacher recruitment remains low. We now have a perfect storm of crisis upon crisis in the schools system.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whether it be on education or on war, England follows everything the US does like a little dog.
It’s actually pathetic.
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I just sent this to a British friend of mine who teaches in Kuala Lumpur. How very sad to see what happens to education when teachers are no longer the experts in what happens inside the classroom.
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From “expert” to “villain” inside ten years.
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Scary for the children and Britain. I remember when Great Britain had a GREAT educational system. Then Reagan and Thatcher happened. OY.
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Well, this sounds familiar….
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England has been hit with the same free market stupid stick as the US. They have undermined the profession, belittled, frustrated and attacked their teachers. More is expected, and less is offered to attract young people to teaching. If England wants an stable pool of teachers, they will have to make it more appealing to young people.
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I passed this on to Real Clear Education, and they were interested…but they noted that the article was written in 2015. Is there anything more recent? And what happened in the two years since the article?
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Good point, OH Alg 2 Tchr. Maybe we can get some comments from British teachers and some more recent info. If I hadn’t fallen victim to the data gurus, the workload and overall poor working conditions probably would have done me in sooner rather than later, so I am not at all surprised by these predictions.
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From 2017:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/teachers-crisis-education-leaving-profession-jobs-market-droves-who-would-be-one-a7591821.html
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Thank you, Diane. I swear, if there was profit in counting the number of notes an orchestra played, the bean counters would be in there lobbying for ways to increase that number whether it had anything to do with improving music or not.
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From 2017:
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/teachers-crisis-education-leaving-profession-jobs-market-droves-who-would-be-one-a7591821.html
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Just wait till sharia law takes over then all the schools will be built with bamboo sticks using trolls for teachers with sheep clothing and scarfs.
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Please tell me this is sarcasm. It’s so hard to tell these days.
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It won’t be sharia law that takes over the schools in the U.S.
It will be the 21st century Christian Inquisition lead by monsters like Betsy DeVos, and the leaders of this horrid movement will use the playbook from Mao’s Cultural Revolution where the children are turned against teachers and parents so the Inquisition can find victims to torture as children are programmed and forced to accuse their teachers and parents of crimes against the fundamentalist Christian god.
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@Lloyd: What evidence or documentation, do you have to support your statement? I have lived under Islamic Sharia Law. I find your statement to be difficult to believe.
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Do you have any idea what a prediction is?
My evidence is a large number of evangelical Christians who think the world was created in one day and dinosaurs and humans lived together.
My evidence is the fact that Trump is a racist and some of his supporters belong to the KKK, the American Nazi Party, and other White Supremacist groups that are mostly fundamentalist, nut-case Christians.
My evidence is more than 1,600 years of history of a very violent religion called Christianity. Islam isn’t the only religion that wages holy wars. Christianity has a long history and when America goes to war, many claim God is on our side.
My evidence is a piece that appeared in Newsweek with a title like this: Right-Wing Extremists Are a Bigger Threat to American than ISIS. And most if not all of these crap heads are fundamentalist Christians.
“They and untold thousands like them are the extremists who hide among us, the right-wing militants who, since 2002, have killed more people in the United States than jihadis have.”
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/02/12/right-wing-extremists-militants-bigger-threat-america-isis-jihadists-422743.html
My evidence is a study that came out of Oxford:
http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-419
Not all Christian fundamentalist are racists and/or violent but too many of them are.
My evidence is a book called “Ameican Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”
“Twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists first spoke of the United States becoming a Christian nation that would build a global Christian empire, it was hard to take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously. Today, such language no longer sounds like hyperbole but poses, instead, a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life. In American Fascists, Chris Hedges, veteran journalist and author of the National Book Award finalist War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, challenges the Christian Right’s religious legitimacy and argues that at its core it is a mass movement fueled by unbridled nationalism and a hatred for the open society. …
American Fascists, which includes interviews and coverage of events such as pro-life rallies and weeklong classes on conversion techniques, examines the movement’s origins, its driving motivations and its dark ideological underpinnings. Hedges argues that the movement currently resembles the young fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, movements that often masked the full extent of their drive for totalitarianism and were willing to make concessions until they achieved unrivaled power. The Christian Right, like these early fascist movements, does not openly call for dictatorship, nor does it use physical violence to suppress opposition.”
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Not only do we have climate change to be concerned about and the Kremlin’s Agent Orange starting a nuclear war in North Korea and Iran while surrendering the U.S. Republic to Russia’s kleptocracy, we also have to consider that we are witnessing the end of civilization as we know it as western civilization collapses into the 2nd dark ages that will include the scourge of a resurgent Chrisitan led Inquisition … a much larger threat to life than ISIS.
It is obvious to me that if the English speaking world, with the exception of New Zealand that recently dropped out of the spread of the theocratic kleptocracy, is leading the move to bring an end to our own species and most life on earth.
It’s all based on greed and trust in “their” god, the god of greed and avarice.
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