Any old wisdom is good if somebody has understood it. A wisdom that hasn’t been understood may get covered in dust.  Daniil Kharms Today I Wrote Nothing

I was out ‘socialising’ with @theprimaryhead and @MrBaxter74 in The Marquis Of Westminster pub last night and came across a rather shabby looking document stuffed behind the cistern of the Gents Lavatory. Much to our surprise it seems like an early copy of the White Paper: Educational Excellence Everywhere published a few weeks ago. It’s a messy draft but you may see some links between this and the published version?

DrAFT White Paper: World Class – Upper, Middle and Low

Education is bloody brilliant. I loved my education and feel that everyone should be given the chance to be as great as we think they should be allowed to be. Therefore, I have set out my wonderful ideas for a better education system and a better Britain.

We want Business to run our schools. Business is about profit – we believe in the ‘profit of learning’. Good business equals worthy schools. We can no longer build schools on social good. Social good was eaten by the Prophets of Profit and they are the only ones at the table tonight. What does profit look like in a future academy – a world class academy?

4th Dimensional Education:

Firstly we have an equation for our new school system:

\TESTING| \mathbf{a} \SATs| = \sqrt{\mathbf{a} \cdotphonics\mathbf{a} } = \sqrt{{a_1}^2 + {a_2}^2 + {a_3}^2 + {a_4}^2},

This exciting breakthrough can be used to calculate any Successful Academy, Or SA’s as we will be calling them.

To paraphrase this equation simply is to say the SA’s looks like mind enhancing drugs (the good ones), they smell like the future, taste like success and they feel like a hurricane of change! That is what we set out for you in this radically S’hite Paper’.

Schools need to get down with business. They need to sell their commodity. Sell your space! Advertise your walls. If McDonalds is good enough for David Beckham it’s good enough for our children.

We can no longer afford to give education away. We have nuclear submarines to build! Education is to be paid for. Nothing you get for free can be truly respected! Money is the key to success. Where would you rather your child attend school? Some shabby little shack where the head teacher turns up in a VW Lupo wearing brown corduroy and listening to The Fall? Or a BIG spanking new building (Fit for Shell UK) where the head wears the sharpest suits, drives an Audi and knows the business of learning? Of course you want the slick professional. Who wouldn’t?

Walk in to the Corduroy Heads office to badly drawn children’s scrawls and pictures of his family on the desk covered in coffee stains and piles of paper. Walk in to the professional’s office and get a coffee from his PA, sit around on luxury furniture and admire the paintings and sculptures. Welcome to Our Academy for the Future!

Coasting, gliding, cruising, drifting, touring, skating or slithering schools will be taken for a long hard hike up the wall of ‘excellence everywhere’ and if not sweating with the exertion we will cut their tendon ropes and let them hurtle towards the rocks below. We want schools with ‘gravitas’. School’s with celebrity status and celebrity drive. For example we will be increasing the number of branded schools:

The KFC free school (Winchester) – finger licking tasty Phonics. Straight to your Heart!

Esso Academy (Newcastle)- where you can smell the learning and it sticks to your downy feathers

Trident Academy (Carlisle)- where learning is a tactical strike of excellence.

Anti-Michael Rosen Academy (Newquay)- where books are gatherings of symbols defining meaning for knowledge.

What’s ronga with a Wonga Academy? (Barnsley) Schools financed by respectable organisations (our 21st century banks).

BAE Systems Academy (Southampton)- Shooting to success – Inspired Work!

Arms dealers – they know the international market. Who better at technology?

The Cowell Fame Academy. Where we teach children that 15 minutes of fame is every child’s right!

Just look at what Simon Cowell did for music! We want this for education! Exciting times! Imagine your school no longer being seen as a Number 2 but instead a golden number 1!

We are also committed to listening to our clients – our voting parents up and down the country.

We will start a parent complaint Twitter account @makemyschoolanacademy with the following hashtags #burnthehead #wheresthemoney? #scandal #academiesdoitbetter

There will be tougher political screening tests on application for teaching jobs. We will ensure that any lefty leanings are outed at the first hurdle. Questions such as:

  1. Have you ever read a Michael Rosen book?
  2. Name 5 reasons how an Academy is better than an LA maintained school. (If you can please send your thoughts to Nicky Morgan, PO Box 666, Westminster. In fact if you have one reason PLEASE sent it to me! PLEASE!!!)
  3. Phonics or reading through interpretive dances. Which is your preferred teaching style?
  4. Working on a Saturday for minimum wage. Discuss the merits!
  5. What is not funny about this grammar joke?

it-was-tense

  1. Outrage! Discuss.

ww4

6, Your Well-being is important therefore – Is Sixty Hours a week enough?  Name 3 legal drugs to get you through the week!

Imagine, if you can Amazon doing education. I know it’s an exciting thought. Imagine beyond this to an Amazon Educational Landscape… What features will it have? A place where all your educational needs could be catered for? This is the dream, an educational machine, a tour de force, making British education great again. A 4th Dimensional Learning Bazaar where your every need is just a competitively priced stall away. Education is about the costumer. It is about delivering world class each and every day and night, 368 days a year. A place where 110% is not enough! A world in which ‘teachers’ (now referred to as ‘organic programmers’) will be there 24/7 to ensure no child is left behind.

We no longer want every school to be a good school. Good is the language of defeat. Good is not good enough! We want every school to be a Quadrant of International Excellence. World class – high and low. We will now be setting a rigorous new international excellence exam in all Institutes of Education (formally known as ‘schools’). The baseline exam of excellence for 2 year old children will now include :

Naming the under 5 Canon of Classics (Only pre 1945).

Reciting 5 Nursery rhymes (list to be published 2017 by the right wing Anti-Rosen think tank).

They MUST know Interrogative Pronouns, Heteronyms and have a better grasp of Archaic Language.

The wolf does not hesitate to seize the lamb! Therefore, we cannot pause to beat those other countries in the PISA league tables!

We want every school to be a research led school. Crack pot ideas are welcomed if you can link them to a blog where the writer has more than 50 twitter followers.

Twitter leaders with more than 5000 followers will automatically become National Leaders of Education. Soon to be called World Leaders of Education.

Blogging negative views about current educational excellence (set out in this paper) will involve a public shaming and visit from the Secretary of State for Education who will set up stocks at the schools gates. We cannot tolerate weak headship and weak views. Education is just too important for moral perspectives to get in the way! Your Nay-saying will NOT be tolerated at all!

Footnotes:

Dear Nick! How did I do on the Exclamation Marks!! ? !!

It goes on… and on. But hopefully this gives you a small taste of the depth and rigour with which the final version must have gone through. I mean, lets thank our lucky stars these nutty ideas will never see the light of day.

@theprimaryhead has the other parts of the White Paper. He may enlighten us some time in the future.

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