Date published: 2006/09/20
The BBC says:
Schools should be given cash incentives to take underperforming children, says Lib Dem education chief Sarah Teather.
Ms Teather told Lib Dem delegates more funds should be targeted at children who underachieve, rather than just focusing money on deprived areas.
The "pupil premium" could encourage good schools to take on challenging children rather than leaving them to go to "sink schools", she said.
...
She said: "We have to break the link between poverty and poor achievement at school".
She might as well have said that "we have to break the link between gravity and falling down". Well, it depends on what you mean by "underperforming children" (most kids in "deprived areas" could probably be classified as such). And it depends how much money you are willing to throw at the situation. Back in the real world, no government spends anywhere nearly enough, or could afford to spend nearly enough, money to make the education of the vast majority of British kids anything other than ordinary. And the Lib Dems are just playing cynical games to pretend otherwise. What they are proposing is to shuffle the deck so some different random selection of a minority of students is helped, while the vast majority of students are ignored, as now.
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