One of the fun things about reading the early edition of the Guardian online, is that when you click on “comment” you get a list of headlines, but with no indication of who wrote what. So you can play a guessing game. Anyone care to guess, for instance, who wrote an article with this title, for instance:
Our children deserve the best, so we must be prepared to pay up
Ooh, it’s a toughy isn’t it?
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Damn. And I was so sure it was Janet Daley.
True to form, Sweden is mentioned and lionised not three lines in.
Panglossian Polly?
I do love the way that people like her lionise scandanavia, but then propose policies quite different from what takes place there.
Plus they love spending other people’s money…
Perhaps we should follow Finland’s example and actually let teachers teach and support them. Scrap the national curriculum and all these national tests and let teachers decide how to teach the children in their care. After all they are the people trained for the job, who have the experience and actually know the children.
And the best education systems are those where the age of going to school is higher, because putting children in to education too early harms them, especially boys. Children must be allowed to play. That is how they learn, not through state directed programs.
More to the point the Sure Start centre that Polly is lionising was a project initiated by Liberal Democrat-run Southwark council who did the work to network the various funding sources required to get it going. But then she’d know this as she was at the launch where all the contributors were represented and Cathy Bowman, Deputy Leader of the Council spoke.
I agree with her though. Labour MPs should continue to visit the centre as a tribute to what happens when a useless Labour council is booted out after 40 years of running down services and replaced by Liberal Democrats who actually do some work.
Incidently at that same launch meeting Harriet Harman perhaps unwisely announced that she wanted to put a penny on income tax for child care. Seems unusual for a minister to make spending commitments without reference to Brown.