Tories, teachers, and testing

I am a firm believer that you learn more about someone's character from what they do than what they say.

For example, all throughout the campaign for Brexit and the subsequent, hapless negotiations, if you had listened to those in favour of what was always going to be and, indeed, is now proving itself to be an act of quite staggering national self-harm, you would have believed that to quite an extraordinary degree, those campaigners cared about our fishing industry. Well, here we are nineteen days in, and it's already evident that all those people who make a living catching and exporting fish have been hung out to dry.

Equally, the Conservative party will talk a good game on education, yet one only has to look at Michael Gove's tenure as education secretary to realise that no one actually gave a hoot what he got up to when he brought his personal prejudices and opinions to bear on the schooling system. The fact that his decisions flew in the face of the experience and advice of people who have spent their entire lives working in and striving to improve education tells you what you need to know about the Tories view of teachers and educationalists. 

And it's not just a lack of respect for the teachers' experience and knowledge, it's also the contempt with which they are treated as people, not least during this pandemic, which has seen one of the largest economies in the world suffer the highest number of daily deaths per capita, thanks to the current government's world-beating ineptitude.

Which brings us to the last day of the autumn term last year when the government blithely announced that schools would be required to run coronavirus test centres from the start of the following term. Let's just stop there: assuming you aren't a teacher and therefore didn't experience this directly, this is like your boss announcing to you that he'd like you to have a new project completed in two weeks' time the day before you get on the plane for a fortnight's summer holiday.

No apology, no compensation, no recognition of the effort involved.

Well, unbelievably, the schools managed it. And then had to refrain from descending on Downing Street and razing it to the ground when that avatar of incompetence Johnson closed the schools after they'd been back for one day. Just long enough to make sure the virus got passed around amongst people who hadn't seen each other for over two weeks. The man is both wholly inadequate for his role and an idiot to boot. (And I don't care how bloody bright he's supposed to be.)

Having said all that, it has had one very personal benefit and that is that I was able to go across this morning and get a lateral flow test for coronavirus. Even allowing for the fact that this is a school I'm talking about - so being a medical centre is hardly a core competency - the whole operation was incredibly slick. One could not fail to be impressed.

And only half an hour later I received a text: "Your coronavirus lateral flow test result is negative. It's likely you were not infectious when the test was done."

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Reading: 'The System Expert's Brother' by Adrian Tchaikovsky