Old Skool

I like to think I'm generally a laid-back type of person but occasionally I have a sleepless night from worrying about work. I find the best way to escape from this tumult is to force myself into thinking 'Well, Jeff, if you don't get that reconciliation to balance, is it really going to make such a big screaming deal in the grand scheme of things?'.

More often than not, that answer is no.

But alas, there are some out there who are not so lucky. Does Gordon Brown sleep soundly at night or does he worry incessantly about the huge responsibility resting on those broad shoulders? Alastair Darling seems a fairly chilled out guy but he's responsible for billions upon billions of private and public money. How does he sleep? And David Milliband must occasionally balk at how he's going to use his diplomatic talents to try to solve the Kenyan, Iraqi and Palestinian problems of this world. Maybe he wonders if he should cash in his chips and go for the easy life in big business?

I can't begin to imagine how these people cope with such ridiculously difficult jobs.

But my utmost concern sits with Ed Balls and Fiona Hyslop and their education briefs. The responsibility of ensuring British and Scottish children receive the best education possible. If you mess that one up then you may well have caused hundreds of thousands of people to have a life of misery and poverty as opposed to a life of contentment.

And a quick browse of BBC News shows just what they have to contend with:

Poorest children falling behind, attacks on teachers are at a record high, school sizes are fit to burst and classroom assistants (annual salary £7k-£10k) are used to fill vacancies.

Where would you start?


Well, I'm going to hide behind a fairly distant family member on this one as he came up with what he thinks is the golden bullet for fixing schools in our countries.


The common denominator in all of the above news headlines is arguably the unruly kids. Take those kids out of the equation and the poorest children would have more time and attention to learn, attacks on teachers would certainly decrease sharply, school sizes would obviously decline and classroom assistants would no longer be so desperately needed to fill shortfalls that no longer existed.


Now for the controversial bit. The second part of this supposed solution is to have spaces for these unruly kids, large buildings where they can go if they clearly don't want to learn. Retired people can oversee them but to a greater extent, between the hours of 9am and 3:30pm (or however long school lasts these days), these kids would be stripped out of the education system, sitting or standing just doing nothing as the minutes ticked by, allowing those who wanted to learn to get on with it. Maybe the crushing boredom would bring them back into line, maybe they would see out such a situation until their 17 and somehow find work thereafter. But rule #1 is: Let the kids who want to learn do so.


I went to a pretty decent school but I can still think of a good 10 or 20 people in my year who the rest of us would have liked to have seen elsewhere rather than causing constant chaos in the classroom. At the time our school's approach seemed to be to sit the wild kids with the brainy ones in the hope that even a fraction of our diligent approach to work would rub off on the kids who seemed to prefer throwing insults (and occasionally chairs) in the teacher's direction. And looking back, the Maths nerd inside me can't help but smile guiltily at the thought of uninterrupted algebra lessons while the crazy kids padded out their time a few miles down the road.


Don't get me wrong, as it was being explained to me, deep down I was aware that this somewhat draconian approach must have been incorrect, I just couldn't find the words to explain why it was injust, backwards and possibly a little bit fascist.

Or maybe I secretly would quite like this old skool approach if it meant Ed Balls, Fiona Hyslop and any future kids of mine, would all have sleep-filled nights free from the nuisance of out-of-control neds.