Scandalous Acceptance

Among the historic achievements of Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition is the provocation of a strike ballot by the National Association of Head Teachers: a thing unprecedented in the association's 114-year history. Not even the sainted Thatcher's war on education or New Labour's authoritarian meddling, let alone Callaghan's puny winter of discontent, were able to arouse the head teachers' ire to the extent that Daveybloke and his pet educational underclass, Michael Gove, have managed in a year and a half.

Meanwhile, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders has been giving back a bit of the finger-wagging that the Government is so fond of doling out. Pointing to such helpful interventions as Daveybloke's recent burble that "for a long time in this country, there has been a scandalous acceptance of under-performing schools" and Gove's airy dismissal of his own inspectors' favourable reports, Brian Lightman accused the Government of giving children a "cast-iron excuse to have low aspirations". Of course, low aspirations are the last thing Daveybloke and his cuddly chums intend for the soldiers, stockbrokers and shelf-stackers of tomorrow; so a spokesbeing from the Department for Training and Control duly presented itself and shuffled its feet a bit. "We already have the best generation of teachers we've ever had," the spokesbeing proclaimed; by which it presumably meant that we have the cheapest and least pensionable generation of teachers we've had in some little time. "We are going further," the spokesbeing rejoiced; "giving teachers better training throughout their careers, making sure they have the powers they want to keep order in the classroom, and trusting them with the freedom to innovate", which doubtless explains why the best generation of teachers we've ever had is getting ready to go on strike.