Parent Power

Education Secretary Ruth Kelly announced this week that new measures were to be introduced to overhaul and improve England’s schools. The latest buzz-phrase attached to this is “parent power”, which sounds dramatic and employs alliteration so it must be a good thing.

The trouble is that in many cases the parents are the problem. “Parents’ councils” will be setup, through which they will advise schools, which in turn will have greater independence to act upon this advice. This is great news for most parents, who have their children’s interests at heart and want to help them through school as much as possible. However, the children who need the most help are often those with uncaring and unsupportive parents. In especially deprived areas children may find themselves no better off through the new system, and these are the areas that need the most attention.

A poorly educated child with no parental support will need little encouragement to turn to crime instead of school.  According to the new White Paper, parents that are not satisfied with local schools can set up their own, with a network of advisors to help them. This idea has been quite rightly attacked by the NUT, who stated that parents do not want to control local schools. It is not the parents’ job to do what we pay our taxes for, and it is not the parents’ responsibility to make up for shortfalls in the government’s education policies. Quite simply, Ruth Kelly’s latest scheme would not be necessary had the government done it’s job properly in the first place.

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