Archive for September 2009
Ending rejection: news from Labour Party Conference
Posted by: melissabenn on: September 30, 2009
Spoke last night at full and very lively fringe meeting at Labour Party conference on the importance of ending selection or, as we in Comprehensive Future call it, rejection at 11 plus.The other speakers were Vanessa Everett, the head of both a comprehensive school and a small secondary modern in Kent, and Aaron Porter, Vice [...]
A tough conference call
Posted by: melissabenn on: September 21, 2009
The party conference season is as much a fixture in the national autumn calendar as the new school term and Guy Fawkes night. It briefly takes the spotlight off Parliament and the TV studios and for a few heady days illuminates both top and bottom of the political parties that claim the right to govern [...]
Answering Conor Ryan on the academies
Posted by: melissabenn on: September 16, 2009
Read Melissa Benn’s blog post answer, on the Public Finance website, to a piece by Conor Ryan, former adviser to Tony Blair and David Blunkett, concerning the academies: In his last PF blog, Conor Ryan suggests that union opposition to academies is based largely on uncertainty about performance; oh, and just a smidgen of carping [...]
The grammar conundrum
Posted by: melissabenn on: September 2, 2009
We are at a strange crossroads on selective education in this country. At no time have the main political parties been more united that selection should play no part in any future development of English schools. Yet neither party has concrete proposals for how they might eliminate selection in the many places it still exists. [...]
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