In education we are now always to be guided by the agenda that

'Every Child Matters'

What a laudable aim, when you read it gives you that nice warm feeling inside as if by agreeing you are already on the side of the angels and not to be thrown in with that dark brood of reactionary forces who want to drag our children back to some terrible past when all teachers were vindictive sadists and lessons were dull repetitions of facts learnt by rote.

Looked at more closely perhaps 'Every Child Matters' seems a little vacuous, something along the lines of 'Freedom is Good'. Does it mean, for example, that all children matter equally or that all children matter a bit but some matter more than others?

In practice it feels more like the latter. Some children in the present system do matter more than others and they are the difficult and disruptive because they swallow inordinate amounts of time of those that teach. Sadly there is also a group of children who suffer at their hands and these are the academically weak but essentially nice kids who share their classrooms. Maybe if their parents were more vocal then the situation would begin to be dealt because Heads fear parent power almost as much as they fear OFSTED but because these parents are not confrontational themselves and because they are Working class and lack the braying certainties that being a member of the Middle Class brings then they don't make a fuss and their children drift through education never quite fulfilling themselves because of course who could when the adult standing at the front of the room is engaging in acts of appeasement that even Chamberlain would have balked at.

To be continued