Teacher Bashing Dips as Weather Warms!

This week I am pleased for my colleagues and friends who are employed in the Education Workforce because  they might now be able to go about their business without any more than the usual level of comment and interference from Tabloids, Talk Shows and Tirade Mongers.

Last Thursday's edition of Question Time morphed into a pastiche of the "Four Yorkshire Men Sketch"  (Python. M. Drury Lane 1974 http://tinyurl.com/bb6ubeo ) as the Q T panel members vied with each other acquiring as they did the skill of opposites, talking hot air about cold weather.  The snow, or more accurately the response of schools to it being there has given countless opportunities for pundits around the country to "talk snow balls." Opportunities that say more about how small-minded and vindictive we have become than they enlighten or provide a basis for sensible and informed discussion.

Sometimes I dislike predictability: at its worst it can take me back to the wet Sunday afternoons of my childhood: oppressive, grey and unrelenting. But guess what, there are other occasions when our inbuilt need to conserve that which is dependable fills me with something like joy and so when I hear "It's 'elf and safety gone mad!" comments I find myself (a) punching the air  and (b) wanting to punch the person who's fallen into this lazy analysis of important and difficult decisions.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed that schools are large and complex organisations that require a lot of people to arrive at more or less the same time (remember how easy the school holiday time commute is in comparison)? Before opening their collective mouths with yet another salvo of asinine observations, commentators might want to think about where schools are. Generally they are where people are-you know, houses and stuff , often on busy and not always easy to reach urban environments. Here's something else, the workforce doesn't live on site and have to use the same roads and systems are all blessed with.

I'd like it fine if the tub-thumpers would just have a look about. They would see most schools are quite old and when planning permission was granted it was given (I'm guessing here) without too much consideration of how the workforce and learners would get there in challenging weather. The date(s) of the buildings (or yes, the sites) suggests that they were acquired at a time when there was much less commuter traffic and ruddy faced children could snowball their way to school and make ice-slides in the playground. A broken bone was as nothing providing it wasn't jutting out through the flesh. Even if it was, fathers could be relied upon (after work) to pick up their osteo-damaged offspring , throw them across the crossbar of their bike and whistle home where mother might apply a poultice.

Society has done a fantastic job in training schools to be risk averse and with that idea in mind I wonder what the view of pundits would be in the event of a loss of life or serious injury that occurred to someone when on a journey they didn't need to be making to a place that no reasonable person would consider should be open?

Well the snow has gone and we can expect a return to a more usual fare of "under-performance", "unemployable kids" and (Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner!), "the holidays.