So, This Is A Step Too Far, Eh..?

School leaders have accused Labour of “window dressing” after Keir Starmer pledged to introduce...

...supervised toothbrushing for young children in England’s primary schools.

While the policy has long been supported by the dentistry profession as a way of curbing decay, headteachers said it was not appropriate for their staff to check whether pupils had cleaned their teeth.

It's not appropriate to check what parents are sending in for a packed lunch either, but that didn't stop them, did it?

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “We have serious reservations about how such a policy could even work. It is not the role of teachers to be making sure children brush their teeth each day.

“Schools already play a role in teaching children about the importance of looking after their teeth through the curriculum, but there has to be a limit in terms of what we can expect them to do.

“We should demand more than window dressing from all of our politicians.”

Oh, be quiet! You've already meddled in things that were the purview of parents, you can hardly claim it's not your role now... 

The British Dental Association, which represents the profession, said it was encouraged by Labour’s proposal, given ministerial inaction over introducing a similar scheme.

So, have the hapless Labour brains trust decided there's more votes to come from dentists than from  teachers? Because maybe they shouldn't have let Diane Abbott do the maths...  

This'll Go Down Well At Friday Prayers...

Teachers can help counteract the rise of the “incel” movement and the dangers of misogyny with school lessons on respect for women and healthy relationships, ministers believe.

Start with the mosques, shall we? 

A government source said that Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, expects teachers to be able to tackle the risks from incel culture through the relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) curriculum within schools.

Ah! No danger of shaking anyone's worldview then, since they probably don't let their children attend these anyway... 

It follows concerns sparked by Britain’s worst mass shooting in over a decade, in which Jake Davison, 22, killed five people including his mother and a toddler in Plymouth last week.After the attack, it emerged he had shown interest in the incel – or involuntary celibate – online culture fuelled by misogyny and abuse of women. Police are investigating whether this was a motive for the shootings.

Going to run up against the thorny issue then, that he didn't solely target women, aren't you? 

On Thursday, an inquest heard that he argued with his mother, for whom he expressed hatred online, before the killing spree.

He's dead, she's dead...how do they know?

But maybe I'm making light of a serious issue, and there's lots of Jake Davisons out there (thanks, GPs!)? Are the people who make a living off this sort of thing seeing a lot of cases? 

William Baldét, a Prevent coordinator and practitioner in countering violent extremism for 10 years, said: “I’ve not personally seen anyone coming through who was explicitly driven to violence by the incel community but we have seen an increase in people engaging with those subcultures. It may be because we are better at recognising it, it may be because of an increase, or both.”

Ah. And if he can't manufacture it... 

He added: “It’s clear that misogyny as a concept runs deep through a lot of extremist ideologies. Incel is different in that it’s built around a hatred of women and feeling of inferiority, rather than bringing about societal change, but there’s a related need to tackle misogyny across society. That should be part of the whole system, at every level, and not just framed trough (sic) counter-terrorism.”

Of course, he can. They always can, can't they? 

Right Headline, Wrong Answer...

 

Faced with a deluge of evidence that months of lockdown, patchy school attendance and a digital divide had widened attainment gaps between better and worse-off pupils, the 163 English grammars put their heads down, ploughed on, and managed to run just about the only examinations that took place last year.

Well, hurrah! Something more to celebrate, surely? 

Well, no. Not according to Fiona. This is the 'Guardian', after all...

Does anyone in government care? It seems not, and this is hardly a topic likely to fire up the prime minister, whose nauseating observation about IQ testing was to suggest that humans were innately of unequal ability, and like cornflakes in a cereal box. “The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top,” he explained in the 2013 Margaret Thatcher lecture, which is certainly an interesting take on the concept of “levelling up”.

Does Fiona believe we are all born equally able, then? 

The 163 grammar schools may seem like small beer at the time of a national emergency, but for every selective school there is a larger local group of secondary moderns, a school type no one is campaigning to bring back.

They might not be, but is the answer really the wrong one? Only if you think that the key to the 'equality' you supposedly seek is to ensure no-one has the provable chance to better themselves... 

Well, You're Well Placed To Talk About 'Divisiveness'...

A newly retired head teacher says some school children will be "blighted" by time away from the classroom during the pandemic.

Really? Well, at least they won't be indoctrinated, so maybe we'll chalk it up as a draw? 

The former head believes the attainment gap will widen between children from a disadvantaged background, and more privileged ones, as more families struggle through the pandemic.

She said: "There are individual success stories but generally we haven't closed that attainment gap so we have to consider what's behind this and we know it's down to poverty.

"If you think about what's happening now our country is even more divided in terms of haves and have nots through this pandemic, increased number of people finding it difficult to make ends meet, all the strain that puts on families, so it will be an even bigger problem."

She's really fired up by 'division', isn't she? Say....does her name seem familiar to you? 

In 2019 she appeared on TV, on This Morning to defend her decision to ban children from handing out sweets on their birthday, a story which was also picked up by numerous national papers.

Ah. Say no more. The lady so concerned with divisiveness she decided to introduce a bit more.