Hi Abbey - while I would agree with many of your comments on the social difficulties that some children ancounter - particularly on the subject of parental responsibilities, for example - it is clear that continued rearrangement of the curriculum (and the thread started with the curriculum as its main point) IS the responsibility of politicians and government civil servants. Government sets the policies and the civil infrastructure implements it. Many teachers themselves - Head Teachers in particular - have complained about the constant changes to testing, the national curriculum and the lack of certain elements in schooling. My own son, now 34, suffered under various changes in the way that subjects were taught and what was taught. The teachers did these things because that was government policy.

You've only to look at the way that successive governments have handled matters like education, health and the criminal justice system to see that the drivers behind this handling include political expediency.

Here's another example - off-thread, perhaps - illustrating political expediency: The Dunblane massacre, a hellish and shocking incident that few who read of it at the time can ever forget, resulted in the banning of handguns in this country. The perpetrator was a member of a licensed gun club. The upshot of that incident is that people who want to practice their sport in, say, the Olympics, will have to do their training abroad - they can't do it in this country. So, in spite of the largely excellent record of gun clubs on private, licensed ranges carrying out their sport safely and properly for many years, the careful many have been prevented from carrying out their pastime - target shooting - virtually by the actions of one person. In the meantime, traffic in illegal handguns and ownership of the same by criminals is undiminished.

I'm NOT a proprgandist for handgun sport - merely using this example of how governments pander to media and popular pressure in an almost knee-jerk reactive way. Pandering to the media and to populist opinion, rather than carefully thinking through policy, is not a way to run a country.