Hi Will,

technically, I agree with you. I'm not trying to argue that governments & the civil service get it right all the time. And I definitely agree that knee jerk media driven policy making is a massive problem in all areas of government....

... but (playing devil's advocate here) if you have a system that you know doesn't work very well then what can you do but try and redesign bits of it to make it better?

(we're not talking if it ain't broke don't fix it, because I don't think there has been a single point in the last 50 years where educationalists or popular opinion have not felt that 'Schools Have Problems...' in one way or another, plus society has been evolving the whole time so things that used to work don't necessarily work any more).

So, you tweak things and make some policy changes in an attempt to make things better. And they don't all work immediately, but it might be because they need time to bed in. So you give it a year or three and then if things are still not working, you tweak some more...

And on the one hand you have people still complaining about the original problem and that your policy doesn't offer a good enough solution, and on the other you have people saying that too many enforced changes are a problem in themselves. Both groups are probably right, but you are damned if you do make changes and damned if you don't. Fundamentally you can recognise both sides of the problem and genuinely do want to come up with a solutrion that suits everybody. But you're not sure how.

Added to this, you have inherited this system from previous governments who have all been trying to achieve broadly the same aims, so all this has been going on for a long time and the media and voters seem to have pretty short memories and don't seem to make much distinction between changes that are happening now and those that happened 10 years ago. And while you may not want to pander to popular opinion, if you can't keep the population happy then they won't vote for you and you lose the opportunity to do anything at all...

I think the problem I have with the whole thing is that lots of people seem convinced that they know the answer and have a solution that will fix the problem, but in reality nobody knows what is going to work until it has been tried. Yes more educational research may be one answer to this but that costs money too, and then you're funnelling resource away from actually paying for real schools and teachers into funding experiments which may not give the answers you're looking for. So you get a situation where some research is done but not quite in depth enough, decisions then still get made based on opinion rather than evidence, and the whole thing goes round again.

Tricky....