Well I was a specialist teacher, being a well-educated scientist, ;-) and I'm not up for pontificating about, for example, early-years education. You don't really want to know what I think about content-stuffed curricula, the terrorising of classroom teachers by a pig-ignorant and ill-trained inspectorate who are there to judge, not support, and a draconian testing regime that pins teachers to the floor and robs them almost entirely of using their imagination and of occasionally going with the flow, the meat and drink of great teaching. Sorry about the one-sentence rant! Unfortunately, what goes on in schools has always been a delicious political football. Everybody has an opinion. Some of those opinions are valuable and valued and some come from the teacher-bashing right-wing press. Getting effective political education into our schools is a vain hope. In fact, to my mind what's far more urgent is the need to address the lack of good education for relationships (not just sex) in the face of online porn and social media. You can put as much muscle as you like into the three Rs, and so you should, but it counts for little if you don't show children how to respect both themselves and others. My view is that schools are seriously lagging behind the real world in those aspects of the education of the young.