EDUCATION secretary Kennneth Clarke let the cat out of the bag when he revealed last week that that opted-out secondary schools are going to have the opportunity to become grammar schools much more quickly than expected.
In effect, the government plans the gradual return to grammar and secondary modern schools.
The new testing of seven-year olds (Standard Assessment Tasks or SATS) fits in with this plan. The five week testing period which seven year-olds (now called Year 2 pupils) will have to undergo is designed to start streaming children, in preparation for an 11 plus-style selection.
The five week period of SATS means children repeating work No. 1 they have already done and more work for indreasingly hard-pressed teachers. At the Easter NUT conference a huge majority voted to boycott SATS.
But NUT General Secretary Doug MacAvoy made it quite clear that, for the seond year running, he will ignore conference decisions. The resistance to SATS has been left to sporadic boycotting at local level.
The government has taken advantage of MacAvoy's sabotage to announce that it is going back on its pledge to restore teachers' negotiating rights.
Kenneth Clarke claims that this will give teachers a 'professional' status like doctors and judges. Teachers forced to administer yet another government change which adds to their work-loads are unlikely to be taken in.
May 1, 1991
Being too pliable? Mandela side by side with De Klerk International News satisfaction in the ANC at what is Democrats (SPD). reaction of the people on 30 nothing to do with the people. It Kohl Defeat GERMANY'S Christian Democrats suffered a major defeat last week when they lost the state elections in Rhineland Palatinate. Chancellor Kohl's party got 38.7 of the vote against 44.8 per cent for the Social The Christian Democrats now control only one of the 10 state parliaments in what used to be West Germany.
The Greens got back into the state parliament, crossing the 5 percent cut-off barrier to get 6.9 per cent. The defeat is due to growing disillusionment with the economic effects of reunification. Kohl is unpopular in the east because of the growing un employment and austerity; and in the west because of taxes to pay for unification.
Pavlovian reaction
THE CRISIS in the Soviet Union has taken a new twist with the events surrounding last week's Central committee. With the collapse of perestroika Gorbachev is caught in a vise between the hard-line Stalinist Soyuz group and the supporters of Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev has taken two main initiatives: the economic rescue package announced by prime