Thank you davejb for an excellent and informative post! Your point that:
We have the teachers that the politicians, over the past 30 years, decided we should have - and it's the airy fairy lot who exit the classroom sharpish (theory being preferable to practise) who rise up the pyramind to determine policy for the next decade or two - assisted by soundbyte based policy decisions
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pretty well confirms what I already suspected, that though there may well be many dedicated and potentially effective teachers, the educational industry itself is crap, an asylum literally run by the least appropriate inmates. That spells out disaster just as it would for the aviation industry. That has many systems and procedures in place to try to avoid disaster. Would it not be a good idea if the same applied to education, education, education? Isn't it time that the real customers', ie the kids', interests were paramount, or are they in the same bed as NHS patients?