By Carole Dennett
Mr Holmes is away at the annual Balancing Unusual Items conference; last year he was highly commended for hanging a caramel Angel Delight on a washing line. Good luck DH.
Luckily, he didn’t miss the Prime Minister making his five pledges (the equivalent of pledging that there will be a Y in the days of the week) or the intention to force school pupils to study maths until they are 18. A policy wholly supported by our MP Bob Seely. It’s almost as if they sat around thinking, “The last few years haven’t been miserable enough for school kids; how can we pile on a bit more misery?”
Now, don’t get me wrong, understanding numbers is a very useful life skill, but what will this further study of maths entail? If it explains compound interest, mortgages, how to quickly calculate percentages and how to compare the price of something like for like, then great. But that shouldn’t need to be an add-on; that should be taught already. Maybe the Tories looked at their MPs and realised they don’t have a very good grasp of numbers.
Take our own MP, Bob Seely, who despite promising categorically in 2019, that the Island Deal was a “done deal”, it hasn’t materialised, yet he insists the Island has received £120 million in additional funding. Maybe that is the basis for the extended maths lessons. Answering questions such as, “If the Island has £120 million of extra funding, why does the council face a £22 million budget shortfall?” Or “Without the Island Deal, how does the Island ensure it has sufficient funding to provide adequate adult social care?”
Perhaps the question should be “How do the 2,400 households on the housing list get homes when the MP opposes house building and his Tory councillors want to reduce the house building target?” or even “Why is school funding on the Island below the national average and attainment at the bottom of national league tables?”
Perhaps we should change tack and ask “How do the people he clapped for during the pandemic, afford to live without a proper pay rise – yet bankers’ bonuses are to be uncapped?” or on a wider topic “Why is there no money for public sector pay rises, yet millions were spent on unusable PPE and billions on a track and trace system that didn’t work?”
One question that is taxing many Islanders is “Why is there a major incident declared at St Mary’s every month, despite Bob’s assurance that the NHS is in good hands?”
Perhaps the study of maths shouldn’t stop there. Maybe it should be incorporated into other aspects of life. For instance, they could introduce some new rules. The Tories would love to limit the little support some do get from the government. How about you can’t get your free bus pass unless you can calculate the area of a circle, or the price of your prescription doubles if you can’t recite Pi to 16 decimal places without pausing?
Joking aside, the real issue here is education and what any government deems important. Any of you like me, with school-aged children, will see the visible stress and anxiety on their faces at the number of mock and GCSE exams they have to do. Twenty-seven exams in some cases, yet we don’t seem to be improving their life chances. We aren’t teaching them the joy of learning for the sake of learning, but rather just learning by rote in the hope of getting a job. What’s wrong with learning music until the age of 18, without an exam, but to encourage creativity and joy? How about learning how to travel the world on a tight budget, or learning languages for fun?
My fear is, that if we keep on the current trajectory, the only thing we will be teaching our youngsters is how to choose between heating and eating.
