Ofsted putting the boot in...

I don't have a lot of time for quango's (see previous post) but this did amuse me if only for the predictable response it garnered.

BBC.

Thousands of pupils are being wrongly labelled as having special educational needs when all they require is better teaching and support, Ofsted has said.

It said up to 25% of the 1.7m pupils in England with special needs would not be so labelled if schools focused more on teaching for all their children.

The education standards watchdog said the term "special needs" was being used too widely.

The National Union of Teachers said such claims were "insulting and wrong".

Now a lot of us blogging types have been saying this for years, but it's sort of nice to see Ofsted pile in as well. Not that having bad teachers in the system is fully the cause of our poor education standards and our slipping down the league tables of education exams. But it does highlight the tendency to label difficult pupils (feral youth types) as having special educational needs rather than disciplining them and focussing their attention on learning. Then again years of wishy washy leftist dogma in the teaching trade have left the pupils as the masters, rather than the teachers, the teachers can't really deal with them and the pupils know it.
The NUT response is predictable though, it is kind of their job to defend teachers, it's just that often enough they shield the really bad along with the best. They also later on in the article claim that over full classrooms don't help, but I grew up going to schools with full classrooms and managed, just about all my class were quite rowdy too, but never to teachers, we knew what would happen if we did!
I think it's time to tilt the balance back to giving the teachers more power when it comes to discipline, however that would mean tearing up so many bits of EU and leftist child protection rules that the only way it could be done is to start from scratch. Make teachers self employed ans allow any two of them to set up a school anywhere that they can, even a house or pub with a spare room. Give all kids an education voucher and let the system sort itself out. The best teachers will survive and thrive, the bad wont be kept on in place when their contract runs out. Parents will be far more involved as trying to find a good school or teacher will be their responsibility, behavioural contracts can be drawn up. Small villages can source teachers to teach their kids in the local pub and keep communities going that way rather than export their kids to the nearest town.
I know there may be problems with implementing the scheme, but our current system isn't working too well anyway. We need to do something and moving the emphasis back to discipline and teaching rather than child care and SAT's cannot hurt. Getting politicians out of the process would help too.