Billy's Holiday Rant

So what are you all doing over the easter holidays?

I'm off for a rest and can't wait. I need a break. Apart from the teaching bit, which I still adore and the kids who challenge my thinking every day, life in Further Education is an endless converyer belt of mind-numbing meetings, bean-counting quality tasks and curriculum development activities that would make a corpse sit up and complain.

FE continues to slide down the governments list of priorities and has nearly fallen off the end. We are somewhere in between the Governments recycling of disposable nappies project and the lets stop everyone enjoying themselves campaign.
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Awful. truly awful. The leeches at the Learning Skills Council, the LSC, continue to suck the finances out of colleges and the good will and vitality out of the staff.

At present it is Redundancy season in College. They are sacking all those over 50 on high salaries in order to make cutbacks and not replacing them. None of this goes reported in the TES as the staff are picked off in small numbers and given payments to go quietly. The people who are left then must pick up their work and carry on.

The skills-centerisation of FE continues unabated. The College now takes school links three days a week from the feeder schools nearby who farm the "dissaffected" kids out to college to get their NVQ level 1s in laundrywork, ferreting, cobbling and chimney sweeping. None of them want to be in College and spend most of the time running round the corridors as there are no security staff to deal with them. One kid ran through a plate glass door last week. Yuk...blood everywhere. He lived though.

So, as you can tell, yours truly needs a tonic for easter and lots of Green and Blacks chocolate to cheer me up. never mind there are people far, far worse off than us in FE.
As the cast of the Life of Brian so gallantly sang, " always look on the bright side of life" !

Love Billy

BBD

xxx