YP Letters: Time to take politics out of the school system

Students sitting exams, but are schools subjected to political interference?

From: Chris Metcalfe, Lower Edge Road, Elland.

I AM writing to comment about the excellent leading article  (The Yorkshire Post, July 26).

As a retired headteacher, I have spent the 18 years since I “escaped” observing the myriad of new initiatives and policies forced upon the teaching profession by successive governments.

Every Education Secretary has shared a common factor: none has ever worked as a teacher. Between them, they have continued to demonstrate a total lack of understanding how schools operate, and how teachers have struggled to implement the reforms they have dreamed up. As you so rightly point out, the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention highlighted by York’s John Tomsett needs to be confronted by the Government as a matter of extreme urgency.

On the same page there appears a letter from Dave Broadhead who suggests that the new Justice Secretary “doesn’t require any particular qualifications”.

He then points out “we don’t have a teacher at education, a GP at health or an Admiral at defence”. This, to me, sums up the problems regarding teaching becoming less and less an attractive occupation. It is time to take politics out of the school system.