Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
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But every political party with working brain cells has always known that some body like OFSTED is necessary whether that body is called OFSTED or "HM Inspectorate of schools" or something else.
A more thorough inspection regime can only work in favour of the students - who the schools are supposed to be there to help and those teachers who want to see their schools deliver the very beset for the students will welcome it.
Scrapping OSTED entirely as Labour propose would be a disaster for education.
Anyway, the point may be made tonight that Mrs Harrison's record as a Chair of School Governors is not something to be overly proud of if we use only Ofsted reports as the measure. Locals well remember the valiant work to defend the school from closure but also the effort she made to get the Wellbank development approved, which has led to the swimming pool closure but nothing much else. So there's now a school but no sight of the predicted additional children.
I presume you are using that expression as a joke and are not seriously suggesting that the Church people who organised the hustings were deliberately biased towards Trudy or the Conservative party.
I've been trying to make sense of Labour's proposals for a replacement for OFSTED. They seem pretty vacuous to me, to be honest.
If you have a job which needs doing, as everyone seems to admit that school inspection does, then nine times out of ten the best way to do that is to take the body you have, build on the strengths of that body and take specific action to correct the weaknesses.
Tearing the whole thing down and starting again risks finding all too often that you've lost the strengths but replicated the weaknesses.