We’ve just selected our Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Rayleigh and Wickford. Her name is Susan Gaszczak, and we are delighted to say that she’s a real “onlinefocus” sort of person. She’s been a member of the Lib Dems for 20 years, been very involved in council and community campaigning, and has 3 school-age children.
Susan sits on the Party’s Federal Policy Committee with Nick Clegg MP and Danny Alexander MP, where they have been working hard to set out the policies that will form the manifesto ‘Change that works for you – building a fairer Britain’.
St Nicholas church, Rawreth, is happy to offer to organise hustings for the General Election. Now that we are getting the names appear for the consituency, I shall be writing out to PPCs to make the offer.
Spread the word!
To quote from the LD manifesto . “The Liberal Democrats will be putting an extra £2.5 billion into schools to pay for more teachers, better discipline and catch-up classes”. How can exactly can additional money improve discipline ? Surely discipline begins at home from an early age, we have, to our cost, a generation of kids who think they can do exactly as they want when they want.
Hi RR
First of all, thanks for pointing out that the Lib Dems do indeed want to see better discipline in schools.
You’re right, so much depends on parents.
But the right funding can make a big difference. For example, reducing class sizes should help improve discipline (along with other things as well) And higher pay and ‘hard to serve’ bonuses to attract the best teachers to the most challenging
schools will also help. And I think there’s something in our policies about generally giving teachers more time to spend in the classroom.
Chris,
Speaking as a “retired” teacher – more time teachers spend in the classroom means more time teachers spend at home planning lessons and creating resources, let alone marking and moderating as well as writing reports. Confining teachers to a classroom does not enable a work/life balance. Teachers should be given additional time outside of the classroom to enable them to do their job properly.
Class sizes are no different to sizes 30 years ago, and there was not the discipline problem then that we see today. From experience, reduced class sizes do not improve discipline, a poorly behaved child will misbehave regardless of the size of the class.
Money needs to be spent on offering parenting classes as well as Social Services to train and recruit Social Workers to offer the necessary support to struggling parents.