Policy and Practice Guest Lecturer - Mike Day 28/2/12

This lecture was held by Mike Day who is a Cabinet Member. The main aim of this lecture was to gain a greater understanding of Education Policy - A personal and practical perspective.
The first discussion was 'what is Education?’ Although we had already done a lot about this in our previous session with Andy I found it beneficial to hear somebody from a political backgrounds opinion on what education is. Some of the suggestions were political options, tradition and values, socio-economic objectives, and fundamental choices.
Next he discussed what education is for, with the answers, to create a workforce, to produce rounded individuals and to keep people off the streets. Whilst all these answers do have a point, I agree with the first more than others, as supported by Jeffs and Smith (1999) 'Education is is future-oriented - it is about development and growth even when we are studying the past.'

Education policy is needed to guide operational decisions and actions. Also education policy is important in order to set out a framework for teachers to work by as the national curriculum is involved with educational policy. If a teacher had no policy to follow, they could be teaching children anything, or nothing. 

To show the importance of education policy we then went on to discuss the types of policies we may not think about immediately and examples of education policies at different levels.
At a UK level, policies such as compulsory school ages, pay and condition of responsibilities of local education authorities, parents and schools.
Welsh Government policy level - includes foundation phase, choice of no SATS, no academies, and the choice of HE tuition fees and the pupil deprivation grant. Some of these are not available in other parts of the UK, therefore making them Welsh Government Policies.
Local Authorities - includes the organisation and the number of schools and school places, improving standards within the schools, offer advice and guidelines to schools. Also one important local authority policy is 'making arrangements to identify children and young people of compulsory school age missing education within their area' (Education and Inspections Act 2006).
School and Governing Body level - deal with polices such as school uniform, school start and finish times, raft of policies on social and personal education, child protection and SEN, also the school improvements plan (SIP) which sets out how the school can improve what it is doing. 

Mike Day finished the lecture by discussing with us who should develop policies; politictions or practicioners? There are arguments for both sides, for example politictions are there to 'represent the people' so should they be able to speak for the people, however polititions are not all experts in the education policy fields so would it be better for practitioners to decide? I agree with Mike Day that there should be 'A meeting of the minds' with both sides involved with developing policies.


Reference:
Jeffs T and Smith M (1999). http://www.infed.org/foundations/f-educ.htm
Education and Inspections Act 2006 (2006).