BAKER DAYS

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The BBC's coverage of education is so tied to the left-liberal agenda of the educational establishment that it has long placed it to the left of New Labour, never mind the Conservatives, on these issues. The attacks on testing have been going on for so long now, it's easy to take them for granted.
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The BBC website's main analyst remains Mike Baker, the BBC's former education correspondent, who is now a trustee for one of the educational establishment's newest forums, the National Education Trust (and, naturally, also a columnist for The Guardian.) Plenty of his articles are easilly accessible on the Education page of the website. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/default.stm
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His latest article for the BBC can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8449521.stm
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It's not a report, it's an opinion piece.
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It begins by drawing the sort of analogy to global warming that you would expect from the BBC: "Just like the difference between the climate and the weather, there are long-term and short-term trends in education. So, while it still feels as if schools, particularly in England, are wading through deep drifts of accountability - everything from Sats and league tables to Ofsted inspections - there are growing signs that a long-term change of direction has begun." He quotes the views of many of the usual suspects, and those of the NET (of which he is a trustee, though he neglects to mention that in his article), and ends: "However, as the current dispute about the Sats at 11 shows, the government and the Conservatives still fear the disapproval of the tabloids (as a proxy for public opinion) should they consider switching from external testing to monitored teacher assessment. They are not yet ready to trust teachers' professionalism. But are they still fighting yesterday's battles?" 'Monitored teacher assessment rather than external testing', 'trust the teachers', all the usual sorts of things.
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The aspects of Labour's education policy (particularly before Brown and Balls took over) that Mike Baker and the BBC regularly attack are precisely those ones that right-of-centre people tend to like most. Now there's a surprise!
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