Your confused and contradictory leader “Don’t panic over early years” sits oddly with The TES’s usually well-informed and well-balanced commentary on early-years education.
For those of us who teach in areas of great social and material deprivation the tone of the leader was insulting.
Generally we receive children who need a great deal of support in the pre-basic skills of social co-operation, speaking and listening, memory training and reasoning before they can progress to fulfil their full potential and reach the literacy and numeracy targets expected at the end of key stage 2.
I welcome any initiative, from any government that can promote the sort of progress shown in the Dispatches programme and supported by Margaret Hodge MP and education junior minister, Estelle Morris. Indeed an education action zone bid for our area includes those ideas.
We can do without the clever parsimony of ill-informed leader writers.
Peter Brinton Headteacher, Roskear school, Camborne, Cornwall
