Labour implicitly admits education failure over exams

Ed Balls (he originally thought up the lets pretend to make the Bank of England independent wheeze ) is to repeat the trick by making a new independent body to oversee exams. [ We now know that really the bank of England was neutered, Gordon's appointees put on the board and when Alistair Darling finally said jump the governor said how high ? ]

The reports on this are full of the usual misdirection and straight lies about how exam standards haven't been falling, armed with the Labour smear on their critics that they are doing down "children,schools and parents".

But the brutal truth is that after 10 years the evidence that this is just untrue is too crushing even for the Labour spin doctors and hangers on to continue to push on the public.

So what does Ed Balls do - he identifies where the mistrust is - New Labour - and tries to pretend he's moved the body out of their control. But you can be sure that Labour favoured people, donors and party members will be on the board and will do their master bidding.

If this move is not to be seen as anything else than a repeat of the Bank of England independence dishonesty then why not have multiple boards. You know like they used to ?

Why not let schools and even pupils chose which exams to sit and Universities decide how they want to weight them.

A free market in education - with opportunity and fairness for all ....

... of course nothing like that could be further from the aims of the servants of the dead and vengeful hand of socialism.

Education, education, education ? Spin, spin spin. Lies, lies lies !

PS Man in a Shed is really going to have to get lots more work done for the rest of the week, so posting will be light. But I'll be back for Monday !

Update: Ed Balls on R4's Today this morning repeating the same matra. I wonder if his boss will like how much claim for the credit for the Bank of England misdirection move from 1997 ? He also just point blank refused to acknowledge the University of Durham survey that says A levels grades have inflated by one grade level in the last 10 years and 2 in the last 20.

Remember what these confidence tricksters came into power saying ? They have instead effectively inflated qualification grades as part of a great con on the public. Cheating children - odd that that didn't make its way into Gordon's conference speech.

Right - work today, not blogging. Comment moderation is back on for a bit as a spammer is trying to add links in comments to old posts.

Update: See John Redwood's take on this also - on much the same lines.