In case you missed the announcement:

The Conservatives are promising to make teaching “brazenly elitist” by improving the quality of graduates entering the profession in England.

Leader David Cameron said there would be no financial help with training for those who failed to get at least a second-class university degree.

I’ve been busy sorting out our village blog and getting the council to acknowledge their idiotic mistakes so didn’t comment on it, although I had been cursing at the radio and TV every time its mentioned. I’m glad I didn’t because it wouldn’t have been a patch on a brilliant demolition from bella gerens. Although you should go and read it all she sums it up in one nice paragraph at the start and one at the end:

People of Britain, do you want fewer teachers? Do you wish to have teacher:pupil ratios of 1:45 across the land? Do you wish for huge schools operated by huge education authorities and staffed by teachers in huge teachers’ unions who can command ever higher and higher salaries and perks for their members as there is more and more work to go round and not enough teachers to do it?

…

Camerhoon, school is not about teachers. It’s about children. And anyone who wants to teach, and can demonstrate that they do it well, should be encouraged to do so, whether they have fancy papers to qualify them or not, and whether they have the biggest brain in Britain or just a mediocre brain that happens to be full of passion and love of learning and dedication to showing kids how amazing the world they live in is.

And  Chris Dillow is on form as usual:

There’s some empirical evidence here. Research in Sweden has found that teachers with high measured cognitive skills are actually bad for lower-ability pupils. And researchers (pdf) in North Carolina have found that the effect of teachers’ qualifications upon pupil’s achievements are often statistically insignificant, or even negative, once they control for the fact that better-qualified teachers tend to teach better pupils anyway*.
This evidence is roughly consistent with Claude’s claim that there’s a “total lack of correlation” between someone’s ability to pass exams at age 21 and their ability to inspire pupils years later.

I haven’t been able to find one good word for the policy, except from the usual dog whistle crowd,  so I am somewhat surprised that they have come up with it. Have they buggered up the selection process for the focus groups, I wonder?

What we need to do is take the politics out of education, and unions for that matter, and go for the successful Swedish model of a  full blown voucher system:

We shall move to a voucher system similar to that in Sweden, coupled with what we believe to be an essential component of any successful voucher system—the ability for people to found schools wherever they wish and for existing schools to opt out of direct State control. We do not envisage a mass sell-off of State assets, but a switch to independent not-for-profit and private entities competing openly.

• Vouchers, based on Swedish-style education reforms, to be used at any school, and parents to be able to top up.
• Independent schools to be free to set-up wherever they wish.
• Removal of veto and control over establishment, funding and administration of schools from LEAs.
• Selection, setting and streaming to be the decision of the individual schools.

and not the anaemic excuse for a policy that the Tories propose:

The Conservative party’s plan to overhaul children’s education by introducing Swedish-style “free schools” is flawed and “risks failure”, according to the man who designed the original model.

Anders Hultin, the architect of the Swedish system, said the party’s refusal to allow operators to make a profit would prevent the scheme from flourishing. To work, the Conservatives must allow a voucher system under which these schools could profit from their public funding, he said.