Last week the BBC website ran a story about some new research casting doubt on the effectiveness of free schools. ‘The Swedish model of free schools, lauded by the Conservatives, has not significantly improved pupils’ academic achievement, a study suggests,’ it began.
So what was this study? It purports to be a paper written by ‘Rebecca Allen’, a lecturer at the ‘Institute of Education’. Is this organisation for real? If you visit the website for the ‘Institute’, the suspicion starts to creep in that it is a brilliant hoax devised by a fiendishly clever group of satirists.
If you click on ‘About the IOE’, you’ll see the following sentence: ‘Our distinguished history and current mission are rooted in a commitment to social justice.’ Now you’d think that a taxpayer-funded teacher-training college would be a little more circumspect about disclosing its ideological bias, particularly if its lecturers are hoping to be quoted as impartial authorities when it comes to assessing Conservative policies.
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