Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa on the Kings Road does a three course lunch for £9 and sells its house wine at £10 per bottle. It is the best value anywhere in London and the quality of both the food and wine is not that bad either. As you can imagine that kind of price attracts an eclectic crowd from manual labourers to those of the more intellectual kind. It is a fascinating place if you enjoy people watching. I was there for lunch with my elder brother yesterday and we were talking about education. We agreed that with the rest of what the government is doing it will have to ensure that the politics of the teacher training colleges is changed so that the spirit of those like Ms Birbalsingh is fostered rather than suppressed. I had also reminded my brother how two of my children had passed through teacher training college having been called to see their respective tutors in one case only once and in the other case only three times and wondered what else these tutors could have been doing to earn their salary, if anything. It was at this point that a rather powerful but unshaven and scruffy chap at the next door table interrupted us. I was a little afraid that he might want to thump us. However he excused himself by saying that he was a teacher but had become so disillusioned he had taken a year out to travel to Australia and India and had only just returned. His disillusionment had arisen as a result of three main issues - firstly, the employment over the last 10 years of middle management and the increased bureaucracy and waste that this had inevitably generated, secondly, the stifling of any individual thought or action making teachers afraid to make any complaint against a manager or support a colleague wishing to do so for fear of losing their job and lastly grade inflation where what was an exam question at GCSE had now become an A level question. He also mentioned that the emphasis on course work for exams had had the result of making it easier for girls to pass rather than boys who work better under short term pressure, nor was he in favour of sats. He hoped the coalition government would re-balance the education system and rid it of the unnecessary jobs worths and allow teacher enthusiasm to flourish for the benefit of the children.