Coast to Coast: The cost of our education policy

The current government is picking up where its predecessors left off - turning our school system into a pointless, punitive mess.

If you don't work in the school system, you might not realise what a monumental year this is for teaching, with huge changes coming in the ways your children are tested, measured, judged and provided for. School quality is to be changed to a measure called Progress 8, wherein a mix of 8 GCSEs are used as a yard stick for quality.

What you also probably won't know is that your kids are going to be punished severely for being unfortunate enough to be living under education secretaries that have no regard for their wellbeing. Variety is no longer encouraged for our children, and in the last decade or so we've seen an erosion of the differing flightpaths that meant anyone with the workrate to succeed stood a great chance.

Labour's push to turn the majority of young people into university education backfired horribly, creating a surge of graduates educated in unspecialised subjects and devaluing the credit undergraduate degrees earned you. Going to university for the sake of it, because you were smart, not necessarily because you had a field you wanted to deepen your expertise in. As a guy that did a three-year law degree purely because I was pretty good at it at A-Level, I can attest to that.

Then came the coalition and a shift towards punishing the young for taking advantage of a system the politicians created. A tripling in university costs, a delegation of responsibility to free schools (disastrous) and academies (why?), and a rhetoric from the wholly unlikeable Michael Gove that your kids have it too easy. Any parent who raises their child with the right amount of dilligence and attention will know that the good modern school puts the children under more pressure than ever before. Constant examinations and targets are set from an early age, and children are taught through blunt repetition to parrot their statistics to any Ofsted officers that might stick their head through the door. There is little learning in schools now, simply training for the next assessment.

The mandatory schooling age has been raised to 18 - a clever way to cut a chunk from unemployment figures - but there is still so much to be done to help those who are unacademic succeed. The new Progress 8 measure places huge weighting on English and Maths, which is fair enough, but Nicky Morgan's plans to make every child take five "core" GCSE's is so ignorant of reality.

Vocational subjects aren't getting less relevant. They're getting more relevant than ever. In a world where so many vocational jobs are being replaced by machinery, we need to give these kids the base knowledge early on, so they can specialise quickly enough to stand a chance. There's thousands of job opporunities for vocationally-minded people in all industries. Graphic designers, construction workers, mechanics and safety operators are always going to be needed, but we aren't letting our children know that these choices are okay to make.

Alternate forms of examination, that have helped unacademic children grab themselves a semblance of societal qualification in this stupid system, are being scrapped. "Too easy", they call the IGCSE in English, a coursework-focused qualification that's being chopped next year. Tell that to the bottom set year 11 children I taught, who cried with happiness when they scraped themselves a C grade by the skin of their teeth. They knew that, with that one letter, the world would judge them as a smarter individual and a better person. They knew that, if they'd gotten two marks less and a D grade, that they'd be forgotten about and left with very few options.

Your children aren't oblivious to their fate, but it's so sad that they can do nothing about the hardships forced upon them by Westminster in the name of performance, nostalgia and ideology.