After pondering the current state of education I was reminiscing when teachers could actually get a job and I came across this old chestnut brought to us by the DfES back in 2003. It was a report with an almost quasi-fascist title; "Workforce Reform-Blue Skies." Its main points were:

* The school of the future will deliver "personalised learning" through school teams including support staff

* Deregulation freeing schools from the need to have a full complement of qualified teachers should be exploited

* Teacher numbers should be cut to pay for a better adult:pupil ratio.

*Targets for recruiting teachers should be replaced with targets for higher-level assistants

* Support staff will play bigger roles in direct teaching and teachers will become "ruthlessly focussed on expert teaching, planning and pupil assessment"

* Funding will be tight with new reforms paid for from existing budgets

* The best classroom teachers may eventually be paid more than school leaders

At the time, ministers tried to distance themselves in a way that they wouldn't have looked out of place on the set of Yes, Prime Minister. Also, some anonymous junior civil servant who was responsible for the report was blamed.

However, a few years on minsters have finally got the chance to start implementing at least some of these ideas with the perfect excuse of the recession. They are not so stupid as to do it all at once. First of all you replace all those dispensable qualified supply teachers with non-qualified staff to ease the burden of those down trodden permanent staff who will be thankful of all this new free time. Once teachers get used to this Trojan Horse staffing, redundancies will be made to permanent staff all because of the recession and budget restraints.

Its funny how the budget restraint argument doesn't apply to things such as the illegal acts of aggression, sometimes referred to as a wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan which costs the UK over £2 billion per year or the Olympics which is estimated to cost almost £10 billion.

I suppose no-one can accuse the government of not getting their priorities straight.