THE public education debate recently held in Stroud (“Panellists clash over education”, SNJ, July 20) highlighted the core problems with our schooling system – viz. over-tested and over-examined children, and over-stressed teachers with absurd workloads which make any kind of healthy life balance virtually impossible.

What an appalling role-model for showing our children how to live a healthy life, when those devoting their vocational lives to teaching them are driven into the ground.

We should be grateful to MP Neil Carmichael for being prepared to speak at an event where he must have anticipated the degree of criticism that ‘the system’ for which his government is responsible would receive.

Neil’s parliamentary Education Committee also recently cast doubt on the Department for Education’s nomination for the next head of Ofsted, thus showing a welcome independence from government for which the Education Committee has a proud history.

Mr Carmichael seemingly still has some way to go to be convinced by the arguments of those who fundamentally question the relentless colonisation of our schools by the toxic “audit and accountability culture” that has occurred since the 1990s, and for which successive Conservative and Labour governments are responsible.

We are fortunate indeed that the chair of this influential parliamentary committee is our local MP, and I hope that the organisers of this pioneering public debate might be prepared to make this an annual event, so that Stroud can be at the centre of the innovative thinking that our schools so desperately need.

For with Steiner and home/alternative education being so prominent in the area, Stroud surely has ideas-a-plenty to contribute to this vital discussion.

Dr Richard House

Educational consultant and campaigner

Stroud