Into the early hours of Wednesday morning, I was sitting on a Cisco Live panel discussing technology and education, to a gathering from all over the globe. I say I but really it was my alter ego avatar, and the audience was likewise made up of avatars. It was a genuinely interesting discussion for me but a truly weird experience in some respects. I found myself oddly inattentive at intervals because besides the human figures, some more exotic than others in Cisco’s rather sumptuous auditorium, was a creature which looked like a cross between a five foot grey squirrel and a Racoon, which went by the name of Steve. I know this may sound hard to believe, but it was the first time I’ve ever lectured to a mansized rodent and I have to admit to being constantly distracted by Steve.

Wednesday in comparison, was dramatically down to earth. I was at Queen’s College Cambridge sitting in as a guest for one day of The Prince's Teaching Institute summer school for Maths and Science teachers. The Institute’s aim is to provide teachers with the kind of intellectual stimulus and excitement which almost certainly drew them into the profession in the first place, and it certainly provided that. Professor David Spielgelhalter’s presentation on the maths of risk and uncertainty was terrific. The way he applied maths to topics as diverse as the national lottery, The Premier League and Harold Shipman was amazingly informative, even to a literary critic!

Michael Gove was also speaking and his description of the current educational landscape was not just accurate, but amusing and provocative for anyone who has had to deal with the Department for Children Schools and Families. His interest in refocusing it on what it used to do, education, is fine by me and seemed to strike more than a chord or two with his audience. It was also a real pleasure to sit in on an educational event that wasn’t stifled by political correctness, and Bernice McCabe’s leadership of the afternoon panel discussion was just exemplary. It’s not a pretty sight when political posturing in the shape of John Coles from the TDA comes up against high tensile steel scholarship…but it is fun!

The only thing I have yet to hear said about the government’s abrupt decision to abandon the national strategies for literacy and numeracy in primary schools is that maybe, just maybe...it is because they have actually worked! The entire approach to basic literacy and numeracy before they were introduced was just so haphazard and chaotic. I remember in those dark and distant days hearing an English adviser for one of the largest local authorities in the UK no less, speaking at a conference. She showed examples of a pupil’s creative writing which made minimal if any sense, was utterly illegible and whichever way you cut it, failed the basic test of written language, to communicate. Yet nonetheless, she confidently asserted that she could understand what the child was trying to write and therefore awarded her such and such positive marks.

I think on that occasion my jaw must have rebounded off the carpet because it suffered a similar fate recently. At a meeting with a local authority, I learned that in three years time they fully expect that less than 25% of all the people working in their secondary school classrooms will be qualified teachers. At the moment a little over 50% are not qualified teachers but they are busy planning for it to be under a quarter.

Now I know from my experience in the past that the phrase teaching assistant covers a multitude of sins and sinners. There are some extremely able adults doing this job, who given other life circumstances would probably have trained as teachers, but there are also some who are little more than mumsy babysitters. I saw lots of these when I worked for Teach First. Kindly souls whose job was to walk around the school all day virtually welded to some appallingly disruptive teenager, often ending up actually doing the work for them. I am also convinced that their value in schools is directly in proportion to a child’s age. The younger the better.

When Estelle Morris introduced teaching assistants to UK schools in 2003, it was never intended that they would take lessons, or run classes on their own. In advice produced by the department about this, the farthest they could go was: Where the teacher is satisfied that the TA is sufficiently confident and accomplished the TA can address the whole class for a time according to plans made in advance with the teacher. Now I have no doubt at all that as I write, there are classrooms in secondary schools all over the UK, where the only adult present is a TA. I think the precise term is mission creep.

So my educated guess, is that it won’t be long before we hear the sound of DCSF tyres squealing under the stress of another U-turn, this time on the effect and value of teaching assistants. Maybe next week’s white paper?

Only a year ago Ed Balls threatened 638 failing secondary schools with closure. Now that the time is fast approaching when their results will show they are still failing, he has issued a revised threat. They will have to merge with more successful schools unless they improve.

The rich irony is that in making this new statement, he exemplifies the weakness and incompetence that has always been the hallmark of this "rump" of an administration. Of course he isn't making this new threat because he thinks it will work and somehow, magically,  over 600 schools will suddenly be getting 30% of their pupils through 5 GCSEs instead of 18% or worse. He's making it because, like the weak teacher who issues a spontaneous warning to a misbehaving child or class, without giving a second thought to whether or not he can back it up, he has no other choice. He has backed himself into this silly, weak, totally unsustainable  position.

And just as when I was a teacher, I had absolutely no sympathy for any colleague who behaved in such a patently weak and damaging manner, I have not a scrap of sympathy for Mr Balls.

Yesterday I took part in a marathon Mirandanet event on blogging which was fascinating and a welcome break from some very intense writing and constant BSF meetings with local authority teams I’ve been doing recently. There were a number of experienced educational bloggers round the physical table at the Institute of Education in Bedford Way, and a number of visitors joined the table remotely as the afternoon moved into the evening. I learned a lot, especially from Microsoft’s Ray Fleming, who had some great material on blogging guidelines from organizations as diverse as the civil service and the US airforce.

One significant thing struck me as the discussions shifted focus, and that was how the fundamental structure of a blog, a diary, lends itself to so many useful educational purposes, not least the much sought after e-portfolio. Does anyone really need anything other than a standard blog to create a meaningful and useful e-portfolio for any secondary school pupil? I doubt it.

There was also a hilarious moment during a discussion about manners and technology use in educational contexts, when Tina Preston’s laptop misbehaved allowing a video narrative to heckle one of the speakers. So I would tentatively offer the educational community a new word, to techle. Definition: the inadvertent interruption of a speaker by misbehaving technology.

In The Stuff of Thought Stephen Pinker has an amusing section on coinage and how the way new words get adopted doesn’t seem to follow any logic or value they might have, so I won’t hold my breath to hear techle crop up in someone else’s conversation. Pinker cites the wonderful furbling for example, definition: having to wander through a maze of ropes at an airport or bank even when you’re the only person in the line. Or given my predilection for Milton, my favourite, Beelzebug, definition: Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out. Neither word having any currency whatsoever, brilliant though they are.

So Ralph Tabberer, ex Director of the Training and Development Agency, has finally struck out for Damascus. In the Daily Telegraph he criticises the state secondary system for inverted snobbery….We have tried a comprehensive system and that is not working…The clock's ticking. Everybody else is catching up because they haven't got the same struggle to reconcile fairness and excellence….How do you make that the focus of education, and also the development of character, to turn out people who know the difference between right and wrong? In a reference to the need for the state sector to show a little humility and learn from the private sector he added that we are failing to spend enough time at the moment arguing about scholarship, genuinely high quality study and its importance. Having been saying exactly that, ever since I left working in the private sector for business a decade ago, in all sorts of educational places and contexts, I can assure Ralph he is in for a rough ride!

Yet he understates the issue hugely. When Tony Blair chanted “Education, education, education” it was as fine an example of the spin historians will relish poring over as the hallmark of New Labour, as you will ever hear, because what he really meant was, “Fairness, fairness, fairness.” (And apologies Matthew (Taylor) if you actually wrote that speech.)

But leveling the playing field is still what motivates thousands of teachers who nonetheless genuinely believe they are educators, working in schools all across the UK today. In classrooms and on sports fields, “teachers” will be making little decisions about who competes for which team, who gets the big part in the school play, who gets to go on a visit, purely on the basis of “fairness.” For many of them ability, enthusiasm, responsibility, aspiration, knowledge or educational need will have nothing to do with it.

I can hardly wait to hear what transpires on tonight’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 having frequently been on the receiving end of the inverted snobbery Ralph Tabberer talks about I fully expect to hear a lot more envy than altruism. I also hope someone exposes Howard Gardner’s wholly unproven "multiple intelligences" agenda, which has precious little to do with education and is all about leveling the playing field.

The Telegraph’s piece also carries this comment from a DCSF spokesman: “We make no apology for making closing the social gap an absolute priority.” So I guess he hasn’t read any of this research has he!