Author: Mick Fletcher

Mick Fletcher worked in the Further Education sector for over 40 years, initially as a lecturer and then as a local authority officer, before becoming a researcher and policy analyst at a national level. For the last twelve years he has been a freelance writer, researcher and consultant specialising in vocational education and skills policy.

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A new deal for the eel

Mick Fletcher

England’s eels are in trouble. Since the 1980s, the numbers in our rivers and wetlands have declined by some 90 per cent. Without urgent intervention, a once-common animal could face extinction. There are several reasons for this dramatic fall. One of the most obvious is the growth of man-made barriers blocking access to suitable habitat. […]

Somerset cuts and the cost of care: a story of defunding and privatisation that is replicated right across the country

Mick Fletcher

In 2021, I wrote about the dangerous dowry left to the new Somerset unitary authority by the previous Conservative council. The combination of an unwanted reorganisation and a systematic failure to invest in local services had left Somerset especially vulnerable to financial crisis. The warning of trouble ahead was all too correct. In November 2023, […]

A dangerous dowry for the new Somerset unitary authority

Mick Fletcher

We are reissuing this horribly-prescient article, given the parlous state of so many councils across the UK. The prospects for the new unitary authority recently imposed on Somerset are not good. Like local government everywhere, the county is having to cope with a dysfunctional funding system and a decade of austerity. It will soon have […]

There’s a positive side to all the pumpkins

Mick Fletcher

A few years ago, we broke a flight to Australia with a short stopover in Singapore. It was Halloween when we arrived and impossible not to know it. Bright orange pumpkins, black silhouettes of bats and tangles of giant spiders’ webs had invaded public spaces, shops and restaurants. It was the same plastic tat as […]

Fine words but few new ideas for further education

Mick Fletcher

It was a surprise when one of the big new announcements made by a desperate Rishi Sunak at the Conservative Party Conference was a reform of further education. It was less of a surprise that the proposal was hastily conceived and not thought through. Calling a qualification designed for England an Advanced British Standard illustrates […]

Active travel is the path to follow

Mick Fletcher

On Saturday September 16, a short section of traffic-free path in rural Somerset was officially opened. It was a small thing in itself, just over one mile in length and, at present, with no onward off-road connection at either end. Nevertheless, it illustrates some very important points. The path, and others like it currently being […]

You can bank on Rishi Sunak to do the wrong thing

Mick Fletcher

In July 2023, Rishi Sunak made a surprising public attack on the leaders of a major UK bank. “Rishi Sunak slams Coutts”. It is perhaps not surprising, however, that he picked the wrong issue. What prompted his unusual intervention was the denial of one sort of bank account to one rich man. Sunak ought to […]

Sewage, phosphates and the housing crisis in Somerset

Mick Fletcher

People understand sewage. It stinks. So does the system that has allowed privatised water companies to make huge profits while failing to upgrade our sewage treatment system. Over the last eleven years the companies have paid out £16.8 billion in dividends while sewage discharges continue to be unacceptably high. Graphic pictures of raw sewage spilling […]

A small step for Shepton, but a step change for active travel

Mick Fletcher

On a cold March morning, a small crowd gathered in Shepton Mallet to mark the opening of a very short section of cyclepath. To an outside observer it will have seemed a pleasant but unremarkable event – a welcome addition to local infrastructure, but not much more. In fact, it could prove quite significant. A […]

A quiet burial for Tory failure in Somerset

Mick Fletcher

Somerset’s politicians can’t sneak anything past Mick Fletcher when it comes to further and adult education… Tucked away at chapter 12, in a document only of interest to specialists in further education, is evidence of another quiet failure of Tory dogma. In a routine administrative update from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) two […]

Mandatory mathematics – do Sunak’s sums add up?

Mick Fletcher
Maths teacher

Mick Fletcher on another back-of-the-envelope policy. There are some huge issues in the Prime Minister’s in-tray. The health service is facing its worst ever crisis; the economic cost of Brexit is increasingly evident and falling living standards are driving mounting social unrest. In a rational world it would make no sense at all for Rishi […]

Medical crisis and moral injury – the state of the NHS in Somerset

Mick Fletcher

Although government seems to be in denial, it is clear that the NHS is in crisis – a consequence, in large part, of a decade of underfunding.  The impact on the service nationally has been logged in detail, with the Financial Times offering a series of particularly thorough analyses.   We wanted to find out […]

‘Keep the rubbish courses for the Brits’

Mick Fletcher

We have become resigned to the fact that many of the policies pursued by the present administration are inhumane, whether they relate to desperate people seeking asylum or poor children denied free school meals. We have also become accustomed to administrative incompetence – there is no need to think further than the Truss-Kwarteng budget for […]

I saw the monster but couldn’t see the point

Mick Fletcher

On a cold, dull and windy day I went to Weston to see the monster. At a distance it looked disappointingly small, dwarfed by miles of empty sand and sea, but as I walked along the beach it grew until its full scale was apparent. So, too, was its oddity. The monster – a repurposed […]

Fysh swims against the tide

Mick Fletcher

Yeovil MP Marcus Fysh is clearly not afraid of adopting controversial positions. Last Christmas, for example, he was widely criticised for comparing the idea of vaccine passports to living in Nazi Germany. In June 2020 he was ordered to apologise for “patronising conduct” towards the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. Now, in comments that say more about […]

The miracle of cider

Mick Fletcher

We didn’t plant the orchard just for fruit. In some ways the wildlife interest and impact on the landscape were more important. We wanted proper trees, full standards on non-dwarfing rootstock. We wanted trees that would outlive us and probably our children as well, growing tall and hanging heavy with mistletoe, becoming crusted with lichen […]

The mysterious glow

Mick Fletcher

At around 9.30pm, on a warm summer evening in late July, some 40 residents of Westbury-sub-Mendip converged on the centre of the village and waited for it to get dark. They were taking part in the annual glow-worm count that has been carried out at about this time for the last 17 years. A small […]

Heappey sabotages a green funding bid with his own ‘imaginative’ idea for levelling-up

Mick Fletcher

James Heappey MP seems guilty of stabbing his constituents in the back after a last-minute intervention which threatens to derail a £20m bid for levelling-up funds. The plan, put together by Conservative-controlled Sedgemoor Council and LibDem-led Mendip, proposes substantial investment in a green transport corridor connecting communities from Wells in the east to Highbridge on […]

Education in crisis, and it can only get worse

Mick Fletcher

In any sane context the car crash that is Conservative education policy would be enough to bring down a government by itself.  The schools bill before Parliament has been so savaged in the House of Lords that ministers have stripped out 18 of the key clauses, leaving it bereft of its original purpose, yet doing […]

Wildlife, wilderness and the English landscape

Mick Fletcher

The contrast was dramatic and instructive. Only a day after walking around the deer park at Petworth House, I took a footpath through the grounds of Knepp Castle, a pioneering ‘rewilding’ project in the heart of Sussex. The two estates are less than half an hour apart by car, but a world apart in terms […]

Miss Snuffy is right about social mobility!

Mick Fletcher

To my surprise, I find myself agreeing with Katharine Birbalsingh, who tweets under the slightly eccentric name of “Miss Snuffy”. Birbalsingh is regularly referred to in the less serious type of newspaper as “Britain’s strictest headmistress” and her views go down well with the Conservative rank and file. I suspect that it is her strong […]

Lib Dem landslide in Somerset – a sign of things to come?

Mick Fletcher

One fact shows the sheer scale of the Conservative defeat in the elections for the new Somerset County Council. The 61 Liberal Democrat councillors elected to the new unitary authority will form the largest group from that party on any elected assembly in the UK. Only the House of Lords – not of course an […]

The man behind Operation Mincemeat

Mick Fletcher

The film ‘Operation Mincemeat’ released over the Easter weekend, tells the exciting story of a key event in the second World War. The Germans were tricked into thinking that an attack on Europe from North Africa would start in Greece rather than the more obvious route through Sicily. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper called it “The most […]

Thanks a million, Eton

Mick Fletcher
Eton by Canaletto

If further proof were needed that ‘levelling up’ is a soundbite rather than a strategy, the proposal for a new cadre of elite sixth forms provides it. Mick Fletcher explains. Trailed as one of the key measures in a programme to address 55 ‘education cold spots’, the aim is apparently “to ensure talented children from […]

Brexit, meritocracy and the retreat from reason

Mick Fletcher
Private Eye cover Leave special

Chris Grey, who blogs about Brexit and related matters, is someone well worth following. A recent post explored the fascinating links between the ‘partygate’ scandals currently engulfing the Johnson administration and the ideas and individuals that drove Vote Leave. It raised again a central paradox of current politics – that while Brexit and populism as […]

Elite sixth forms: a class idea?

Mick Fletcher
sixth formers in parliament

In a desperate attempt to divert attention from the mess in Downing Street, the government recently announced a flurry of ill-considered ’new’ policies. One was a proposal to develop a cadre of “elite sixth forms” which would “ensure talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds have access to the highest standard of education this country offers.” I […]

Raise your voice!

Mick Fletcher

At West Country Voices we like to tell the stories that others in the media don’t. Often, these stories concern issues that the powerful and well-connected are keen to suppress; they involve holding policymakers to account or exposing abuse of office. Recent stories have focused on the threats to our democratic rights and freedoms. They […]