Downing Street Says » School Monitoring

» Monday, October 16, 2006

School Monitoring

Put that the PMOS’s characterisation of the Guardian story this morning was somewhat different from Ruth Kelly’s who had called it a sensible monitoring of activities, which sounded a lot like spying, the PMOS said that spying suggested an activity that was covert in nature. Putting the positive case for pluralism was a sensible thing to do whether you were in university campuses or schools or wherever and as such putting forward a positive case was what we were about. This also addressed extremism and no one should be in any way apologetic about taking on the extremist argument whether in society as a whole or in our education system. Part of that task was understanding the argument put forward by the extremists. Asked by Sky what the difference between spying and monitoring was, the PMOS said that it was, for example, knowing the likely arguments put forward by Sky and preparing a defence against them. That was not spying it was common sense monitoring.

Asked what putting the positive case for pluralism meant, the PMOS said that it meant educational programmes, which explained about democracy. That explained why violence was wrong. They would, of course, vary from place to place but we should not be afraid to argue the case for a pluralist democracy such as the one we had in this country.

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