Education

Thursday

Toby Young

Tips on how to get your child into the best state school

Monday was ‘national offer day’, which means that more than half a million parents across England were notified about which primary school their child got into. For most, the news was good, with nine in ten parents securing a place at one of their top three choices. But for some — particularly in London — the offer letters brought disappointment. In Kensington and Chelsea, for instance, just 68.3 per cent got their first choice of school. Not surprising, then, that parents have been resorting to fraud. In some cases, desperate parents end up spending so much money to game the system it would be cheaper to go private. Mumsnet commissioned

James Tooley

We’re not talking Eton

Private schools in the United Kingdom are affordable only to those on the highest incomes. But surprisingly to many, this is not true across developing countries, where low-cost private schools are ubiquitous and affordable to all. For nearly two decades I’ve been researching this phenomenon. I’ve visited low-cost private schools in more than 20 countries, from the vibrant slums of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to remote mountain villages in South-east Asia and the gang-dominated barrios of Central and Latin America. It truly is a global phenomenon, serving huge numbers of children. In Lagos State, Nigeria, alone, there are an estimated 14,000 low-cost private schools, serving two million children. In

Aidan Hartley

Let kids learn

Why would anyone who claims to care about the world’s poorest children try to shut down their schools? It’s strange and sad, but several British charities, in cahoots with some British unions, are making a concerted effort to close down hundreds of schools in Africa. They are doing this because they dislike private education, seeming not to care that this will destroy the life chances of thousands of desperate children, forcing them, at best, into state schools where the teachers are often absent, drunk or incapable. The campaign involves not only an alphabet soup of left-leaning charities from Action Aid to Amnesty International but also Unison and the National Union

Thursday

James Delingpole

It’s a cult thing

I have decided to set up a cult, which you are all welcome to join, especially those of you who are young and very attractive or stupendously rich. The former will get exclusive membership of my JiggyJiggy Fun Club™, while the latter will be essential in financing all the cool shit I need on my 500-square-mile estate, viz: hunt stables and kennels, helipad, private games room with huge comfy chair, water slides, grouse moor, airstrip, barracks for my cuirassiers, volcano with battery of rockets inside, and so on. What gave me the idea was this new Netflix documentary series everyone is talking about called Wild Wild Country. It tells the

Monday

Toby Young

Why we must save the Open University

I was sorry to read about the difficulties facing the Open University today. The Mail splashed on the story, while the Times and the Sun have followed up. This is a story close to my heart because my father Michael Young was one of the founders of the OU. I told the story of how he came up with the idea for a ‘university of the air’ in an article for this magazine last year: In 1961, shortly after getting a job as a lecturer at Cambridge, my father had an idea. The faculty buildings, he discovered, were largely unused for six months of the year. The colleges, too, were

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 5 April 2018

Self-limiting beliefs Sir: As someone who spent much of his working life teaching at Eton and Harrow, it was amusing to learn from Toby Young (31 March) that privately educated pupils achieve better exam results than pupils in other schools because they came into the world equipped with high IQ genes which, together with parental background, guarantee success, with the school adding little. If only we teachers had known! If genes are as important as Toby, Robert Plomin and others insist, it does ask questions of the drive to improve social mobility. If schools are limited in the difference they can make, do we fuss too much about ‘good’ and

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 22 March 2018

Reform National Insurance Sir: One objection to an increase in National Insurance contributions to rescue the NHS is that it would once again exempt from contributing those who most heavily use the NHS — the retired — and heap yet more of the burden on the working young who least use it and can least afford it (‘The Tory tax bombshell’, 17 March). As you acknowledge, National Insurance contributions long ago ceased to be purely contributions into a pension and sickness benefit scheme, and became part of general taxation. This means that entirely exempting retirees from contributing when many of them are on incomes larger than the working young is quite

Thursday

Mark Palmer

My football lesson

Every now and again my Tube ride to work on the District line is enlivened by children on a school outing. Presumably they are heading for the Science Museum or possibly the National Gallery. Often, they have different coloured badges stuck to their jumpers. As far as I can work out, if, for example, you are a red, then you’re meant to sit with other reds, and sometimes the teacher barks instructions such as: ‘Could the reds try to be a little quieter please?’, or asks: ‘Blues, how many more stops until we get there?’ This last question gives rise to a piercing shriek as a dozen or so blues

The Spectator

School portraits | 15 March 2018

Ludgrove There aren’t many traditional all-boys, full-boarding prep schools left in the UK, but Ludgrove in Berkshire is one. ‘Our boys speak for themselves and it is them that make Ludgrove special. They are full of spark and never short of things to say,’ according to the school. There are two mantras of Ludgrove life, ‘Be kind’ and ‘Be the best you can’, while the school motto is: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might’ (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Ludgrove has a strong academic record — around 70 per cent of the top year go on to Eton, Harrow, Radley or Winchester — but sport and tradition

Ross Clark Ross Clark

IB or not to IB?

The International Baccalaureate (IB), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, has — like its home town of Geneva — a slightly goody-goody reputation. Although not founded until the 1960s, it grew out of efforts to build a liberal infrastructure for postwar Europe. It was inspired by a pamphlet written in 1948 by the French pedagogue Marie-Thérèse Maurette called ‘Do Education Techniques for Peace Exist?’ We don’t want our schools and universities creating swots who might just turn out like Josef Mengele, the IB seems to be saying, but well-rounded citizens of the world. Nowadays, the IB is often sold by schools as a kind of academic Duke of Edinburgh

Katherine Forster

Minding the gender gap

Boys are behind girls: at primary school, secondary school and at university. In the UK, white working-class boys have long been at the bottom of the heap in terms of attainment, but these days boys of all backgrounds are underperforming relative to girls. Last year, girls got two-thirds of the new top grade 9 scores at GCSE, while just 32 per cent of boys applied for university, compared with 44 per cent of girls. It’s not just in Britain either. Across the OECD countries, a study has found that 15-year-old boys are 50 per cent more likely than girls to fail to meet the baseline standards in reading, maths and

The Spectator

School report | 15 March 2018

TRUE GRIT Education secretary Damian Hinds gave his first big speech at the Education World Forum in January, about the vital importance of learning from other countries and ensuring young people are able to thrive in a global economy. He also spoke of the benefits that come from sharing Britain’s educational excellence and know-how with the rest of the world. But he made it clear that he doesn’t believe education is all about exams and A grades. ‘There is much outside the relevant qualifications which matters a great deal as well,’ he said. ‘That you believe that you can achieve, that you can stick with the task at hand and

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Editor’s Letter | 15 March 2018

Is it the responsibility of schools to teach children about relationships and sexual consent? Or is that something parents ought to be teaching at home? This is the question Joanna Williams addresses in our opening feature. She takes a look at the changing face of sex education, and talks to some of its more evangelical exponents, as well as to a mother who has chosen to remove her daughters from sex education classes. It’s something of a controversial topic — but an undeniably interesting one. Gender neutrality is a fashionable subject these days, but Katherine Forster suggests that it’s quite harmful for boys if we pretend they learn in the

Sunday

Melanie McDonagh

Church school critics ought to be consistent on selective education

This week my daughter, 11, got the equivalent of a whopping scratch card win in the lottery of life; she got into the secondary school of her choice, an outcome partly determined by her being a Catholic, partly by dint of her entirely fortuitous proximity to the school in question. Some of her classmates are also going around punching the air, others, also baptised, aren’t, presumably on the basis that they didn’t live close enough. They’re a bit subdued right now, poor mites; at the age of eleven, they’ve got the sense that things haven’t really worked out for them, unless quite a few of the lucky ones turn down

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Does Theresa May know what she’s getting herself into?

What does Theresa May want post-18 education to look like? The Prime Minister’s plans for tuition fees are getting the most attention today, but her big education speech has a lot more in it than just the cost of university degrees. Indeed, May is criticising the ‘outdated attitude’ that university is the be all and end all, and promising reform of vocational training, including apprenticeships. A focus on vocational training is something all prime ministers tend to meander into, before realising that higher education is so devilishly complicated that they retreat before achieving said reform. In May’s case, it may not be the complexity of the sector so much as

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Damian Hinds reveals how constrained May is on domestic policy

Theresa May hasn’t had many opportunities to talk about domestic policy since the snap election. It’s probably fair to say, too, that the Prime Minister hasn’t exactly seized what opportunities there have been, either. This week, though, the Tories are talking about education, offering their response to Labour’s very attractive tuition fee pledge, and letting new Education Secretary Damian Hinds out to talk about his vision for the brief. Hinds has made clear today that he’s the sort of Education Secretary that Theresa May often wished she had over the past year. Justine Greening lost her job because of her visible lack of enthusiasm for May’s grammar schools policy, while

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Faith schools are more diverse than their critics make out

Ever willing to exploit my children, I asked them yesterday just how many actual English children there were in their class at school – one’s at primary, the other, secondary. What, English-English, they said reasonably? You mean, both parents, plus born here? Yes, I said, which meant they couldn’t count themselves – they were born in Dublin. They thought about it for a bit. The elder said, counting on his fingers, that five out of 27 were English-English, with another three more half and half. My daughter counted 10 out of 27, if you include pupils from Guernsey and Northern Ireland, which I unwillingly conceded might count as British from

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Look down on me at your peril: I’ll eat you alive

Angela Rayner is perhaps the only Labour MP who works with a picture of Theresa May hanging above her desk. It’s there for inspiration, she says, a daily reminder of the general incompetence of the Conservative government and the need for its removal. ‘That picture motivates me, in a strange way,’ she says when we meet. ‘They are doing such a bad job of Brexit, and a lot of people will be let down. Again. The people who already think that politicians are lower than a snake’s belly.’ The anger is with politicians in general. ‘It just feels that this generation is not doing a very good job.’ Ms Rayner,

Wednesday

Toby Young

In defence of Toby Young, by Toby Young

Shortly after midnight on 1 January my phone began to vibrate repeatedly. Happy New Year messages from absent friends? No, I was trending on Twitter — the third-most popular topic on the network after #NYE. The cause was a story about me in the next day’s Guardian that had just gone live. The headline read: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ Now, that is wildly overstating it. I’ve been appointed to the board of the Office for Students (OfS), the new body created by merging the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access — one of 15 people! But the Guardian’s spin

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 2 November 2017

Equality of outcome Sir: Rod Liddle exposes some deep flaws in the way children are prepared to play their part in adulthood (‘The kids aren’t all right’, 28 October). But one in particular merits further analysis. He is right to say that teachers’ imperative is to raise the D grade students at GCSE to a C, as a school is judged on the number of A-C grade passes it secures. So all the best teachers and all the extra resources are focused on the D grade children. An A grade student who could, with a bit of help, achieve an A* and thus begin their journey to Cambridge is ignored,