Education

Class struggle

Once one of the best in the world, Scotland’s education system has been steadily marching backwards for the past ten years. From the outside, it seems baffling: why, given that Scottish spending per pupil is among the highest in the world, are things going so wrong? From the inside, it’s far easier to understand. You can explain it in three words: Curriculum for Excellence. I’d heard stories about it before I started training as a teacher. By the time I qualified — in April last year — how I wished I’d listened to them. The story starts in 2010, when the new system was introduced with four aims: to create

Critics of grammar schools are wrong

Bright but poor kids have been failed for decades. Since the abolition of grammar school expansion some forty years ago, an educational bottleneck has been created, through which children from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot squeeze. State primary schools are banned from teaching how to pass the 11-Plus test, leading to the creation of an incredibly unfair system. Full disclosure; I live in Kent (grammar school territory) and both my kids were tutored and sat the test: one failed, one passed, no big deal either way as I too had failed the 11-Plus (and the world kept turning). A private tutor was essential if my kids were to stand a chance of understanding the

James Forsyth

MPs are undermining Britain’s world-class university system

The debate about universities in the last few days has been extremely frustrating. Britain has the two best universities in the world, according to The Times Higher Education rankings, and five of the top 25. This should be a cause for national celebration. Politicians should be seeking to build on this strength, not doing anything to undermine it. But instead, MPs on both the left and the right are behaving in reckless and irresponsible ways. Oxford is the best university in the world. But a former universities minister, David Lammy, the shadow Education Secretary, the Tory chair of the Education Select Committee and 100-odd other MPs want to massively interfere

Rod Liddle

The kids aren’t all right

Now that the Scots have banned people from smacking kids — both their own and, presumably, those that belong to other people — I suppose we will dutifully follow suit and another one of life’s harmless little pleasures will have bitten the dust. Fair enough, we can still say horrible, frightening things to them in order to exert a bit of discipline. But the immense satisfaction of hearing them howl in pain from a sharp slap to the leg, or a nasty pinch to the upper arm, will be gone for good.  Not many parents do hit their kids any more. It is already a vanishing art. Smacking unruly brats

It is unfair to blame Oxford for the low number of black undergraduates

David Lammy has been making headlines today, accusing Oxford of ‘social apartheid’ because it offers so few places to black British students. This claim is based on an FOI request Lammy submitted to the university asking how many black British A-level students each college has offered places to in the last six years. The most eye-catching statistic is that 10 out of 32 Oxford colleges did not offer a place to a single black British pupil with A-levels in 2015 and Oriel College has only offered one place to a black British A-level student since 2010. There is no doubt that Oxford does admit too few black British students, but

Sadly, true grit can’t be taught

I am currently wrestling with a dilemma. I have agreed to contribute to a panel discussion on character education at University College London, and while I generally applaud schools that try to inculcate qualities like perseverance, resilience, the ability to defer gratification, etc, I am not entirely convinced that these virtues can be taught. Should I swallow my scepticism, or gently point out that it’s naive to expect schools to achieve much in this area? The panel will be discussing an essay in a periodical called Impact in which philosophers write about education policy. This essay by Randall Curren, a professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, New York,

Tales out of school | 5 October 2017

In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents. The coronation was approaching, and the trip was an effort to ‘ignore it away’. All went well until they reached Wallingford, where Rosen’s father and a friend visited a pub, not knowing it had a TV set. They entered ‘at the very moment the Archbishop was putting the crown on the Queen’s head. The whole purpose of the punting holiday was ruined.’ His family’s political convictions are a recurring theme in Rosen’s account of his childhood and university years. Their experience was typical of many Jewish people at the time:

Don’t let these figures depress you, girls

Are British teenagers suffering from an epidemic of mental illness? Yes, according to a ‘government-funded study’ which found that 24 per cent of 14-year-old girls are suffering from depression. This has been seized upon by critics of Conservative education policies; they see it as ‘proof’ that the increased focus on teaching children knowledge, as well as more frequent testing and the GCSE reforms, have literally driven children mad. ‘One in four girls is clinically depressed by the time they turn 14,’ reported the Guardian. I’m sceptical about this and I took a look at the research carried out by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, which is based at UCL Institute

Our browbeaten universities

Are university vice-chancellors paid too much? The government clearly thinks so, and is planning to fine universities that can’t justify paying their leaders more than the Prime Minister’s salary of £150,000 per annum. Louise Richardson, vice-chancellor of Oxford University (salary £350,000), strongly disagrees, and has contrasted her salary negatively with those of bankers and footballers. But bankers and footballers work in the private sector and so are not the concern of government. It’s surely an established principle that government can intervene in the pay of chief executives of public bodies, but not of private ones. And any fool knows that universities are public bodies. Or are they? Actually, Professor Richardson

Prince George should be at a state school

I don’t want to come across like Dave Spart, but I am a bit disappointed that William and Kate have decided to send George to a private school. Nothing against Thomas’s Battersea, which is part of a successful, for-profit chain, but there’s no reason to think he will get a better education there than he would at a good state primary. One obvious choice would have been Kensington Primary Academy, the latest addition to the free school chain I co-founded in 2011. Admittedly, it hasn’t been inspected by Ofsted yet, but the other two primaries in the chain have both been rated Outstanding. He would have received a rigorous, knowledge-based

Laura Freeman

Box of delights | 7 September 2017

No mother, wrote Roald Dahl in his childhood memoir Boy, would send her son off to prep school without, at the very least, the following in his tuck box: a home-made currant cake, a packet of squashed-fly biscuits, a couple of oranges, an apple, a banana, a pot of strawberry jam or Marmite, a bar of chocolate, a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, and a tin of Bassett’s lemonade powder. To these, a boy would add ‘all manner of treasures’, such as magnets, pocket knifes, balls of string, clockwork racing cars, lead soldiers, tiddlywinks, catapults, stink bombs and Mexican jumping beans. One boy in Dahl’s class at St Peter’s in Weston-super-Mare

Follow the money

In 2007, many of today’s young parents were either graduates or school-leavers testing their skills in their first jobs. They were saving for a mortgage or just enjoying the freedom of being young with few responsibilities. Back then, UK average annual earnings were around £23,765. Now, they are £27,271 — a rise of just under 15 per cent. The average house price in 2007 was £181,383. Today, it’s £215,847 — a rise of more than 19 per cent. Tough on today’s young families, you may think. But the rise in house prices relative to income is nothing compared with the increase in fees for independent schools. As with incomes and

Ross Clark

Wealthier by degree

It is not a great advert for university when the universities minister says he is not especially bothered whether his own children go or not. ‘The days of degree or bust are long gone,’ Jo Johnson told the Sunday Times recently. ‘There are alternative ways into the workforce these days. Absolutely I would say to my own kids to consider them.’ But hasn’t he got it the wrong way round? Is it not the case that a degree is more essential now than ever? That the chances of getting a good job without one have greatly diminished since a generation ago, when East End barrow boys went straight into the

How to conquer America

Teenagers, in my experience, divide into the unmotivated and the motivated sort. You can spot the symptoms: given a free day, the unmotivated one will go out to buy a new phone charger, while the motivated one will go on an advanced sailing course. If you’re the unmotivated sort, read no further. This piece is not for you. You have as little chance of getting a place at an American university as my lazy dog does of winning Crufts. And when I say motivated, forget the Oxbridge level of motivation. Doing well in A-levels, filling in a Ucas form, managing to cook up a personal statement claiming to be passionate

Eat, pray, learn

My greatest spiritual moment this year came in Eton College Chapel. I was there for Evensong with a friend who’s an English master at the school. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the congregation belted out Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ — in English. Part of the pleasure came from the shock of hearing 1,300 upper-middle-class schoolboys imitating Hebrew slaves singing a lament about their Babylonian captivity in 500 BC. But it was also the sheer joy of the music in Henry VI’s chapel, a triumph of the Perpendicular Gothic. In quieter moments during the service, I examined the 15th century wall paintings, which are splendid, Flemish-style pictures of miracles of the Virgin

School portraits | 7 September 2017

  Walhampton School   The ethos at this prep school on the edge of Hampshire’s New Forest is very much one of living life to the full; history lessons involve re-enactments of the Battle of Hastings on horseback or the Battle of Trafalgar on a lake. Every year pupils go to ‘camp’ for a week at the end of the summer term; activities include day trips to RNLI stations, visits to local historical sites and a week on the Isle of Mull. Horse riding is also part of the curriculum, with a stable-full of ponies available for lessons. Walhampton describes itself as encompassing the ‘Swallows and Amazons spirit’, and aside

Rod Liddle

Learning? It’s a walk in the park

A hot, still day in Middlesbrough in early July 1970, the junior school summer term running down like an unplugged fan. Coming up soon would be the 11-plus, although we didn’t know it then and wouldn’t know it until the morning before the exam. All we knew or cared that fragrant, baking month was that soon we’d be free for six weeks. I think the teachers felt the same way. They were dilatory and listless, indulgent of our misbehaviour, the usual insistence upon discipline melting away in the heat. Why bother? That’s what the teachers must have thought. Why cram anything more into them with the holidays coming up? That

As easy as 1, 2, 3…

The amount of nonsense being talked about the new GCSEs in English and maths, whereby exams have been graded 9-1 rather than A*-G, is astonishing. The new grading system is ‘gibberish’ and will cost young people jobs, according to the Institute of Directors. The NSPCC thinks greater differentiation at the top end, with 9 being worth more than A*, will take a terrible toll on children’s mental health, while Mary Bousted, the General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, says the new system is ‘inherently ridiculous’. ‘To put 1 at the lowest and 9 at the top when the grades go alphabetically in a different order from A*

Hard lessons

George Tomlinson, the post-war education secretary, declared that politicians should leave exams to the teachers because ‘the minister knows nowt about curriculum’. Today, however, the curriculum seems to be in a state of permanent revolution. The new GCSEs, for example, are marked on a nine-point scale: a grade of 7 or above indicates what used to be an ‘A’. For every five students who hit the 7 threshold, only one will get 9, the top mark. How employers are meant to understand this is another question. The GCSE overhaul is the latest of a series of reforms, started by Michael Gove seven years ago, which are intended to ‘restore confidence’