Education

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 13 July 2017

Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the anti-Brexit campaign and the persistent underestimation of the United Kingdom’s strengths (‘Down with declinism’, 8 July). It is ironic that the heirs of the old 19th-century Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, are among its principal proponents, for declinism goes back even further than the 1880s cited in his article. Fearful of the advances demonstrated at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 by continental countries in engineering (e.g. the giant Krupp cannon) and the sciences generally, the Liberal minister Robert Lowe in 1870 opened the debate on the Education Bill —

Tuesday

Toby Young

The government should think again before scrapping its free schools plan

On the front page of today’s Times it says ministers are thinking of scrapping the free schools policy in order to give more money to schools. I hope it’s not true. Not only would it constitute a terrible loss of self-confidence on the Government’s part and confirm the narrative that the Conservatives are enacting Labour’s manifesto rather than their own. It would also be a betrayal of the thousands of people who’ve set up free schools and are in the process of setting them up. We have taken on the educational establishment and put our necks on the line at the behest of successive Conservative Education Secretaries. Are they really

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 15 June 2017

Divining Rod Sir: Please congratulate Rod Liddle on being the only commentator who accurately forecast the uncertain general election result (‘This is the worst Tory campaign ever’, 27 May). His prediction of the ‘stickiness’ of the Labour vote and the likelihood that Ukippers would return to the Conservatives in the south, where they mostly were not needed, were especially prescient. Mr Liddle goes to show that instinct, common sense and a sceptical nous are worth more than all the pseudoscience of polling. Well done him. Poor old us! Dr Barry Moyse North Petherton, Somerset Our lefty deplorables Sir: An astonishing 41 per cent of the British electorate voted for Jeremy

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Universities should offer one-year courses

In every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what with my full grant and my tuition fees paid. But by God, learning stuff is easy nowadays. The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then. That’s why we were all drunk and

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sink or swim | 15 June 2017

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian. On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mad matrons and horrid housemistresses

It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than make me smile, or emit a sharp soundless puff of breath from the nostrils. But this book made me guffaw. Normally, only P. G. Wodehouse has that effect. It’s tragicomedy, really. Julie Welch’s subject is a ripe one for tragicomedy, as I should know, having written on it myself: life inside girls’ boarding schools — or in this case, life inside Felixstowe College (founded 1929, closed down 1994) to which Welch went in the early 1960s, and which shaped her whole being to such an extent that she’s convinced her

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 1 June 2017

Ignoring the hadith Sir: Douglas Murray and Jenny McCartney (‘The known wolf’ and ‘A war on joy’, 27 May) are correct to cite hatred of women and young girls and fear of their independence as a trigger for terrorist violence — witness Malala Yousafzai. But it is of course not the only trigger since, denial notwithstanding, it is against the generic and non-gender-specific ‘infidel’ that the Koran fulminates. The prohibition said to exist against killing women and children in war is not found in the Koran (of divine infallibility) but in the hadith (of debatable provenance on a case-by-case basis). The alleged prohibition thus forms a secondary and ultimately dispensable

Thursday

James Tooley

First class

On the Today programme a month ago, Education Secretary Justine Greening was asked whether she could name any ‘respected figure or institution’ in favour of more grammar schools. She declined to answer, which was taken to mean that she couldn’t, and that there wasn’t. I’ve been travelling a lot this year, so wasn’t around to offer my support. I’m back now. Assuming that a professor of education at a Russell Group university is respectable enough, let me wade into the debate: yes, I’m in favour of more grammar schools. Educational experts against more grammar schools — of which there are plenty — point to the current evidence from England and

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The SNP’s muddled education policy is failing Scottish kids

I am afraid that whenever a politician asks to be judged on their record, it is sensible to assume this reflects a confidence they won’t be. At the very least such promises are hostages to future headlines. Take, for instance, Nicola Sturgeon’s boast that education  – and specifically closing the gap between the best and worst schools in Scotland – is her top priority. Judge me on this, she said. Well, OK.  Today the SNP government published the results of the latest Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy and, as has become annually predictable, they make for depressing reading. While standards of reading have remained relatively constant amongst both primary and

Tuesday

Rebecca O'Connor

We should teach infants about the value of money

On the one hand, perhaps he should only be thinking about football, Minecraft, his Lego Millennium Falcon and whether he is actually capable of magic. On the other, I can’t let this window of opportunity go by. Being five-years-old is a prime time for learning about the world and how things work. It might seem a bit too young to be dulling his imagination with compound interest, but it’s a lesson he probably won’t get at school (unfortunately) and is one he would do well to get sooner rather than later. That’s why I’ve started giving my five-year-old son £2 pocket money every week for the completion of very minor

Saturday

David Butterfield

Like them or not, Theresa May’s grammar school plans will end the postcode lottery of education

Grammar Schools. Now there’s a potent pair of words. Mention them, and genial conversation will instantly shift into awkward silence or seething torrents of passion. In either case, reasoned argument is in short supply. Yet now that Theresa May seems committed to overturning Labour’s ban on opening new grammar schools, discussion is vital. But instead of rehashing the same arguments in favour of academically selective schools, or raking over the same problems they can cause, it’s important instead to look carefully at the evidence about whether grammar schools really do promote ‘social mobility’. One of the major themes of anti-grammar salvos is that they don’t. And to make this point, the crudest approach is typically

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 6 April 2017

All-round education Sir: While much of Ross Clark’s analysis of the direction that independent education has taken is spot on (‘A hard lesson is coming’, 1 April), he could not be more wrong on one issue. Many (or even most) parents who choose a private education for their children do not do so simply to achieve top academic outcomes: one look at the results league tables would disabuse him of this notion. What the average independent school does deliver is a rounded education (drama, sport, singing, D of E, CCF, debating and so on) with an emphasis on self-reliance, character and values, and competitive reward systems which acknowledge success rather

Ross Clark Ross Clark

VAT on fees? Our greedy private schools have it coming

The standard conservative response to Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to impose VAT on private schools would be to attack it as as a policy motivated by class envy and dreamed up to please his party’s levellers — except that Michael Gove, too, questioned private schools’ charitable status a few weeks ago. Private schools might moan and groan, yet they have invited an attack on their charitable status by shamelessly pitching their product at the children of very wealthy parents – an increasing number of them from abroad. By jacking up their fees relentlessly they have priced many middle-class parents out of the market Where 40 years’ ago private schooling was an

Thursday

Ross Clark

A hard lesson is coming

It is one of the great mysteries of modern British politics: how public schools managed to survive three periods of Labour government with their tax breaks intact. How was it that an education secretary, Anthony Crosland, could say: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England, and Wales and Northern Ireland’, and yet do nothing to make life difficult for independent schools? Suzi Leather, Tony Blair’s appointment as head of the Charity Commission, demanded private schools do more to justify their charitable status. They upped their bursaries a bit and invited state schools to use their swimming pools every so often,

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The Government is doing nothing to tackle GCSE grade inflation

The whole purpose of changing the grading structure for GCSE exams was supposed to be to guard against the curse of grade inflation – whereby, over time, it becomes easier and easier to gain a good grade. How unfortunate, then, that the government has inflated the grades before the first exam results using the new system are published in August. The new scheme replaces the existing A – G grades. In future, candidates will be awarded a grade from 1 to 9, with 1 being the highest level of attainment and 9 being the lowest. The bottom of grade 1 is to be aligned with the bottom of old grade

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 March 2017

My joints were aching suddenly and unaccountably — fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, toes — so I cried off the dinner invitation, volunteering instead to pick up Catriona and her lovely daughter, who was staying for a week, at around 11 p.m. At ten, Catriona rang. Had I forgotten? She sounded a bit squiffy. No, I hadn’t forgotten, I said. We’d said 11, hadn’t we? Well, they were ready to be picked up now, she said. When I arrived, the front door was open and I let myself in. The four of them were still seated at the dining table, chatting and drinking over the remains of the meal. I accepted

James Delingpole James Delingpole

For a real Oxbridge education, go to Durham

‘Should I just have done with it and tell them they’re a bunch of tossers?’ I was on my way to speak at the Durham Union. The motion was ‘This House believes the NHS is out of date’. And, as usual, I was on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate — so why should I even bother? You know beforehand which way the vote is going to go at any university debate these days: the one which enables the snowflakes most easily to signal their virtue. But, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give Durham the benefit of the doubt. ‘I was going to be incredibly rude

Thursday

Will Brown

Put him down for Doon

A near-perfect rendition of Schubert’s ‘Impromptus’ rings out of the music room’s colonial-era windows, the sound carrying all through the school’s pristine grounds. Even in India, a country famed for its sharp inequalities, there are few places where privilege is so obvious. Set in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Doon School, a private boarding school for boys aged 12 to 18, is probably India’s most elite institution. A short walk away from the school’s main gate, children live in slums plagued by dengue fever. But here you’ll find a campus which last year won a Unesco award for cultural heritage conservation, one equipped with its very own hospital. Although

Robert Peal

Our island story is for everyone

Iam a teacher in a state secondary school in west London where the ethnic diversity of the pupils is remarkable. My current Year 9 class, for example, includes pupils with parents from Trinidad, Ireland, Turkey, French Guina, Algeria, Yemen, Italy, France, Bosnia, Albania, India, Germany, Iceland, Portugal, Zanzibar, Lebanon, America, and Spain. Over the past few decades, this ethnic diversity has been used as an argument against the teaching of national history. ‘What relevance do Boudicca and Benjamin Disraeli have to multi-ethnic pupils in modern Britain?’ it is asked. Well, quite a lot, I answer. So far this year, those Year 9 pupils have learnt about the birth of the

Henry Jeffreys

Flunking the interview

I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the funeral oration by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral where he describes his deceased partner, played by Simon Callow, as ‘so very fat and very rude’. So I did something you should never ever do in an interview: I tried to be funny. ‘Rude — my friends would describe me as rude,’