Education

Tried and tested by the Common Entrance Exam

This is about something that did not happen to me at school, an exam I dreaded, but never had to take. It was the only examination that ever really worried me, and it was called Common Entrance. Do not confuse it with modern imitations bearing the same name. In those days, preparing for it involved (for me, anyway) translating English into Latin and French (a proper knowledge of irregular verbs and a wide vocabulary in both those languages was required). It also demanded thorny and tricky types of mathematics, an astounding grasp of largely Imperial geography – and a full knowledge of English history since the Conquest. I actually understood

The real crisis in our school system

For years, each school in England has been put in one of four categories: ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’. While undoubtedly crude, the system offered clarity to parents. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has now abolished this categorisation structure but not yet said precisely what will replace it. Children are returning to school in the middle of uncertainty. Are politicians blind to the staggering inequality within a state system that educates 93 per cent of pupils? The National Education Union has long urged schools to ignore Ofsted ratings and to stop referring to them on their gates. Phillipson’s reform seems to nod towards this. But instead of abolishing Ofsted,

The culture wars are far from over 

It’s only been a month since the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, declared that the ‘era of culture wars is over’. Yet this morning the Daily Telegraph reports that teachers in training courses will be taught to challenge ‘whiteness’ in lessons, to ensure future educators are ‘anti-racist’. The guidance in question has emerged from universities, rather than from the government itself – specifically from the National Education Union in England (and funded by Newcastle University) and from ten universities north of the border who have endorsed an ‘anti-racism framework’ drawn up by the Scottish Council of Deans of Education. Some of the guidance includes instructions on how to ‘disrupt the

Labour’s outrageous attack on academic free speech

In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the Conservatives, as a ‘hate-speech charter’. This is an outrageous distortion of the new laws that aim to guarantee free speech within universities. The best that can be said about that phrase is that, so long as we retain free speech, people are free to describe it that way. But doing so raises worrying doubts about what the new government thinks free speech means.   Universities have a special role in the promotion of free speech. They are, or should be, places where those teaching and those taught can try out ideas,

Should Labour be messing with the school curriculum?

Labour’s new education secretary wishes, as usual, to change everything. She might consider the advice of the Roman educationist Quintilian (d. c. ad 100). In the ancient world education was for the elites, and its purpose was to prepare them to be statesmen and power-brokers. That required mastery of both history, since that was the only way to understand the future, and verbal persuasion, because power depended upon winning legal and political arguments. The building blocks of education were acquiring a firm grasp of grammar and right usage, and reading widely across history and the best literature, poetry and philosophy. But above all else, that education must produce good men

The mystery of teaching composition

Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental composers started flocking to places like Darmstadt in Germany for the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik. Olivier Messiaen taught there in the late 1940s and 1950s, when among his students were Stockhausen and Boulez. Attending the 1980 course as an undergraduate, I benefitted from a lesson with Brian Ferneyhough and conversations with Wolfgang Rihm, who died last week and was described in one obituary as ‘the last great German composer’. In the US, the summer activities at places such as Tanglewood and Aspen have become part of the learning process

Jonathan Miller

The cult of Bedales

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t. Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since. Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now

The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir Keir Starmer’s phrase about how Labour intends to govern. As former director of the Institute of Education and current CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, she has the outward appearance of a technocrat. But scratch the surface and, like so many Labour appointees, she emerges as a long-standing adherent of left-wing identity politics. After earning

The craft renaissance

As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered much of the family fortune he had inherited, aged five, on supporting struggling surrealists (he commissioned the Mae West lips sofa and lobster telephone from a scuffling Dali) and on backing shows starring his actress girlfriends (‘very wealth-consuming,’ he admitted, ‘because invariably they flopped’) then creating an 80-acre sculpture garden in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico, the man described as ‘the last of the great eccentrics’ decided in his late fifties to invest his remaining money in something more sensible. So in 1964 he founded the Edward James Foundation

Labour’s plans to rewrite the National Curriculum

Michael Gove’s decision to stand down in this election was a reminder that the one really bright spot in the past 14 years was the education reforms he steered through between 2010 and 2014. These policies were vindicated in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which showed England climbing the OECD’s international league table and outperforming Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In maths, England rose from 17th place in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average. I was involved in the most successful of these reforms, the free schools programme. Many of these schools are now

We have lost an unforgettable teacher and one of Britain’s great critics

Tanner, the critic RICHARD BRATBY Michael Tanner (1935-2024), who died earlier this month, had such a vital mind and stood so far above the common run of music critics that it’s hard to believe he’s gone. For a philosopher to concern themself with the inner game of opera is not unknown (think of Friedrich Nietzsche and Roger Scruton). To do it as perceptively and as readably as Tanner is rarer. For two decades, starting in  1996, his weekly Spectator opera column offered as thorough and as stimulating an education in musical aesthetics as one could hope to receive; intellectual red meat served with forensic clarity and a mischievous, subversive smile.

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

Queen Ethelburga’s, York Set in 220 acres of beautiful countryside between Harrogate and York, Queen Ethelburga’s College is an award-winning day and boarding school that welcomes girls and boys aged from three months to 19 years and boarders from Year 3. It is known for its high-ranking academic performance. College, one of its two senior schools, placed second nationally last year for A-levels and 18th for all-round academic performance. The other senior school, Faculty, which offers more ‘creative and vocational subjects’, climbed several places to third in the north for A-levels and seventh for overall performance. The college places emphasis on growing pupils into resilient, caring and confident adults. It

Sam Leith

Russia lives on in my mind

My kids, at our local comprehensive, go on school trips to Leigh-on-Sea. I went to a much fancier school, so I went on school trips to Leningrad and Moscow. The first time must have been in 1990. We were all going through dramatic changes; and so was Russia – not that as cossetted, self-absorbed 16-year-olds we were able to take much serious notice. We joked, nervously, gauchely, ahead of our departure about the likelihood that an Aeroflot flight could be relied upon to get us there in one piece. We practised our rudimentary GCSE Russian: ‘Chto eto? Eto GUM!’ (What’s that? That’s [the department store] – GUM.’) ‘Gdye Dom Knigi?’

The great sociology con

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer. The most recent occasion this happened was last Monday when I drove through torrential rain to three retail parks in search of an item which – as I found out later – didn’t actually exist. While turning the car around to drive home I switched on the radio and Stephen Fry was bashfully admitting to some fawning sap of an interviewer how bloody brilliant he was. Triggered, right there, at the roundabout where you enter the old coal-mining village of Pity Me. It took ages for

Ancient lessons in oracy

It is encouraging to see Sir Keir Starmer taking a leaf out of the ancients’ book by putting oracy (from Latin orator) on the curriculum. Indeed, on the ancient curriculum, there was little else of such importance. State education did not exist. It was an entirely private operation, designed to supply the elite with the skills necessary to win arguments in political and legal forums. (They alone had the time for such an activity; our ‘school’ derives from scholê, the Greek for ‘leisure’). It began with the young relentlessly analysing language in minute technical detail, e.g. dividing words into syllables, pronouncing, spelling and parsing them, learning grammatical terms, parts of

Britain’s schools are facing an epidemic of bad behaviour

Something troubling is happening in Britain’s schools. This week, the government released its findings from the first national survey into pupil behaviour in classrooms. The results are a hard lesson to learn. But, as a teacher who has witnessed chairs being thrown and pupils urinating on teachers’ cars, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Over 40 per cent of students say that they feel unsafe each week because of poor behaviour, according to the survey. Students have the lowest perception of how well behaviour is going in school. This suggests that teachers and school leaders have normalised lower standards and expectations, to the point that roughly six weeks of lesson time is lost

Progress is coming to our remote corner of Kenya

Laikipia The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is a chief or a surveyor, or geese, or the cats Omar and Bernini, the dogs Jock, Sasi and Potatoes, foundling lambs or calves gambolling about hoping for milk, or stockmen with news of a sick cow, or armed askaris clumping in after a hard night to lay assault rifles down on the counter before slurping mugs of sugar-loaded tea. Bees try to swarm behind the fridge and one day Milka, the cook, primly announced there was a big snake coiled on the shelf of pots and pans. In her Cold

Why are my son’s teachers constantly on strike?

It is a bright Wednesday morning in May. My son, T, a Year 8 pupil, should be at school and I should be working, but instead we are playing tennis. We are also listening to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ by Dire Straits because he’s supposed to be studying the play in class so I figure I can cover both PE and English literature in the next half an hour before we head home and I start the work I’m meant to be doing. For them academies are a Tory ruse designed to hand over control of schools to nasty capitalists My son isn’t ill and isn’t playing truant. His school, along

Why Britain is falling behind in the global universities race

Our country still excels when it comes to higher education. Britain has seven of the world’s top 50 universities. In spite of many claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in the number of foreign students, the intake has never been higher. In 2021-22, there were 680,000 overseas students in higher education in Britain, an increase of 123,000 in just two years. That’s good news for the British economy. A report by London Economics estimated that one year’s intake of students would, by the time their courses had finished, bring in £29 billion in revenue from tuition fees and other income. Importantly, the benefits are spread all over the

British universities are beyond redemption

There’s no doubt that the government has the best of intentions when it comes to clearing up the Augean stables of UK higher education: witness its setting up of the Office for Students to protect students’ interests against ever-more monolithic university management, and more recently this year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act aimed at safeguarding the interests of both students and staff. However, all this leaves a much more awkward issue: what are we actually promoting? True, it’s the done thing for middle-class 18-year-olds to be sent away to university. True too that you still need a degree to obtain certain kinds of well-paid jobs. But these aside, why