Education

Thursday

Oliver Balch

Children should get out more — even if it’s for hide and seek in the park

We live in an urban world. It’s a statistical fact. The great outdoors for most of us is a thing of the past — a place, like elderly relatives, to be visited infrequently and preferably with gloves. Metro world, by contrast, is safe, insulated, inviting. No getting wet in the rain, no patchy wifi, no mud on our new Nikes. Little wonder that our education system has gone the same way: safe, sedentary, sterile. Patrick Barkham thinks there might be a better way. Give kids more space, he pleads. Free them up from rules and tests. Climbing trees, prodding roadkill, collecting grubs: hell yes, if they want to, why not?

Lucy Kellaway

School’s out: the true cost of classroom closures

It’s Monday at 9 a.m. and secondary schools in England have just re-opened their gates to students in Years 10 and 12. I have been looking forward to this moment for 13 long weeks, since that frightening afternoon in March when my colleagues and I gathered around a computer in the staff room and saw a healthier-looking Boris Johnson declare he was shutting schools. But today I’m not at the comprehensive in Hackney where I teach economics welcoming back my students with a rousing lesson on the financial devastation caused by the crisis. I’m surplus to requirements and am still marooned at home. What ‘re-opening’ means is that a mere

Thursday

The Spectator

Reopening schools must be our first priority

It would be a tragedy if one of the legacies of Covid-19 — a disease which hardly affects children physically — was a widening of the already broad gap in educational attainment between rich and poor. But sadly, the damage is already well under way. Back in March, Britain was the European country most keen to keep its schools open in the face of the then-burgeoning number of Covid-19 cases. Now it is the other way around. In Denmark, primary schools have been open for a month. This week, children began to return to class in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Next week, schools will start to reopen in Belgium.

Monday

James Kirkup

These kids just got screwed by lockdown – and no one bothered to tell them

Here are some numbers that too many people who work in and around politics don’t know. In any given year, around 700,000 young people turn 18 and leave school. A little under half of them go on to higher education (HE). The other half, around 360,000, do something else. Roughly half of these non-HE school leavers would normally get a job. Another 60,000 or so would become apprentices. And quite a lot – more than 100,000 – would go down in the stats as ‘not sustained’ or ‘activity not captured’ meaning that whatever they did, it didn’t last, or that they have dropped out of the view of educational statisticians.

Thursday

Sam Leith

Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all

‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, labouring over their times tables and number bonds. It was my complaint as I struggled to tell median from mean, or sine from cosine. Well. Now we have a nation and a world bewitched and terrified in equal measure by a ground-level demonstration of what an exponential function does. Our entire society is being shaped for a generation by that elegant, predictable, horrifyingly steepening curve. One shred of comfort in this catastrophe is the thought that no journalist will ever again

Friday

David Swift

How Oxbridge PhDs became the preserve of the super-rich

Oxford and Cambridge have gone to great lengths over the last few years to increase the number of admissions of state-school educated students at undergraduate level – to varying degrees of success. As Robin Harman reported in Spectator Life recently, there’s still a worrying disparity between the number of offers made to disadvantaged pupils and the take-up of those offers, even though the number of offers made has risen steadily. Yet the most striking inequity in Oxbridge admissions occurs at postgraduate level – something that is barely mentioned in media or political debates around higher education, possibly because the privileged students who make up a disproportionate number of Oxbridge postgraduates

Patrick West

Harry Potter’s dwindling popularity is a great shame

Teenagers are no longer reading Harry Potter books in their legions, it emerged this week, as J.K. Rowling’s series dropped out of the top ten favourite books for secondary school pupils. Instead, teens are reading books aimed at primary school children. This is disquieting news. Of all the books teenagers can access, they should be reading the Harry Potter books. They’re not perfect, of course. For one, the storylines are derivate: orphan raised by aunt and uncle encounters a bearded old man, goes on an epic journey with his buddies, undergoes tasks and magic training, and defeats ogres before encountering the dark lord in his lair. Our hero emerges victorious!

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why have the Conservatives decided Chesterfield is a lost cause?

Given up on Chesterfield? Sir: Matthew Parris makes some interesting and accurate points about growing Tory support in the north and Midlands (‘The Tory push north will end in failure’, 7 December). He did not mention Chesterfield in his article, but it is a good example of what he talks about. It seems to me that the Conservatives have decided Chesterfield is a lost cause, even though it would on the face of it seem promising territory for them. With an average age higher than the national average and no university, it is one of those ‘left behind’ areas with a lot of traditional working-class voters who dislike Corbyn. A good

James Delingpole James Delingpole

What have the Anglo-Saxons ever done for us?

It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my Anglo-Saxon tutorials with dear, lovely, gentle Richard Hamer. And now he is the author of the standard translation being used by my children on their own university English Literature courses. (I suppose the Latin equivalent would be having been taught by the author of Kennedy’s ‘Eating’ Primer.) Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’ is the pivotal word in ‘The Battle of Maldon’, a 325-line fragment of Old English poetry about an otherwise obscure skirmish between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, and much studied on English courses

Thursday

Toby Young

Must try harder: Labour wants to reverse a decade of progress in education

If education rather than Brexit or the NHS was the biggest issue in this election campaign, the Tories would be coasting to victory. On Tuesday, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) published its latest rankings, based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 79 countries, and they show the UK climbing the international league tables. In reading, we’re now 14th (up eight places from 2015); in science, 14th (up a place); and in maths, 18th (up nine places). In other words, British schoolchildren are making huge strides compared to those in other countries. And over a period where money has been pretty tight. Why, then, would you want to

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Asians are doing too well – they must be stopped

Riddle: when is discrimination against a historically disadvantaged racial minority perfectly legal? Answer: when they do too well. The first ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions suit against Harvard University is in. A federal judge in Massachusetts concluded last week that for America’s be-all-and-end-all university to discriminate against Asian applicants in order to serve the all-hallowed goal of ‘diversity’ is constitutional. (Or strictly speaking, if you can follow this logic, the university did not discriminate against Asians by discriminating against them.) The reasoning: ‘Race conscious admissions will always penalise to some extent the groups that are not being advantaged by the process.’ The decision has already been appealed, and

Monday

Christopher Snowdon

Labour should scrap state schools, not private ones

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner has promised that if Labour wins the next election it will use its first budget to ‘immediately close the tax loopholes used by elite private schools and use that money to improve the lives of all children.’ This slab of red meat went down well with the class warriors at the party’s conference in Brighton, where there were doubtless plenty of teachers in attendance, but it wasn’t enough. Labour conference not only voted to withdraw charitable status from private schools, but to abolish them altogether. This was described, rather euphemistically, as ‘integrating all private schools into the state sector’ by Holly Rigby of the not

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

General de Gaulle’s advice to the young Queen Elizabeth

There were so many ear-catching moments in Peter Hennessy’s series for Radio 4, Winds of Change, adapted from his new book by Libby Spurrier and produced by Simon Elmes. Harold Wilson answering a journalist’s question after a sleepless night while awaiting the results of the 1964 election, quizzical, cheeky and so quick off the mark. When asked if he felt like a prime minister, he replied: ‘Quite honestly, I feel like a drink.’ Later he was waylaid at Euston station having just got off the morning train from Liverpool and was still unsure of the result. (Labour won by just four seats after 13 years of Conservative rule.) At 3.50

Thursday

Madeleine Silver

The rise of the flexi-boarder

Spend a night at Woldingham School in Surrey — with its wellness room, indoor tennis dome and a menu offering cod steak with prawns and tarragon, all just an hour’s drive from London — and you may feel like you’re on an upmarket mini-break. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the number of ‘flexi-boarders’ — pupils who stay the night at school just once or twice a week — has grown three-fold since it was introduced three years ago. ‘It’s the perfect solution for us,’ says Siobhan Burgess, who works for the Cabinet Office and whose 14-year-old daughter boards up to two nights a week at the school to fit

Andrew Watts

Learning the ropes

My school owned a boat.  And not some dinghy or fibreglass pleasure craft either:  Jolie Brise — the name was always, of course, pronounced ‘Jolly Breeze’ — is one of the best-known tall ships in the world, three times winner of the Fastnet race, a pilot cutter so famous that she has a pub named after her. (A Wetherspoons, admittedly, but that counts.) It was only after I left that I realised that this was unusual: especially for a former direct grant grammar school in Wiltshire, about as far away from the sea as you can get in England. There were two sorts of master at Dauntsey’s in the 1980s:

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

      Stoke Newington school   This Hackney school — lovingly known as Stokey School — has a strong reputation for both the creative arts and academia. In 2006, it unveiled its new sixth form, and this year students received record-breaking A-level results, with 83 per cent achieving A*–C grades. In 2002 the school was awarded a Media Arts specialism, and until 2013 it was a designated ‘media arts and science college’. The focus on the arts still lies at its heart, with links to organisations such as the Barbican and the BBC, and extracurricular activities ranging from workshops (including a self-esteem workshop with TV presenter Miquita Oliver, pictured)

Katherine Whitbourn

Can the school magazine survive the social media age?

After all these years its pages smell distinctly fusty and its rusting staples are hanging on by a thread. But there is something about flicking through an old school magazine that jolts the past back into the present in a way nothing else quite can. More than four decades on, there they still are: those apparently trivial but meaningful events that punctuated my and my schoolmates’ formative years, faithfully chronicled for all time. The doings of the sixth-form committee that ran weekly tea parties for the elderly are painstakingly recorded. A report of a field trip to Warwick sits alongside details of a junior school production of Antigone. Long-forgotten faces

William Cook

Too cool for school: beware ‘trendy’ teachers

I didn’t know Chris Todd had died until I saw his photo in the newspaper. I hadn’t seen his face for nearly 40 years but he still looked much the same. It was a kind face, decent and dutiful — everything you want from a teacher. I wish I’d known as a schoolboy what I know now — that the Chris Todds of this world are the teachers we recall with real affection, while the teachers we thought were so much cooler we merely remember with contempt. Chris Todd was my form master for several years at my state grammar school. He wasn’t all that strict but he had no

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: Roedean’s Oliver Blond on etiquette lessons and luxury boarding houses

It’s hard to open a newspaper without spotting a headline about Roedean. One week it’s lessons in Brexit etiquette; the next, phone-free retreats. Days after I meet 51-year-old headmaster Oliver Blond, the Times trumpets: ‘Let homeless eat steak, says Roedean.’ It’s a blustery walk up the drive to the 134-year-old girls’ boarding school, perched on the South Downs overlooking Brighton Marina. Girls stream through the corridors excitedly. There’s a whoop here, a cheer there — not long to go until the end of term. In his office I find Blond in an armchair. He took up teaching following a degree in English and philosophy from the University of Essex, having

The Spectator

School report: a round-up of recent stories from the front line in education

      Unconditional Offers   In the last Spectator Schools, Ross Clark wrote about the dangers of ‘unconditional offers’, whereby a university offers a student a place irrespective of their exam results. The topic has come back into the news following this year’s A-level results, with headmasters bemoaning the apathy among students that unconditional offers can create. A number of heads blamed unconditional offers for the drop in top A-level results, with Universities Minister Jo Johnson writing that unconditional offers risk ‘undermining the faith which rests in our education system’. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, confirmed that it was concerned over the rise in such