Civitas

July 28, 2006

Crippling contradictions

Last week, the new education secretary, Alan Johnson, declared that targets, testing and inspection were vital to school improvement and would therefore be ‘intensified’. This announcement came as a surprise to the education community: the fledglings of cross-party consensus seemed to have developed over the crippling impact of these measures in the state sector. Then this week, Johnson surprised us again by more or less saying that private school teachers were superior to those teaching in the state sector. Yet don’t these two views of Johnson’s actually conflict with each other?

With Alan Johnson apparently believing the private sector to be so effective, there might seem to be flickers of hope for the future of the education system as a whole. The state sector could emulate more of the independent sector’s pedagogical pluralism and the government could cease interfering in private provision. Yet Johnson’s plans to up testing and inspection, the very things hindering progress in state schools and, in the case of inspection, straitjacketing private schools nullify hope.

The one thing that has characterised the New Labour government’s approach to education is over-regulation: culminating in very prescriptive statutory pedagogical regulation for the nominally autonomous private sector (enacted in 2003). Regulation enforced through OfSTED inspection. While not everyone may be concerned with the arrested autonomy of the private sector when it serves so few pupils (around 7%), we should surely all be worried about the wider significance of this intervention: a government monopoly, which is both arbitrary and misguided, on what counts as good education. A monopoly which has proved to be very damaging to school standards. The successes of the private sector are frequently attributed to privileged intake and good resources; Alan Johnson seems to attribute them to better teachers. But in fact, small class size, the opportunity to focus on teaching rather than paperwork and the freedom to employ teaching strategies which are responsive to pupils rather than central diktat, which are key to the achievement gulf between the sectors.

We need to learn from the private sector not because it is uniformly superior, but because it highlights the flaws which are holding back the state sector.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2006

Citizenship Education -- Why Old School Beats New

Tomorrow is the official 80th birthday of the Queen. Yesterday, to mark the occasion a special morning service was held at St Paul’s, followed by a slap-up lunch at Manson House. There over three hundred guests, ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to Margaret Thatcher, turned up to pay homage to the remarkable lady who has done more than anyone else during this last turbulent half-century to hold the nation together.

Remarkably, this occasion served to evoke some rare words of sense from both the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Before tucking into his smoked salmon with blinis starter, Tony Blair spoke in glowing terms of the Queen’s ‘life-time of service to our country’. He rightly observed that the reason she was regarded with such affection by so many of her subjects, young and old, was the exemplary devotion to duty that she has always displayed. ‘Duty’ remarked the Prime Minister in this rare outburst of sense from him ‘is what marks you out, Ma’am –a selfless, dignified and perpetual adherence to doing your duty by your country.’ How true!

Earlier the same day, and even more miraculously, Rowan Williams was driven by the occasion to speak some good sense rather than in his more customary unfathomable tongue. He did so when in his sermon he observed that:

‘The identity of the United Kingdom has had something to do with the development of a critical democracy within the framework of symbol and tradition, At our best, we have found solidarity in a network of relationship and practices quite hard to codify, but variously connected with the personal focus that is the monarch.’

You might have thought that the ruling sovereign’s official birthday, plus such other events in the public life of the country as Coronations, the annual Day of Remembrance and other similar occasions that regularly punctuate the calendar, would provide schools with more than ample occasion to join in or study as would suffice, combined with suitable study of British history, to teach them enough about the framework of tradition and symbol that their country has been blessed to have been able to develop over the centuries as would be almost guaranteed to foster in them the appropriate solidarity with it.

By way of illustrative example of what scope study of their national public life has to offer schoolchildren for a form of citizenship education as would be liable to foster social cohesion in them, consider the oath the Queen took at her coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1953. Here, before a television audience of millions of her subjects at home and abroad, and among whom, as a young boy, the present author can still vividly recall staring in wide-eyed wonder, the young Elizabeth swore before God as Queen to:

‘do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order.’

Pretty awesome, in my book!

What a citizenship lesson for our present multi-faith society being made to consider what making such an oath must feel like.

Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely today’s schoolchildren will receive opportunity to engage in any such forms of empathetic study as part of their citizenship education. For, as newspapers report today, their time spent in class on such studies is far more likely to be spent being made to think about, where in their locality, are the most vulnerable targets for Al Qaeda terrorists to make a strike and other such salubrious topics.

I kid ye not. As part of their citizenship studies, today’s Times reports that pupils attending secondary schools in Waltham Forest are being given an education pack entitled ‘9/11: The Main Chance’ containing worksheets asking children to address such enticing questions as: Are there any possible targets in your local area? What weapons or methods could be used? How safe is our water?

Call me old-fashioned or what, but give me old school citizenship education any time, exemplified by watching a Coronation or being made to line a local road to wave flag as the Queen drives by, to the sort of the new-style active citizenship classes that are currently being offered in at least some of our schools which more bent on turning pupils into terrorists than anything else.

Posted by David Conway at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2006

C'mon Becks!

The Council of the European Union (Council of Ministers) has long been a whipping boy for those angry at the lack of transparency in the EU. In 2002, the House of Commons European Scrutiny Select Committee famously compared it to the closed Parliament of North Korea. Critics have rightly made a stink about the fact that while the EU’s twenty-five member states take a rather preachy attitude towards encouraging democracy in other parts of the world, they take most significant legislative decisions behind closed doors. Last year, the Council bowed to pressure to allow the beginning and end of some meetings to be filmed by news crews. Now, there are moved to allow cameras in for the full length of meetings discussing the single market, the environment and transport. A revolution it ain’t. But British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett has cried foul: she is worried that allowing in cameras will encourage participants to play-up to national audiences, thus crippling decision-making.

I can see where Mrs Beckett is coming from. This is a tricky circle to square: transparency is a laudable goal, but it will only work if we trust our fellow member states. If we can’t trust them, then perhaps it is better to avoid a diplomatic brouhaha by keeping decision-making behind closed doors. Yet, I can’t help but think that there is a greater imperative here: ensuring that decision-makers are accountable and are seen to be accountable. It is this that makes Mrs Beckett’s back-pedalling misguided.

There is certainly diplomatic wisdom in Mrs Beckett’s suggestion that open meetings will push real decision-making out of the meetings and into the corridors. It is also undeniable that many decisions are subject to greater political sensitivity than those made in a normal national legislature. As much as the EU might like to think of itself as a supranational body in which everyone bats for the same team, countries do have national interests and these will sometimes impinge on the positions countries take.

There is also an argument to say that bringing in TV cameras won’t make a significant difference. Who will watch footage of an Environment Ministers meeting? But this misses the point: hardly anyone watches C-Span or BBC Parliament, but the cameras are there. So, if an MP or Congressman acts up or behaves in a compromising way, then they can be pretty sure that their misbehaviour will be on the evening news. We might not stay glued to Council of Ministers’ broadcasts, but we can have some hope that our friends in the press might keep half an eye on what ministers are up to. Furthermore, short of turning the decision-making of the EU on its head, there doesn’t appear to be another simple way of bringing straightforward openness to the process. We have spent too long allowing the EU to make decisions like a national government while treating it with the diplomatic reverence of the UN. Let’s face facts: the EU decides on issues about which there is political disagreement. So lets hear why they disagree.

I say open the doors to all but the most sensitive meetings. And if Mr Chirac or Mr Kaczyński gets in a tizzy and storms out, then let us all see it and have a good laugh. Far from undermining decision-making, I think that TV cameras might just focus the minds of our elected representatives. And if some recalcitrant ministers continue to backslide, then let those member states that claim to believe in transparency call them out publicly for their behaviour. Surely the odd acid remark at the expense of a compromised minister is better than the institutionalised backroom dealing that prevails at the moment.

Posted by at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2006

The neo-progressives

This in The Times today:

‘THE days of vast lecture halls filled with bored, hungover students falling asleep may be over. In what is being likened to the printing revolution of the 16th century, podcasts may soon replace lectures. Forcing undergraduates out of bed to visit campuses is not the best way to teach, researchers have found. Academics are investigating how they might use digital technology and MP3 players to help students. Lecturers are already using podcasts to supplement lectures. Harold Fricker, a lecturer at Coventry, says: “There is a shift equivalent to the Gutenberg presses of the 1500s.” A trial podcast mixing rap and information will be discussed today.’

Three objections…

Firstly, there can be no comparison with the revolution in the printing press. The podcast is an extension of the capabilities of existing technologies, and is quite insignificant against the real modern information revolution, which was the internet revolution. Such sensationalism is little more than an advertising pitch. Secondly, which ‘researchers have found’ that ‘[f]orcing undergraduates out of bed to visit campuses is not the best way to teach’? Presumably the same academic cowboys advocating the use of podcasts as a substitute for proper teaching. Thirdly, the use to which the podcast will be put: ‘mixing rap and information’ is at the forefront of imbecility, precisely the kind of lowest common denominator teaching that has been so detrimental to the nation’s learning.

It reminds me of one of my favourite horror stories, recounted by Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard in their 1997 book Class Act. They tell of how the London Institute of Education asserted that schools are too often guilty of ‘legitimising one popular view of mathematics’. Maths is oppressive and consistent with Western cultural and educational imperialism; it should be replaced by ‘ethnomathematics’. Our everyday experiences are what maths is really about, not the pedagogic instructions of a teacher. As the headmaster in Lambeth who appointed an expert in Nigerian cooking, with no experience of maths, to teach maths in his school put it: ‘It’s real life maths with Ibo cookery – transferable maths.’

The progressive classroom and lecture hall have been the laboratory for too many failed projects. Let’s not make the putative neo-progressive non-classroom and non-auditorium the laboratory for any more.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2006

Slowly Light is Dawning in the Dim Region Formed By the Combined Intellects of This Government

Signs are starting to appear that the government is finally beginning to realise just how badly it misjudged policy in connection with diversity and social cohesion.

How cool it all seemed back in the early days of the first Blair administration, when the door of Number Ten was opened to the glitterati who had endorsed the return of New Labour, to swallow on behalf of the country hook, line and sinker every provision in the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as to set about fostering social inclusion and cohesion by the aggressive promotion of multiculturalism.

Several tube-bombings later -- plus the recent revelations that a thousand plus foreign criminals convicted and imprisoned for serious offences have been released into the community rather than made to leave, so as to obviate their needing to claim asylum to avoid deportation and thereby embarrass the government, plus recent surveys that reveal dangerously high levels of alienation among young British-born Muslims combined with the recent revelations about how that alienation might be being actively fomented by Muslim colleges they are attending on British university validated degree programmes -- have all combined to prompt the government to reconsider some of its previous policies in these adjacent areas.

It was reported in yesterday's Observer and confirmed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning that the Government is considering amending the 1988 Human Rights Act so as to restore to the courts and the Home Secretary power to deport convicted foreign criminals, upon completing their sentences, without their being able to avoid deportation by claiming asylum.

Today, it was also announced that the government s to reconsider citizenship education in schools, as well as how Islam may be taught at degree level to British Muslims. In the case of both reviews, the aim is to ensure both forms of education promote rather than impede social cohesion.

These are promising signs of sanity dawning at last among the senior ranks of the government.

But it may all be too little and too late.

It may be too little in that their attempt at educational reform will not succeed in its objective unless the government really appreciates just how much needs to be changed in terms of what is taught, in schools and in Muslim schools and colleges in particular, to ensure that all British citizens growing up here do so with sufficient knowledge of this country and its history to give them the wherewithal to appreciate just what a free and tolerant society it is and has been comparatively speaking for a very long time, and hence what a privilege they and their families have, in many cases, in having been granted citizenship here, and how much the world owes generally to British achievement.

It may be too late in that the rot has now gone so deep and become so pervasive it may be too late to restore the traditions and political culture needed to sustain a religiously and ethnically plural society such as ours that is at the same time both tolerant, mutually respectful and above all united in a common national identity with which not only are they all at ease but which they rejoice in having.

Basically, the Crick agenda of active citizenship needs replacing by the older model that sought only good and politically literate and well-informed citizen and that had long fallen into desuetude under pressure from multiculturalism before the Crick one came along to fill the vacuum. The older model of citizenship education demands only political literacy from pupils, so to be able to exercise the vote responsibly, not the manic activism that lies at the heart of Crick’s ideal. The older model also requires something with which Crick’s model is ultimately incompatible: namely, sufficient understanding and appreciation of the institutions of this country and of the history by which it came to acquire them as would almost certainly foster love of country and allegiance to it in all those who had undergone such a form of schooling.

The best way , or at least one very good way, to restore the kind and style of history teaching that would achieve what the government is seeking to bring back to the class-room would be for Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall’s Our Island Story , along with other works of a similar kind, to become part of the core of what is taught in history in primary schools, if not to become the back-bone of the history curriculum in primary school and during the early years of secondary school.

The naïve and innocent phase of the present government’s time in office was symbolised by the exhibition in the Millennium Dome to celebrate that occasion which managed to expunge all reference to British historical achievements for the supposed sake of greater inclusiveness.

It is a sign of its belated coming of age that it has begun to recognise the importance of conveying to British school-children and university students some understanding of Britain’s historical achievements and of how it came to lead the world in the development of liberal and tolerant institutions so that they begin to make that island’s story their own, rather than writing a new chapter for it in which all its great historical achievement is destroyed through deconstruction, of both the intellectual and of the more incendiary kind.

Posted by David Conway at 01:49 PM | Comments (4)

May 08, 2006

Messing around with childplay

The former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Lord Herman Ouseley, and Jane Lane, a nursery education expert, are recommending that nursery teachers ‘help children unlearn racist attitudes’. In an article appearing in the journal Race Equality Teaching, Ouseley and Herman argue that nursery staff should look out for child play where there are signs of racial or cultural prejudice.

The proposals have met a frosty reception from educators and commentators alike. A spokeswoman from the National Confederation of Parent Teachers Association argued that children of this age do not note differences in skin colour, whilst early years carers are arguing that it is already common practice for nurseries to promote integration.

Making an issue out of race at an age as early as three years old is at best going to be futile in combating racism in our society and at worst generate problems where they don’t exist. Young children are naturally curious and so probably do, at least in passing, notice difference; but when they do it is something which is interesting, not something which is an issue. Moreover whilst children may not be astute to prejudice at three, they are astute to coercion. Having their playmates carefully picked thus not only risks displacing innocence with labels, it risks making what could be natural integration a chore. We need to teach children to be open-minded, Ouseley and Lane are telling us. This is exactly what children are and imposing the narrow-mindedness of adults on them would be highly misguided.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 06:37 PM | Comments (3)

April 28, 2006

Cleaning up the mess that is education

Today the TES reports on two teachers who found ‘pupils’ unruly behaviour and the demands of the National Curriculum too stressful’ and consequently have left the teaching profession for… the cleaning profession. In spite of - or because of – a combined 13 years in teaching, sisters Kirsty and Fiona Innes have given up school life to set up Aardvark Cleaning.

Although it might sound a rather ridiculous story, within it is a very serious issue. We have come to the point where disaffection from teaching has literally made disinfecting toilets a preferable job. This is a deeply worrying indictment on conditions in our schools. Equally concerning is the fact that life as a teacher has become so notorious that such moves are not even regarded as implausible.

Whilst not all teachers are leaving the classroom to take up with their bucket and mops, too many of them are leaving. As well as discipline issues ousting teachers there is the persistent, and above all avoidable, problem of unnecessary but mandatory paperwork. As a National Union of Teachers representative commented, “the workload continues to drive teachers away…it is still excessive and the amount of time teachers spend working at home preparing and marking is too great.”

The disparity under New Labour between teacher workload and real improvement is proof enough that current DfES diktat is fundamentally flawed.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 08:00 PM | Comments (1)

April 13, 2006

Hit by the LEA

Schools are to become less, not more independent from local authority control, we hear in Ruth Kelly’s latest announcement.

The new proposals which are unveiled today at the National Association of Schoolmasters and Women Teachers conference in Birmingham today set out a new system whereby even schools which are successful in terms of academic achievement will be subject to an ‘enforcement notice’. LEAs are to gain powers to issue warning notices and send ‘hit squads’ into schools deemed to be under performing in terms of progress. This is a response to OfSTED’s findings that one in four schools are ‘coasting’, providing an education that, in the words of former HMCI David Bell, is “nothing more than…mediocre.”

This enhanced role of the LEA, commentators are arguing, goes against Tony Blair’s White Paper proposals to ‘set schools’ free from LEA control – something which caused an uproar amongst Labour backbenchers. Misguidedly, these Labour rebels saw the role of the LEA as particularly supportive of deprived areas. Therefore to dilute the role of the LEA was to harm the worst-off the worst. However the targets imposed on LEAs by the government meant that this ‘support’ became distorted: far from aiding real learning in schools, it became necessary to push schools into artificially reaching LEA targets.

Thus although Blair did say that local authorities would be less in control of schools, he also said early on that they would become the ‘champions of standards’. In an educational climate where achieving higher standards is done through coercion, the hit squad approach is perfectly in line with this.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2006

Exactly Who or What Might the West Really Be Against?

Neither Britain nor the US have suffered any significant Islamist terror strikes on their own soil for some time.

Has the threat of such attacks now permanently gone away?

If it hasn't, are not the US and UK governments courting such attacks by prolonging the presence of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention one of them vaguely threatening to use of force against Iran to frustrate its nuclear ambitions?

Would the USA and the UK today not be safer if Bush and Blair had never invaded Iraq three years ago, or if Bush Snr had not decided earlier to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which caused US troops to be stationed on Saudi Arabian soil, thereby incurring the wrath of Osama bin Laden and other likeminded Muslims?

Many pundits here and in the US have offered affirmative answers to all these questions.

Yet there are counter-balancing considerations which should be considered before Britain and the US revise their foreign policies.

One such consideration was well summarised in an unsigned article that appeared at the end of last month in the Investor’s Business Daily under the title ‘Religion of Peace?’ [hat-tip: Little Green Footballs].

What the article suggests is that the roots of the current conflict between Britain and the USA and those Islamists against whom they are currently contending may be more integral to Islam – or, at least , to how many of its adherents conceive of elements of that religion, than would be suggested by those who think Western countries have brought the risk upon themselves by their foreign policy.

In essence, so the article contends, the Quran lends itself to being construed as calling upon Muslims to wage war against all non-believers in order for their religion to achieve world-wide acceptance. By drawing attention to specific verses in the Quran that bid Muslims engage in jihad, the article poses some disturbing questions for those who think the current troubles the UK and the US have with parts of the Muslim world were brought on by their own actions in the Middle East. The article asks:

‘Is Islam the only religion with a doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers?

'Is it true that 26 chapters of the Quran deal with jihad, a fight able-bodied believers are obligated to join (Surah 2:216), and that the text orders Muslims to "instill terror into the hearts of the unbeliever" and to "smite above their necks" (8:12)?

'Is the "test" of loyalty to Allah not good acts or faith in general, but martyrdom that results from fighting unbelievers (47:4) — the only assurance of salvation in Islam (4:74; 9:111)?

'Are the sins of any Muslim who becomes a martyr forgiven by the very act of being slain while slaying the unbelievers (4:96)?

'And is it really true that martyrs are rewarded with virgins, among other carnal delights, in Paradise (38:51, 55:56; 55:76; 56:22)?

'Are those unable to do jihad — such as women or the elderly — required to give "asylum and aid" to those who do fight unbelievers in the cause of Allah (8:74)?

'Does Islam advocate expansion by force? And is the final command of jihad, as revealed to Muhammad in the Quran, to conquer the world in the name of Islam (9:29)?

'Is Islam the only religion that does not teach the Golden Rule (48:29)? Does the Quran instead teach violence and hatred against non-Muslims, specifically Jews and Christians (5:50)?’

Having posed these questions, the article ominously concludes by observing of them:

‘If the answers are “yes”, then at least [we] … will know there’s no such thing as moderate Islam, even if there are moderate Muslims who do not act out its violent commands.’

Grounds for affirmative answers to these questions are contained in a new book on the subject entitled Islamic Imperialism: a History . Its author is Efraim Karsh, a professor and head of the Mediterranean Studies programme at King’s College, London. He offers a very good summary of its central thesis in an article entitled ‘Islam’s Imperial Dreams’ that appears in this month’s issue of Commentary.

In his book, Karsh argues such current militancy towards the West as emanates from so many parts of the Muslim world today is less a frustrated response to that region's long historic decline relative to the West, as some have claimed. Nor is it, as others have contended so Karsh claims, a reaction to current US and British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Rather, according to Karsh, ‘the real root cause “ of Islamic jihad is the teachings and traditions of Islam itself.’
The following quotations from Islam’s founder and other well-known Muslims are offered in the book’s advance publicity to illustrate and bear out its central thesis:

‘ Muhammad: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah'. Saladin, the 12th-century conqueror: "I shall cross the sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah". Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini: "We will export our revolution throughout the world . . . until the calls 'There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah' are echoed all over the world". Osama bin Laden: "I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah and his prophet Muhammad".

These are chilling words, if Karsh is right.

Still more chilling, should Karsh be right, are recent reports to the effect that, for several years now, Saudi Arabia has, with the connivance of another supposed ally of the US Pakistan, been secretly at work developing a nuclear weapons programme of its own. The first of these reports appeared in the German magazine Cicero [hat-tip: Little Green footballs]. According to it, somewhere south of Riyadh, the Saudis have built ‘a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles’ which the report claims some unnamed western security services maintain house ‘long range Ghauri-missiles of Pakinstano-origin’.

As one wag who commented on this report on the Little Green Footballs web-site that reported this story observed: With friends like these, who needs friends?

A second report posted yesterday on The Middle East Newsline [again, hat-tip: LGF] appears to confirm the first. It claims that, at a recent seminar in Qatar, a Kuwait researcher told his audience that Saudi Arabia is preparing a nuclear programme.

How worried the West should be about the idea that Saudi Arabia might be in process of gaining or have acquired a nuclear weapons capability ultimately depends on the intention with which it, and other nuclear armed Muslims states like Iran, should have acquired such a capability. This, in turn, depends upon how their ruling elites interpret the call that their religion makes upon them to engage in jihad.

I conclude by repeating the question posed in the title of this posting: Exactly Who or What Might the West Really Be Up Against?

Posted by David Conway at 12:17 PM | Comments (2)

April 03, 2006

Practice makes perfect

That antiquated institution marriage seems to be making a comeback. What’s more we’re hearing about it in the most unlikely places. Last week The New Statesman told us that marriage wasn’t in fact ‘withering’ as they’d suspected we’d suspected, but that it was ‘cautiously putting out green sprouts’. Then this week The Economist tells us that marriage is recovering and explains ‘why marriages are lasting longer’. For the marriages advocates amongst us this all looks very promising: not only is it no longer antediluvian to want to marry, marriages are getting more robust. But whilst all this is good news in principle, a generation of stable, gender-equal partnerships is not actually just around the corner. Nor, therefore is the end of high family breakdown. As The Economist points out the greater longevity of marriage in recent years is a lot to do with parallel increases in cohabitation. Because cohabitation has become so normalised the people who marry today are ‘a more select group’. Consequently whilst divorce rates have remained relatively stable over the last 20 years, cohabitation rates have risen enormously – as has family breakdown. Ideology has changed, but practice is being a little slower.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2006

Should we allocate school places by lottery?

The debate about how best to improve schools has been hijacked by egalitarians who are obsessed with selection. Would admission by lottery be a solution? Here are a few words from The Times arguing in favour. Does it concede too much to the egalitarians?

Posted by David Green at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

Are they sounding out a u-turn?

Education Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced that the back-to-basics method of teaching reading known as ‘synthetic phonics’ is to become a legal requirement ‘embedded in the National curriculum’. This decision follows the conclusions of Jim Rose, a former Deputy Chief Inspector at Ofsted, that phonics work is ‘essential’ to teaching reading.

In a nutshell, synthetic phonics involves blending individual letter sounds to ‘sound-out’ whole words: c-a-t. The call for the phonics approach in primary teaching is not new. Widely used in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was later replaced by methods which relied on readers learning whole words and their meaning simultaneously – building up ‘word recognition’ by building banks of ‘sight vocabulary’. The rejection of phonics centred on the argument that although sounding out words sped up children’s ability to read words in a mechanical sense, it did not help their understanding of what the words actually meant. Half a decade later, the government has rejected this rejection and decided to make it statutory for all schools to use phonics as the ‘first’ strategy in teaching children to read. This will enable children to 'decode' words, and, it is hoped, combat the high proportion of pupils who leave primary school with poor reading and spelling skills.

But isn’t this a u-turn policy-wise? Well yes and no. Ruth Kelly is insisting that it’s not, as synthetic phonics is something which has always been part of the National Literacy Strategy. This is true as the Literacy Strategy recommends a combination of four methods, one of them phonics. However because it is currently only one component of the method mixture in the Strategy teachers aren't able to build the foundations of literacy with a focus on phonics alone. And it is this that is to change, with phonics becoming the ‘prime’ teaching system in all reading lessons.

The Rose Review of phonics was spurred on by the seven-year longitudinal study of phonics teaching in Clackmannanshire (a particularly apt area for testing sounding out). Although children’s comprehension didn’t improve – the original objection – their reading age increased by three years. Whilst developing comprehension skills is clearly vital, the first necessary stage is giving children the skills to be able to access the words themselves.

So even though getting children to sound out may not be altogether new to Dfes policy, getting methods ‘tried out’ is rather a novelty. Perhaps the Dfes is learning – and therefore soon perhaps, so too will our children.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 07:12 PM | Comments (4)

March 13, 2006

Footing the Bill

On Wednesday the fate of the surprisingly controversial Education and Inspections Bill will be determined. To secure a Second Reading, Blair and Kelly will have to succeed in pushing the reforms through Parliament. Which, despite the concessions made to the Bill in response to the concerns of Labour backbenchers, may prove problematic. A new BBC survey suggests that the proposed reforms will still probably only get through with the support of Opposition votes. What Parliament is unanimous on however, is the fact that the Bill is unsatisfactory. Rebel Labour MPs see the Bill as potentially fostering inequality, the Conservatives see it as overly ‘timid’ and the Liberal democrats see it as ‘a missed opportunity’.

But despite the hype, the promised ‘transformations’ won’t have much impact. As the BBC’s Education Correspondent Mike Baker put it this Bill is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This description couldn’t be more apt, the reforms being exactly evolutionary in the sense that they strive to mitigate the adverse outcomes of existing education policy, rather than being revolutionary and scrapping the policies altogether. The root of the crisis in education today is that the government has stifled schools with a lethal combination of over-regulation and poor policies. If the Bill is passed, this situation will remain essentially unchanged.

The three key areas of remaining reform - the altered role of the local education authority, the new disciplinary powers for teachers and the introduction of Trust schools - will at best do very little to improve standards and at worst bring them down even further. The LEAs new function as guardian of standards will exacerbate their already heavily criticised pressuring of schools to focus on targets. New disciplinary powers for teachers don’t extend to expulsion and crucially fail to tackle the factors such as class size and poor curricula causing poor behaviour. And for all the build-up, Trust schools - the Bill’s centrepiece reform – don’t in fact signify much of a departure from what we already know: existing foundation and voluntary aided schools. What detail does distinguish them, namely their ability to form relationships with ‘external partners’, is of dubious worth. ‘Parent power’ has been central to the rhetoric on these external partners. Trust schools will mean that parents no longer have to watch their children perform poorly in poor provision, instead, the Bill proposes, parents themselves will be able to take action – set up a new school. But is this really empowering parents? Isn’t it rather saying we the government can’t improve schools so if you’re not happy you take responsibility for the education of your children?

Parents don’t want to manage schools, they want the people who’s job it is to manage them – and this doesn’t mean the CEO of IBM. Real parent power means providing parents with good options, not making them attempt to salvage the government’s mess.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

March 06, 2006

Exercising parent power

Last Friday the government education watchdog, Ofsted, published a report entitled ‘Parent’s satisfaction with schools’. The report is compiled using data collected from nearly 7,000 inspections carried out between September 2003 and July 2005. The report shows Ofsted ‘found that inspectors judged parental satisfaction to be excellent, very good or good in 88% of primary schools, 77% of secondary schools and 92% of special schools’. (Are we to conclude, incidentally, that 12% of primary, 23% of secondary and 8% of special school parents will be shortly setting up Trust schools?)

Not surprisingly the report says that parental satisfaction is strongly related to how effective schools are. But, the report then goes on to say that particularly at primary level, a certain ‘loyalty’ means that parents are less critical of schools than they might be. According to Ofsted’s theory, the fact that this loyalty is more pronounced in primary schools explains why parental dissatisfaction is greater at secondary level.

However, it quite possibly isn’t loyalty that lies behind positive parental response – rather a different notion on what makes for an ‘effective’ school. To Ofsted what counts as good education is very tightly defined according to the Dfes’s criteria: a sound inspection judgement and a good set of test scores. The report ignores the possibility that parents, who actually know considerably more about what is going on in schools (including the fact that the school is unrecognisable during inspection), may take a broader or simply different view of what makes for an effective school. And in fact Ofsted suggests this itself to an extent by admitting that: ‘…this (greater parental satisfaction) could reflect…beliefs that broader aspects of education, such as social development, are more important at primary level.’

But what is particularly irritating about Ofsted’s somewhat patronising loyalty theory is the background to the data it has used in order to draw this conclusion. The findings on parental satisfaction come from questionnaires which are now sent to parents during a school’s Ofsted inspection. Ofsted has made much of this ‘pioneering championing of parent power’ that is the rather bland survey. Yet the parental survey turns out to be an unfunded afterthought, pushed through at the eleventh hour by Lord Adonis, as the 2005 Bill went through Parliament in April. Consequently, this tokenistic nod towards ‘parent power’ has not been budgeted for by the regional inspection providers – no time and money has been allocated for any analysis of the findings. The surveys are collected and then more or less ignored.
This sends a rather different message to that being espoused in the new Education Bill – or as Kelly likes to call it, the ‘Parent’s Bill’.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

Class counts - but so do league tables

Yesterday the Guardian published news of a study by London University’s UCL and Kings which shows that it is social background which determines pupils’ progress. The still unpublished report is based on national test attainment scores for nearly one million children, and shows that a child’s postcode acts as the best predictor of its success in school.

But what, ultimately, is the point in Professors Richard Webber and Tim Butler’s research? They present us with a depressing confirmation of what we already know, that the better off will always do better, and basically leave it at that – class matters in class. The Guardian article declared the research to be somehow revolutionary, finally giving a ‘statistical backbone’ to what had 'never been proved'. But there is actually already a lot of evidence on the impact of class, it has been proved mutlitple times, making Webber and Butler’s research little more than another vertebra – or, with its apparent lack of constructiveness, just a spare rib.

Yet there is something which can be done to narrow the learning gap and that’s scrapping primary league tables. As Webber and Butler point out even the government’s value-added measures for schools fail to factor in all influences on learning, as will the new contextual value-added measures. We can make approximate bands which factor in influences to achievement, and Webber and Butler claim to have come up with more accurate versions. But these approximations do not show how good schools with less advantaged intakes are as attempts to standardise circumstance are inevitably going to fail. More worryingly, attempts to do so fail the already worst off in terms of learning opportunity. Whilst good primaries in middle-class areas can take testing in their stride, league table culture all too often forces potentially good schools in deprived areas to focus on often arbitrary targets. This inevitably leads to teaching to the test – lowering learning potential even further. And widening that class gap.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 06:06 PM | Comments (1)

February 20, 2006

Failing measures

Incredibly, schools are to now be judged according to their different ethnic compositions. The government's education watchdog, Ofsted, has implemented a new grading system whereby schools are judged on a ‘contextual value-added’ (CVA) measure. CVA takes into account not just levels of improvement, but social background – including ethnicity.

The Dfes' performance-potential by ethnicity rankings, mean that a school with a white working class majority, for example, will not be expected to progress as quickly as one with an Asian majority. For an education system which relentlessly champions a diversity-embracing agenda of equal opportunities, the move is astounding. The Dfes would, however, argue that recognising contributing factors to differing performance is in line with, not against, such an agenda. But it is very difficult to not see the inclusion of an ‘ethnicity-effect’ measure as merely shackling potential with spurious assertions on ascribed status. And this can only be wholly at odds with equality of opportunity.

The Institute for Education’s Professor David Gillborn, has been hotly defending this controversial move. He argues that previous ‘colour blind’ approaches, which denied differing performance between ethnic groups, were simply failing ethnic minority pupils. Head teachers on the other hand, have retaliated by arguing that the move will lead to lower expectations for some ethnic groups, and unfairly inflated ones for others. But qualms about a system of what is essentially race-labelling aside, the consistent reliability of the calculations is highly doubtful. Whilst there may be patterns in performance between Bangladeshis, for example, there may be marked differences between Bangladeshis emigrated from rural and urban areas - or between white working class pupils from Birmingham and those from Barnet. In fact the white pupil from Barnet may have more in common, performance-wise, with the urban Bangladeshi. So whilst there may be patterns, there may be differences. But the real issue is what is the point in trying to classify pupils into one set or another? How is this actually contributing to their learning? Or, is learning no longer the aim of the game? It would seem not, and it all comes back to the key flaw in education policy: the attempt to standardise schools to the point of homogeny.

Value added (VA) measures came into play in the first place, because government control over input and output was making all schools function identically, regardless of the requirements of their pupils. VA measures were introduced to address the issue of different intake, as a more democratic measure which rewarded progress, not only absolute achievement. However the effect of VA to learning has not been anymore beneficial to the school with a deprived intake, than the raw measure. Research by Professor Stephen Gorard at the University of York shows that adverse socio-economic background is as likely to negatively affect VA scores as it is absolute scores. Yet the assumption that it is within the powers of all schools to increase their VA scores, whatever their circumstances, has meant a distortion of schools’ goals as they are forced to focus myopically on test results. Real learning has become a casualty of this focus, leading to merely more disadvantage.

The bottom line is that the government desperately needs to stop quantifying, contextualising, and justifying underachievement and return to that forgotten goal: learning.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

The significance of homework

‘Does marriage make people happy, or do happy people get married?’ is the title of a new paper from economists at the University of Zurich. Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey analysed the ‘causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being’ using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. One of the most interesting findings from the data (which spans 17 years) was the alleged impact of different roles taken by each spouse within marriages. According to the author’s analysis, ‘potential, as well as actual, division of labo[u]r seems to contribute to spouses’ well-being’.

The conclusions were particularly note-worthy on the happiness of women who became full-time 'homemakers', or as they put it, where husbands and wives 'specialised.’(Specialisation didn’t necessarily mean the wife becoming the homemaker, however instances of the reverse were notably rare). The married women who lived in households with a complete domestic/employment division of labour, appeared to be considerably happier than those women living in households where this wasn't the case - especially once children came into the equation. As the authors say, this traditional division of labour is regarded as very conservative – and merely pointing out this observation is likely to draw accusations of seeking evidence to re-instate gendered roles in marriage. Aversion to this point being that exclusion from the labour force is necessarily a negative for women. But in fact, the realities of of many families' domestic arrangements make it not remotely surprising that full 'specialisation' was the preferable option for many wives - considering that women continue to do the majority of housework and caring, whether they work or not. (This might be particularly the case when their employment opportunities were unappealing - equating 'unappealing' with low pay and low reward, may also help explain why couples with large wage differences benefit disproportionately from specialisation and marriage). The authors drew a similar conclusion, attributing the comparative unhappiness of employed wives, to the stress of having the double burden of outside and domestic work. Tellingly, the men in specialised marriages were neither happier nor less happy than those in dual-income ones.

Although the study looks at the happiness of one particular country, the insight could perhaps be more widely applied. Namely, that in exactly the same way that we must not assume gendered divisions of labour in marriages, we also mustn’t assume that all wives, mothers in particular, are desperate to get back to their jobs. There is a stigma attached to women who stay at home to care for their children and work in the home. Even if they have chosen to. The word ‘housework’ has become almost derogatory. These women are either pitied, or frowned upon. However, whilst the problem is seen to be that non-participation in the paid labour force means non-participation in adult modern life, arguably the root of the problem is quite different. Because it is unpaid, domestic work has never been regarded as proper labour. (Something which those against women staying in the home would agree with). Thus rather than seeing the solution as ignoring domestic work, together with its still heavily gendered take-up, the more realistic strategy for greater equality would be to elevate its importance.

Policy in the UK currently does nothing for the domestic ‘worker’. Women, and men, are positively discouraged from working in the home. The economic necessity of getting them into the labour force has meant a further degrading of caring for one’s family, and investment solely into institutionalised childcare.

The trouble is that moves to facilitate equal opportunity between the sexes are often based on assumptions – and outcomes – which effectively perpetuate, rather than addressing, inequity. And let’s not be naïve about the motives behind government policy: the same principle which lay behind Thatcher’s desire to get women out of the labour force, lies behind Blair’s desire to get women into it – economics, not equality.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 10:42 AM | Comments (1)

February 06, 2006

Labour's Education Rebels

Labour’s education rebels claim to want good schools for everyone. Why then are they so hostile to schools that are already good? Mr Blair is glad that some schools do a good job and wants to focus on raising standards in failing schools. Why would someone professing concern for equality be against his strategy?

Two distinct types are opposed to Blair’s reforms: those concerned about social solidarity and those who want social equalization. The equalizers are hostile both to good schools and committed parents - who are often denounced as ‘pushy parents’ when merely calling them middle class is not considered condemnation enough. What do pushy parents and successful schools have in common that might explain this animosity? Both bring about unequal outcomes in society and that is what Labour equalizers are against. Polly Toynbee in the Guardian recently described the attitude succinctly: “Secondary schools cannot compensate for the damage done in one of Europe's most unequal societies: by the age of five children's destinies are all but set by social class or parental ambition. Schools are only remedial. Real change will come only if society grows more equal in wealth, status, esteem and reward.”

The reasoning goes like this. The real challenge is to create equal outcomes. Schools, as Toynbee puts it, are only remedial. In fact, successful schools create unequal outcomes. Consequently, because they put the attainment of equal outcomes above all other considerations, egalitarians find themselves opposed to effective schools.

The second group of Labour rebels has a more pragmatic focus on social solidarity. They worry that determined parents will monopolise the good schools and that less capable parents will find their children left behind in sink schools. Equal outcomes are not the top priority. Rather, step-by-step progress towards higher education standards for all is the aim. Consequently, good schools are not the problem. The issue is, how to make sure no one is left behind as we improve bad schools. This concern with social solidarity leaves its adherents open to rational persuasion, whereas the demands of the equalizers are incompatible with a free society and should be confronted and defeated.

But wait, are egalitarians really that bad? Are they not optimistic about human potential? Don’t they also want the best for everyone? If so, why the hostility to people who are already successful – the hated pushy parents? It’s because the idealism of equalizers only extends to potential people – to what they might become - not to actual people as they really are today. Typically egalitarians often reveal a strong contempt for people as they are. George Bernard Shaw, for example, one of the early exponents of equalization said in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism that ‘For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but I am equally bent on their extermination’. All classes including the working classes had ‘no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.’

How could Mr Blair isolate and defeat the equalizers? Selection of pupils is the key and here we can learn from American experience in the 1980s. The issue for Americans was race rather than class, but the basic problem was the same: how could policy makers be sure that popular schools would not exclude disadvantaged children? They opted for lotteries.

One of the earliest cities to adopt lotteries was Chicago. The system was simple. Parents applied for the school of their choice. If a school with 100 places was over-subscribed, all the names were ‘put in a hat’ and the first 100 picked out. Covert selection on ability was impossible. A similar process was adopted for publicly-funded ‘charter’ schools that began to be introduced in the 1990s. Local authorities give a contract (or charter) to new schools and pay a fixed amount for each child who attends. Independent studies have found that charter schools assist children from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieve higher standards in reading and maths compared with similar local schools.

If lotteries were introduced here, it would turn the debate away from selection onto the real issue – namely does competition between schools benefit everyone? The evidence from countries such as Sweden, where a voucher scheme has been introduced, is positive but you don’t have to believe that schools are just like any other commercial product to see the strength of the argument for competition. Nor is profit the issue. A market system brings two strengths, compared with the public sector monopoly we have now. Pluralism on the supply-side reflects the reality that the drive for improvement in most walks of life comes from producers, not consumers. We learn the best ways of meeting our needs by allowing many people to discover the best solutions through trial and error. This diversity, when combined with the cut and thrust of critical inquiry through the media, allows us to learn rapidly from both successes and failures. Public sector monopoly creates entrenched interests that will not budge, as Mr Blair is finding. And it suppresses the mutual learning that pluralism opens up. Monopoly permits intellectual orthodoxies to flourish even when they are contrary to the declared aims of the system. The abandonment of synthetic phonics in teaching reading is only the most recent example of an educational folly that was enthusiastically embraced by teachers who, in their hearts, knew better. School diversity allows us all to take part in a journey of discovery, permitting the growth of our knowledge in the light of experimentation, rather than the suppression of sense by political dictate.

A system of lotteries would concede a lot to egalitarians, but it would also concentrate public debate on the real issue: whether supply-side pluralism would create educational opportunities for all and raise educational standards above the depths to which they have sunk under the watchful eye of monopolistic local government. Above all, it would reveal that concern for social solidarity is compatible with school diversity and parental choice. Social reform should happen on a scale that allows mistakes to be corrected quickly and successes emulated fast. No system of schools dominated by the deadweight of local politicians can come close.

Posted by David Green at 07:38 AM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2006

Beleaguered league tables

Ruth Kelly faces her toughest battle yet as Education Secretary today, as she gives a make or break statement over the sex offender debacle. Adding to calls for her resignation over sex offender clearance comes the latest blow in the full publication of GCSE results (and the lost war on persisting truancy to boot). Although the BBC cheerfully announced that the jump in GCSE attainment was ‘even bigger than thought’, a closer look at 2005 performance is an expose of the serious cracks beleaguering New Labour’s education policy. Whilst the results may show a 0.6-point rise in achievement from the provisional data published in October, they also reveal that the government’s flagship city academies fall amongst the worst performing schools in the country, and that private schools continue to out-strip state sector attainment.

27 of Blair’s ‘pet’ city academies have replaced failing schools, but only 14 of these have been open long enough to be included in the 2005 GCSE league tables. Out of these 14, 7 – half – rank in the bottom 200 schools, where fewer than 30% of pupils at these 7 academies achieve five C’s or above. Four of the academies fall into the 100 worst schools category.

The second blow in the GCSE league tables was in the value-added scores, also published today. These scores show that independent schools advance their pupils – from primary to GCSE level – at a rate significantly greater than state schools. According to the value-added scale, state schools score roughly two GCSE grades below the median, whereas independent schools score between five and six grades above the median. Despite the small number of independent schools, their attainment has been sufficiently high to raise the median score of all schools.

The amount of money invested in the city academies programme (at least £5bn), as well as projected investment to extend the scheme, is vast. Misgivings over this expenditure aside, a greater concern is that academies’ disappointing performance will be used as fuel against granting schools more freedoms. The failure of these 'independently' run schools is likely to be cited by MPs rebelling over the forthcoming Education Bill, as demonstrating that more autonomy is not key to raising standards in schools. However, the fact that these academies are absolutely not free from government diktat, still shackled enormously by DfES regulation, nullifies them as useful evidence for the anti-freedom brigade. As, moreover, does the value-added gulf between the independent and state sector.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

School failure

According to a study published by the National Audit Office today, a million children are being failed by schools eight years after Tony Blair hollered that famous line, education, education, education. Although just 577 schools are judged to be failing or have ‘serious weaknesses’ by Ofsted, the NAO report has found that the number of schools failing to provide a decent education is far higher. ‘We estimate that these 1,557 schools educate around 980,000 pupils, or 13 per cent of the school population,’ it says.

Ministers spent £840 million on improving struggling schools last year and £160 million on replacing failing comprehensives with city academies. There are many Labour backbenchers who see no pressing reason to tinker with the structure and organisation of schools: they would prefer that ministers preserve the status quo and allow the extra money to bring about any improvements it can. However, the NAO’s report could be employed by the PM and Ruth Kelly to help them drive through reforms outlined in the White Paper.

The NAO highlights the character of schools in its analysis of the common traits of underperformance. These include ineffective leadership, weak supervision by governors, poor contacts with the community, and negligent local authorities. All these factors combine to produce both below par teaching and bad pupil behaviour.

Perhaps the most dramatic statistics concern school leadership. The numbers of appropriately qualified individuals applying for these crucial posts is, the NAO asserts, ‘generally falling’; and it appears that in 2004-05 ‘28 per cent of primary and 20 per cent of secondary schools had head teacher vacancies’. As the NAO pithily puts it, ‘leadership counts’. Speaking on the Today programme, the headmaster of Phoenix High School in London, William Atkinson, said that heads are not paid enough and that the burden of bureaucracy is intolerable. To turns around a school, as he is credited as having done, heads must ignore many of the government’s diktats.

In theory, the White Paper is designed to address some of these problems, although the great concern is that the independence envisaged for schools will turn out to be illusory, and a further concern is that regulations will increase the degree to which head teachers’ are straitjacketed. Although the White Paper might turn out to be a plaster for an axe wound, in the circumstances, that might just be better than nothing.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 02:23 PM | Comments (7)

December 09, 2005

Only One Word Describes the Government's Literacy Strategy

Those with sufficiently intact and long memories will doubtless still be able to remember quite vividly how easy and enjoyable it was to learn to read in primary school. One aid in the process back in the 'fifties and 'sixties were series of very simple reading books that gradually became slightly but progressively more challenging and interesting.

One notable example of such were the Ladybird 'Peter and Jane' stories.

That approach got swept away in the wake of more progressive but less effective methods introduced into primary schools with disastrous effect in the seventies.

Well warranted concern by the present Labour government about high rates of illiteracy among schoolchildren and school-leavers led to its imposition of a 'literacy strategy' that required children by age seven to have been taught to read 158 specific prescribed words.

Today's Times reports some startling results of a £1million research study just completed by Warwick University's Institute of Education that call that strategy into question.

Among its findings were that: 'only 100 of the most common words were needed to tackle any book, including adult fiction and non-fiction'; that 'only 16 words accounted for a quarter of written English'; that, with mastery of those hundred 'high-frequency' words, children could understand nearly a half of all texts; and that the additional 58 words required under the literacy strategy added only between 2 and 4% to the understanding of children.

The implication of the research is that young children need not have been obliged to learned as many as over a third of the words the literary strategy requires them to by aged seven before being able to read for themselves. The time set aside in school to ensuring children have mastered the surplus third of prescribed words would have been better spent letting them read books that, like the Peter and Jane series, initially used only words from the most common 100 and then gradually expanded the children's reading vocabulary by introducing new words.

Those, like the present writer with both distant but pleasant memories of having learned to read with the old-style Ladybird books and more recent but distinctly less pleasant memories of seeing what purgatory their own children's primary schooling was made by the government's literacy strategy requiring them to master masses of lists of words at the expense of letting them read easy texts for themselves, will have a word of their own to describe that strategy that, despite being an easy word does figure among the government's list of prescribed words.

Can you guess, readers, what it is? Here is a clue: it has four letters, starts with 's,' and ends with 't'.

Posted by David Conway at 09:16 AM | Comments (1)

November 21, 2005

Select success

Latest education reforms have once again raised the question of selection. However, the government, who remain adamant that changes in education policy in no way reinstate selection, are not the ones raising this issue. Despite New Labour’s egalitarian rhetoric, many feel that granting new autonomy to schools will lead to a steep rise in the unofficial selection already occurring today. The education minister, Ruth Kelly, and the Prime Minister, however, insist that schools’ new freedoms, including independence from LEAs, will not denote powers to select pupils.

Whatever the ideology behind the government’s education policy, the fact is that the existing imbalance between supply and demand means that some form of selection is inevitable. A report published last week by the Evening Standard highlights the extent of the demand/supply disparity in London’s secondary schools. According to the report, in the capital’s best secondary schools pupils’ chances of securing a place are as low as 1 in 10, and for most popular schools, there are two applicants per space. In 11 of London’s most popular schools, the survey found that there were on average 6 applicants per place. The survey’s central illustration of the surplus demand problem was the case of Haberdashers' Aske’s Hatcham College, which had 2000 applicants for just 180 places.

The result of a system where only a handful of schools can be judged ‘good’ is that informal selection creeps in, in a number of ways. One effect has been the notorious inflation of house prices in particular regions as parents move to the catchment areas of popular schools. Rather more sinister is the evidence showing parents deceiving schools about their addresses, and extensive examples of schools informally selecting pupils on the basis of socio-economic class. Ultimately over-subscription necessitates schools to pick and choose, with the middle classes best at maximising their chances of being chosen. The fact that just 3% of pupils in the country’s top schools are eligible for free school meals (i.e. come from poor families) demonstrates not just the relationship between achievement and socio-economic class, but the limited access even the brightest poor children have to good schools.

In response to the new reforms one ‘rebel’ Labour MP, David Claytor, warned:
“We could find ourselves in a hierarchical, segregated system…” But arguably it’s not a segregated system per se that we want to avoid; it is the nature and mechanisms of this segregation which we need to be wary about. By purporting education provision based on non-selective egalitarianism, room is made for harmful and unfair unofficial selection which simply thwarts meritocracy. By standing staunchly against any forms of planned selection, yet allowing schools to select covertly, the DfES is creating a school system dominated by middle-class privilege. Token parity of esteem under New Labour is therefore more likely to hinder socio-economic mobility and maintain pockets of ghettoised underachievement than a system based on selective admissions.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Homogenising provision

In spite of the ‘pivotal’ new era of autonomy for education practitioners, childminders and nursery school teachers are to now be included in OfSTED’s remit.
New legislation under the Childcare Bill will demand that all infant-care providers implement a new national curriculum. Consequently, 0-3 year olds across the country will soon be learning the same thing, the same way, most probably at the same hour. What is concerning about an infant curriculum however, extends much further than restricting creative freedom for toddlers.

A legally imposed learning programme for under-fours will homogenise early-years care as practitioners are forced to stick to prescribed activities. The response to an infant curriculum has been very negative. The principal objection is the predicted loss of creative play as infants are subjected to specific learning outcomes. Even under prior arrangements, many practitioners were sceptical about the early introduction of formalised learning in the UK – and that’s when the national curriculum started at four. The children’s minister, Beverley Hughes, has responded to criticisms of the proposal by arguing that an infant curriculum won’t symbolise the end of childhood, but simply a ‘coherent framework’. Yet it’s exactly the coherent framework which is pernicious.

However, it’s the straight jacketing of practitioners, rather than the straight jacketing of children which is most alarming. The suitability or inappropriateness of an infant curriculum is less important than the issue of choice. Just a week after the release of the DfES’s white paper championing new freedoms for educators, independence is being sucked out of a previously autonomous education sector. Under the direction of OfSTED, infant care providers will now be duty-bound to teach ‘four distinct curriculum headings’. What is concerning about this arrangement, is that ultimately it means a government monopoly on early-years pedagogical methods, where alternative approaches to early-years teaching are no longer permitted. Choice may be topping the government’s rhetorical agenda, but at the frontline diversity is being disabled.

The other major concern is the near certainty that formal testing will be employed. As we’ve witnessed so painfully, government-set learning goals are invariably accompanied by testing in order to regulate their implementation. Testing for 0-3 year-olds is not only a preposterous notion in itself, it would also run the risk of driving practitioners to becoming league-table, rather than child-development, focused.

When the plan was so clearly going to come up against major resistance, why has the government decided to introduce an infant curriculum? Crudely put, OfSTED-enforced outcomes permit regulation without investment. Whilst this may be a cheap way of securing accountability for the DfES, the costs are high for children.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 05:08 PM | Comments (1)

November 07, 2005

Trying before buying

Trying before buying is a concept alien to New Labour. Whilst this government’s been in power, initiative after initiative has been rolled out without so much as a pilot study.

With education the centrepiece of the Blair project, schools have suffered particularly acutely. Here, with the u-turn virtually synonymous with education policy, not only have policies been implemented untested, they have also invariably focused on short-term goals, often at the expense of long-term benefits. Moreover, in order to guarantee headline coverage, these short-term strategies tend to be ‘innovative’, which by definition involves discarding anything tried and tested. Sure Start is a prime example. A nationwide equalising project had exactly the sort of historical potential Blair was looking for. As the Guardian commented in July 2000, “Sure Start could be what Tony Blair’s government is remembered for in the same way that Harold Wilson’s government is remembered for the Open University.” However unlike the design of the OU, Sure Start was rolled out at break-neck speed, with not a scrap of evidence showing it to be structurally sound. As the flaws now come rapidly to light, Sure Start is – rather more quietly – being restructured.

And it’s happened again with the government’s ‘irreversible’ reforms laid out in the latest white paper. (Only a government whose educational policy was quite so notorious for its u-turns would proudly declare their reforms ‘irreversible’).
This time, however, whilst Blair may not be interested in learning from experience, many in his party are. Both from within the party and from educationalists outside it, the proposed reforms have been subject to extensive criticism. As backbenchers plot tactics over the white paper, the Commons Education and Select Committee has announced that it will be carrying out a formal enquiry into it. Meanwhile, New Labour’s education policy has also come under fire from a body made up of 25 education experts, headed by Professor Richard Pring, at Oxford University. The committee’s accusation is that this government’s reforms are ‘not properly evaluated’, and based primarily on ‘political’ motives. This is the second time this year that the committee have accused the government’s education strategy of being ill planned. On the 14-19 reforms, the group described New Labour education policy as a ‘plethora of piecemeal policy initiatives that are not fully evaluated’, guided by ‘short-term political objectives’.

That it remains possible to implement education policy without evaluation is a great concern. After the January 2004 Commons’ debacle over university tuition fees, MPs were promised that policy proposals would in future be rigorously evidence-based, with a much stronger emphasis on the consultation process. Yet, MPs today argue that this has simply not been the case with the white paper. Brewing unrest on such matters, both in the party and in the teaching community, is putting Blair in an increasingly weak position. But more importantly, implementing untested education policies is gambling not only taxpayer’s money, but also our children’s life chances. In the cases where the DfES has conceded to having failed, policy u-turns have led to enormous disruption to learners and children, to the detriment of standards. Thus the evidence, not just common sense, suggest that testing must pre-empt investing.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2005

Markets with strings attached

The new Education White Paper was heralded as Blair’s transformation of the English education system. This White Paper was professed to signify bold ‘new freedoms’ and ‘new autonomy’ for schools. But now that the reforms have been unveiled, just how revolutionary are they, and what changes will they mean to the everyday lives of teachers and school children in this country?

In the Prime Minister’s speech during the run-up to the White Paper, we were promised ‘revolutionary’ and ‘irreversible’ reforms. So the assumption was truly drastic change to the system. And yes the reforms are drastic – bussing deprived children into middle class areas, catch up classes for an entire nation of 11 year olds. Yet on the whole, these reforms are of the sticking-plaster sort. Rather than attempting to deal with the problems which have thrown our education system into crisis head-on – class sizes, inappropriate curricula, to name a couple – mitigating remedies are being implemented as long-term solutions. In other words the current state of schools is being perpetuated by stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it as symptomatic of many misguided policies.

Equally misleading is the notion of ‘new autonomy’ for schools. Unless OfSTED’s role in schools were to change fundamentally, autonomy will largely mean more managerial responsibility for schools but not more pedagogical freedom. Looking at the 2005 OfSTED framework, there are no plans to dilute OfSTED’s power in schools. The OfSTED Inspection Framework has recently been overhauled. Inspection has been re-focused to give schools a greater sense - in government-speak - of ownership over the process. The basis of this revamp is a new emphasis on self-evaluation. Self-evaluation is sold as increasing autonomy, but in reality schools have by no means felt less pressure to conform to OfSTED’s framework; instead schools now self-regulate under strict monitoring. Accompanied with ‘shorter, sharper’ inspections, supposedly to reduce preparation but conspicuously to reduce inspection expenses, OfSTED’s refocus looked more like cost cutting and a tightening of central control than liberating schools.

Baring in mind OfSTED’s stranglehold on definitions of ‘quality’ in education, witnessed now even by the private sector since its inclusion in OfSTED’s remit, it is difficult to see why independent schools and organisations would find it worthwhile to enter into the state sector – as the White Paper proposes. Bringing private providers into the system would allegedly encourage pluralism; in fact it would more likely signify the extension of an ideological monopoly on effective education, as schools become homogenised in order to achieve ‘state standards’. A strictly prescriptive regulatory body simply cannot accompany self-governance in matters other than organisation. As long as the government insists on a tight grip over teaching methodologies through OfSTED, the education system cannot function as a true consumer-led market.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2005

In a twist

I love it when this government gets its knickers in a twist. Goodness knows it’s got itself tangled up in so many problems it deserves to be tripping over. The attempt to legislate virtually every aspect of public and private life is proving complicated for the classroom swat Ruth Kelly, the priggish Patricia Hewitt and the haughty Baroness Scotland. They’re not alone, but they’ll do for today. You see, Kelly’s trying to keep bossy Blair happy by doing exactly what he tells her, Hewitt’s having her pigtails tugged by that naughty Johnny Reid, and as for Baroness Scotland, she’s been pushed around in the playground of the Lords.

Kelly’s problem is that doing what Tony tells her is not popular with the rest of the class, for the bullies on the backbenches have been heckling her and saying all sorts of horrid things. I’ve complained a lot about the government’s education policy, but it’s going in vaguely the right direction by seeking to remove power from teaching unions and LEAs by creating more independent state schools (bizarrely what the Conservatives called grant maintained schools until they were abolished by New Labour, but still) and bringing private sector providers into the education market. All of which is hated by Old Labour stalwarts. And the problem is there are still too many regulations that hamper start-up schools, well, starting, despite the white paper’s talk of getting rid of red tape; catchment areas remain; and selection is still taboo. At the moment ‘independent’ is little more than rhetoric – Kelly will be crying her eyes out soon enough. I don’t usually think much of what she writes, but there was a good piece by Alice Thompson in The Times yesterday about how grammars were the best engines of social mobility. Raising people from poverty and exclusion will need something similar.

As for Hewitt, watching her troubles is nearly as satisfying as seeing the class geek get caught for smoking behind the bike sheds – only this one hates smokers. Which is why she and Johnny Reid have had such a falling out. Okay, so the health lobby have won the argument about smoking, that it’s bad for you, like drinking too much, eating too much, or extreme sports. (Incidentally, for those who go on about costs, twelve million people smoke in the UK at an estimated cost to the NHS of 1.7 billion a year; but the Treasury receives around £8 billion in tax from tobacco sales.) Many continue to smoke because it’s fun, so Reid, the Scottish bruiser, promised in the election manifesto to ban smoking in pubs that serve food but allow it elsewhere. Hewitt wants an outright ban on smoking in all public places and members clubs, which is pretty draconian. So the same government that talks about choice in education wants to deny it in public life by micromanaging behaviour. Anyway, so bad has been the tiff in the Cabinet that the Bill looks set to be shelved. Wouldn’t it be easier to control if there was, as The Times suggests, a licensing system that permits some pubs, with or without food, to be smoking establishments, meaning that customers would know in advance what kind of air they’ll be breathing?

And then there’s old Baroness Scotland and the incitement to religious hatred bill. She’s tried, oh she’s tried, and so have all her cronies in government, but this is a glorious debacle of New Labour’s own making. A backhand promise to the Muslim kids annoyed about Iraq – as if they were the only ones – has turned into a mess. Well, The Times reports today that the Lords have scuppered the bill’s chances of going through in its present ramshackle form. Baroness Scotland has promised to go away and do her homework properly this time. This government has seemed impervious to criticism about the importance of the freedom to criticise, but at last the message seems to be getting through. You promote tolerance through freedom of expression. You outlaw sticks and stones, but not words. Now it looks like the Religious Hatred Bill might not end up being an extension of the 1986 Public Order Act, but a new schedule requiring that the prosecution prove that the defendant acted with criminal intent, and adding in a provision that allows for the right to ridicule, insult or abuse religions or their adherents, and to allow proselytising. This is a good thing.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:44 PM | Comments (1)

October 24, 2005

Lessons in reporting

On the eve of the new Education White Paper, the furore over the government’s misleading presentation of GCSE performance continues to rage. To have presented an overly ‘optimistic’ picture would have been one thing, but this particular ‘overstatement’ raised a very serious set of issues surrounding both the state of education and the scrupulousness of DfES reporting.

Whilst the government has been boasting its successes in GCSE attainment, it turns out that the figures fail to include maths and English. Only thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, under which the BBC was able to obtain the true figures, did the true situation in secondary schools come to light. What is so concerning is that in a system celebrating its alleged successes, the reality is that over half of all GCSE pupils are currently failing to achieve adequate levels in the English and maths. The headlines put out by the DfES showed that the number of pupils scoring A*-C at GCSE level this year had increased by two percentage points to 55.7%. However, once maths and English are taken into account, the proportion of pupils receiving 5 good GCSEs drops to just 44.1%. Furthermore, one in six of the schools which claimed improved results actually saw a decline once maths and English were included.

A principal lesson from this debacle is the dangerous nature of New Labour’s rhetoric. Not only is Blair’s desire to seize headlines misleading parents, it is driving schools and the DfES to pervert the purpose of education. In response to the revelation, Kelly has announced that schools will be obliged to include maths and English in the publication of their results. What is extraordinary is the fact that this hasn’t always been the case. That schools have been able – and indeed encouraged – to publish results which exclude the key indicators of a school’s performance is alarming. The incentive to leave out English and maths for both schools and the DfES lies in the distorted nature of a target-driven education agenda. When quantifiable yet meaningless outcomes become the aim of the game the purpose of education ceases to be to educate but instead to manipulate those subjects with the best returns. The prime example is schools boosting their league table positions by including vocational subjects in their apparently academic results. This is not about academic v vocational snobbery, but about lucid reporting. A mixture of academic and vocational subjects not only fails to give a clear picture on two very different areas of teaching, but there is also the issue of skewed equivalency between vocational GNVQs and academic GCSEs. This matters particularly when a deceptive picture of the basics is presented.

Whilst maths and English are not the only subjects of importance, they are the foundations of other education and crucial to life skills. For us to be able to judge the state of secondary education, we need to know whether pupils are able to perform simple calculations, read and write and access the rest of the curriculum. It is imperative therefore that information disseminated on school performance is usefully presented, so that it is possible to see a breakdown of what has actually been achieved. When reporting makes it difficult to tell that education policies are failing, as achievement appears to be rising, it is more difficult to challenge them. Which is exactly the desired result. Nebulous categories, we now know, mean there’s something to hide.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2005

Sisters are Doing It to Themselves

The badly scarred and understandably sad-looking face of a twelve-year old Sheffield schoolgirl stares reproachfully from a photograph on the front page of today’s Times. The poor girl acquired her disfiguring injuries after she was savagely set upon by a knife-wielding classmate whom the previous day the brave victim of the attack had tried to stop bullying a third schoolmate.

Earlier this year, Secretary of State for Education, Ruth Kelly, set up a ‘behaviour task force’ to make proposals about how to tackle the growing problem of classroom bullying and disorder which it is due to publish today. It was, apparently and welcomingly, asked to adopt a long-overdue and badly-needed zero-tolerance approach to the problem.

We should, however, not hold our hopes too high. For we have long been promised so much by the present government and given so little it is difficult to believe we shall not this time receive only yet more brave words that amount to little in practice.

By way of illustration of the current tragic gap between rhetoric and reality today in all matters to do with schooling today, consider what was said in its last Ofsted report about the approach of the victim’s school towards instilling good behaviour in pupils:

‘The school looks after its pupils well…. The school successfully integrates many pupils with challenging behaviour, and those who have been excluded from schools…. A programme for personal, social and health education is well organised and effectively taught. … Moral education is good. Expectations regarding behaviour are clear, and pupils are full aware of the difference between right and wrong.’

Now, we all know that one swallow does not a summer make. But by the same token so do we that it takes only one rotten apple to spoil a barrel. Moreover, it simply defies belief to suppose the attack was a totally isolated incident or that a twelve-year old girl would be carrying a knife to school with the intention or willingness to use it as she did had her doing so not been to some extent in keeping with the entire culture of that school, if not at its official classroom level, then at its unofficial level in the playground.

(There’s a word whose literal meaning harks back to earlier more civilised times and serves as a standing indictment of the harsh and brutal reality that place has all too commonly and tragically become today.)

But the rot goes well beyond the disturbed and deprived family backgrounds which are such fertile incubators of the many disorderly and disturbed children who attend today’s schools. It goes right up to the top of the educational establishment. Consider, for example, what the same Ofsted report said about that same school’s approach towards moral education:

‘Moral education is good…. When moral decisions are to be made, pupils are taught to think these through from action to consequence…. Moral issues are debated as they arise in lessons, for example, global warming and its consequences, refugees and persecution.’

Lord above! If ever there was a moral decision to be made by a school child, it is not whether the G8 countries should adopt some protocol about reducing carbon emissions or whether there should be a law prohibiting incitement to religious hatred. It is whether they school bring into school a knife today or any other with the intent or preparedness to use it.

Admittedly, this moral issue is by no means as straightforward as might at first sight appear. Were school environments entirely orderly and civil, the question should simply not arise for a child of whether to carry a knife to school. It does, however, when schools have been turned into blackboard jungles into which children must daily venture in fear and trembling of being assaulted. Then, whether to carry a knife to school does become a genuine moral issue for them.

Having said all that, it seems Ofsted, along with the entire educational establishment of this country, has got the moral focus all wrong if it and they should think moral education in schools should be about fostering in their pupils the ability to debate such issues as the ethics of global-warming, rather than about instilling in them basic common decency, as well as attempting to develop their abilty to think for themselves about how to be decent as well as their wanting to be, when all about them there is so much moral chaos, disorder and unruliness.

School, as we know, is no moral substitute for the home and, unless their pupils' home environment is stable and nurturing, it is an uphill struggle for teachers to turn out morally decent products.

Perhaps, then, more emphasis should be given in schools and in the wider community at large on the value of stable homes and family-life. ‘Oh!’ we will be told ‘to do that will stigmatise those children not fortunate enough to have been born into one!’

Balderdash! If the time has come for society to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance towards classroom disorder and bullying, it has also come for it to get tough on the causes of classroom disorder and bullying. Of these unsettled and unstable home-lives must be a principal, if not the single biggest, cause.

All those 'sixties feminists who back then championed the break-up of the two-parent family because, so they claimed, this would liberate women from domestic violence should be made to take a long hard look at the photograph of that poor school-girl’s face and made to answer the simple question of whether their sisters’ liberation from the oppressive patriarchal family was worth her scars inflicted by a girl not a boy as well as all the other injuries and indignities suffered by all other victims of violent crime today.

Posted by David Conway at 11:29 AM | Comments (3)

October 19, 2005

Independent?

Anyone interested in Tony Blair's educational reforms should take a look at Stephen Pollard's excellent article in yesterday's Times. Not only does he make the astute point that Blair's "independent" state schools plan simply represents a return to the grant-maintained system that New Labour abolished in 1997. He also makes some revealing observations about his co-author on A Class Act, Lord Adonis, who has for some years been Tony Blair's key adviser on education policy.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

Independent?

Anyone interested in Tony Blair's educational reforms should take a look at Stephen Pollard's excellent article in yesterday's Times. Not only does he make the astute point that Blair's "independent" state schools plan simply represents a return to the grant-maintained system that New Labour abolished in 1997. He also makes some revealing observations about his co-author on A Class Act, Lord Adonis, who has for some years been Tony Blair's key adviser on education policy.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Family, Education, Education

‘Parents blamed for unruly pupils’ ran headlines across the press last week. A survey of 500 primary and secondary school teachers conducted for Teacher’s TV found that eight out of ten teachers saw parents’ failure to control their children as the primary cause of discipline problems in school. According to the findings, twice as many teachers believed parents were the cause of poor behaviour than thought it stemmed from school-related factors.

These findings are particularly concerning as they most likely confirm that the poor are continuing to do worst. Poor pupil behaviour, poor pupil performance and poor pupil socio-economic background have become virtually synonymous in the UK. Equally inextricable are poverty and family breakdown. The lower the average parent income in both primary and secondary schools, the worse overall achievement tends to be – with bad behaviour playing a key role. The equation seems pretty clear: support stable families for better results. Literally.

Under New Labour ‘teachers blame pupil behaviour/performance on home life’ headlines have appeared on several occasions. Each time, the ‘revelation’ is treated as if it were somehow shocking, and the teachers suggesting it, somehow outrageous in doing so. It is as if once children are institutionalised in schools, they must become clean slates severed from their backgrounds.( Kelly Hours, where schools were to become not unlike orphanages, would do this in the extreme.) Thus to acknowledge the potential impact of an adverse home life is to impede egalitarianism. Blair’s myopic focus on the potential of education combined with the refusal to battle family breakdown is largely responsible for this mind-set. Blair relentlessly champions education as the only way to create a more equal society. According to Blairite doctrine, education is the single best way of levelling the playing field. To imagine that schooling can right all the adverse effects of a child’s background, however, is naïve. To deny many children family stability by not fostering the two-parent family in policy, is the surest way to perpetuate inequality. Universally accessible education is undeniably a key component of a meritocracy. But why attempt to remedy home life disadvantage solely through school, leaving the root of the problem untouched? It is more than coincidence that after a series of governments doing little to promote the family, family breakdown has rocketed and, according to researchers at LSE, social mobility has declined significantl.

Sure Start is an example of dealing with the consequences but doing little to solve the problem. Crudely put, the point of Sure Start was to remove children from their disadvantageous homes in order to mitigate the adverse impact of their home life. The scheme arguably also enables mothers to work and thereby pro-actively improve their children’s life chances. Yet a relatively small amount of additional cash has limited potential to change circumstances. Moreover, family policy focusing solely on getting mothers into work, is often a sticking-plaster response to family breakdown which might have been avoided by a different political agenda.

Life chances aside, the government needs to re-think the home/school interface simply to hold onto teachers. The last notable piece of research on school discipline showed that a huge number of Newly Qualified Teachers consider changing jobs after only a few months – because of poor pupil behaviour. The exit rate from the teaching continues to be very high, and according to OfSTED, retention and recruitment is a problem in two thirds of the LEAs. Whilst it was once training and low salaries which thwarted the profession, pupil discipline now appears to be the primary problem for schools.

In the survey, teachers called for ‘zero tolerance’ to tackle unruly pupils: two thirds wanting powers to exclude pupils. There is a strong case for giving schools more autonomy in disciplinary measures. But there is an even stronger case for the government to start tackling behaviour issues at the root – through the family.

So let’s alter Blair’s mantra, for family surely comes first.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 07:41 PM | Comments (1)

October 14, 2005

How the Government Adds Insult to the Injuries it Has Inflicted on the Public

‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. ‘Education, education, education’. ‘No return to boom and bust’.

One by one, the flag-ship commitments that brought New Labour to office in 1997are running into the sands.

A very small statistical dip in the overall crime rate allowed the Government misleadingly to boast of having successfully reduced crime. But violent crime stands at an all time high. The Government has spectacularly failed to get tough on its immediate cause -- the criminals who perpetrate it.

Despite long-standing evidence of a steadily mounting need for additional prison capacity to house the burgeoning numbers of offenders awarded custodial sentences, the Government has persistently refused to build any. Yesterday’s Times contains a front-page story that , to solve of prison over-crowding, the Home Office intends to extend still further its already hazardous early release scheme. ‘Criminals sentenced to four years in prison could be freed after just 18 months.’

With recidivism rates for those granted early release standing at 8%, we can be certain that violent crime will continue to stay uncomfortably high.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair’s boast to have improved school performance received a cruel blow by a report also in yesterday’s Times that, ‘despite soaring A grades at GCSE and A level, … nearly half of students this year failed to get a grade C or better in GCSE maths and 40% failed to reach a C in English’.

According to CBI estimates, ’15 million adults do not have the arithmetic skills expected of a 14-year-old and …one in ten adults cannot read to a similar level.’

Whatever the Pink Floyd may at one time have blithely sung, our school-children certainly do need an education. If their teachers are failing to provide one, this could be partly due to their having graduated from university without adequate proficiency themselves in these subjects.

As to our Iron Chancellor’s proud boast of having presided over an unparalleled sustained period of economic growth that has enabled him to increase spending on public services massively without increasing government debt or taxes, all that seems about to change and be shown up for another failed promise. In making his budgetary calculations, the Chancellor appears to have relied on growth estimates that now appear wildly optimistic.

Meanwhile, as is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the latest official unemployment figures show ‘the number of people out of work and claiming benefits climbed for the eighth month in a row, marking the longest sustained increases in unemployment since the early Nineties.’

These economic trends would not be nearly as depressing as they are -- forgive the pun! – did not yesterday’s papers also reveal the Chancellor’s much vaunted Working Families Tax Credit scheme to have proved itself monumentally unworkable and plagued by fraud.

Perhaps, it is the fault of all those innumerate employees turned out by our failing schools and universities who administer the system, but the last year, the most recent for which there are figures, it is reported the Revenue overpaid tax credits to the tune of ‘£2.2 billion to 1.9 million families’. The Revenue is expecting mistakes of a comparable order of magnitude this year.

Small wonder is it, as yesterday’s Times reports, that the National Audit Office has become so concerned about the high level of benefit fraud that it has ‘refused to give a clean bill of health to the tax credits section of the Inland Revenue’s accounts for the third year in succession.’

At one time, such a dismal track-record of a Government in office might have been expected to be visited by voter revenge at the ballot-box at the next general election. However, if its lack-lustre record in office were not bad enough, to the list of Government initiatives that have proved failures can be added one that might well prevent this from happening.

It is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the Government seems determined to press on with household rather than individual registration for postal voting, against the strong advice of the independent Electoral Commission that household registration lends itself to electoral abuse.

Doubtless in future, offenders stuck at home on early release from prison will have a field-day fraudulently claiming benefit, before, through using multiple votes they have frauduently amassed by registering their household, keeping in power a Government that has served them and other criminals so well, but the honest law-abiding majority so badly.

Posted by David Conway at 01:10 PM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2005

Vocabulary lesson

In the battle of ideas, particularly where education is concerned, one of the few weapons left in Tony Blair’s arsenal is that of rhetorical sophistry. ‘Higher standards’ have to be interpreted as falling standards disguised by higher grades, for example, and the assertion that specialist schools ‘outperform’ comprehensives is true only because only top performing comprehensives are allowed to convert and become specialist schools. The same semantic slippage bleaches such words as ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ of their potency.

Blair, nervy about being replaced, is desperate to ‘accelerate change’ to leave his mark, as he has so far failed to do, on education, education, education. ‘We can either soft pedal these changes and hope to see some further incremental improvement,’ he has said, ‘or seize this moment and drive through lasting radical reform’. Yet the policy reforms being suggested do not have the potential to drive through any ‘radical’ improvements. People say that British politics has atrophied because there are no real issues to be fought any more. The lamentable state of state education, and the low levels of social mobility, show what a mistake that is – and it is not only New Labour that is failing to come up with any genuinely fresh thinking on the matter, for the Conservatives are just as bad. Still, it’s probably worth looking at what Blair’s been saying. As the BBC reports today:

‘By the end of this third term, I want every school that wants to be to be able to be an independent, non fee-paying state school, with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents of the school want, subject to certain common standards.’

However, the mantras of independence and choice do not mean much if schools are not free to make up their own rules and parents are not free to shop around. The euphemism ‘certain common standards’ is telling: the government will still retain control over the things that matter. Teachers will continue to be overworked and underpaid. Red tape and regulation will still take up more time than teaching and marking. The things that have caused generations of schoolchildren to underperform – low examination standards, ineffective reading programmes, ill-conceived syllabi – will go unremedied. As private providers enter the system, they will increasingly discover that what is required of them is to pay for glossy new facilities, not to interfere with the business of actually running the school. Not dissimilarly, the greatest obstacle to choice is the catchment area, but this will remain, thereby preventing poorer parents from exercising any choice over where their children go.

Tony Blair’s problem is that he knows comprehensives have failed but he doesn’t know – or won’t say – how to fix them. If he wants more private schools, then he should make it easier for new providers to enter the system and bring in a voucher system, if he wants selection, then he should aim for a modification of the grammar school system, etc. He cannot have these systems within the comprehensive system. Great improvements require bold policies, not lukewarm policies driven through with autocratic determination. Until he realises this, he will only ever be remembered for political manoeuvring, not for successful policies. The sword of sophistry is looking blunt.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

Right direction?

You can’t help feeling a little bit of schadenfreude. Staunch supporters of the comprehensive schools in this country are up in arms that their sometime champion, the Labour Party, should now be the agent of their destruction. For the rightwing to start singing Ruth Kelly’s praises would be absurd, but her announcement, as The Times reports today, that not-for-profit educational charities, faith and parents’ groups will be given public money to take over failing schools looks like a step in the right direction. There are, however, causes for concern.

Firstly, the policy of closing down failing schools within a year, which is to be the precursor to the proposed takeovers, smacks of autocratic centralised control. As well as being a way to fastforward the creation of 200 City Academies – Blair’s patchy aim in which the cost-benefits make for an awful gamble with public funds – it will divest local area authorities of their powers. Placing the emphasis on new providers, so that the relationship is between parents or charities and government, will result in teachers and headteachers losing more influence, and thus being even further vilified than they already are.

Secondly, it’s not clear how much autonomy these schools will have in practice to do what needs to be done to improve. It looks like a drift towards the US charter schools or the Dutch system, and this kind of franchising could make for an interesting experiment; but endless regulation, endless OfSTED inspections, endless testing and scrutiny could lead to the new providers pulling out as soon as they come in, creating further transience and instability in the system.

Thirdly, there’s no allowance for choice in the proposed system. While parental choice over where to send their children, or school choice over how to select their pupils, or how to organise their syllabus, could foster a healthy education market in which failing schools fail and good schools expand and proliferate, different schools will not in practice be free to offer a substantially different service. This proposal looks suspiciously like a cosmetic change to ‘providers’ that will allow central government to retain complete control.

Fourthly, and connectedly, catchments, which have done so much damage, which have made schools select on income rather than ability, remain untouched. It’s hard to see how progress is possible without breaking these social jails.

Fifthly and finally, this will presumably open the way for more faith schools, energising the debate about the relationship between state funding and religion. A New Statesman pole this week shows 96.4% of its readers want Blair to end his support of faith schools. For the leftwing there is an objection to inequality since it’s clear that different faith groups perform to different levels – Catholic schools tend to do very well, for instance, while Islamic schools on average underachieve badly. For the rightwing there is the issue of social cohesion – after the 2001 riots in the north of England the official reports of Ouseley, Cantle and Denham identified the segregation of schooling as a significant factor in racial and religious tensions.

So as ever a reasonable idea from New Labour looks like a halfway house to something that could work as it seeks to run away from something that doesn’t.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2005

The importance of being affluent

A report alleging that ‘rogue’ state schools are selecting children on the basis of their parents’ income is published today. In Sins of Admission, Chris Waterman, Chief Executive of ConfEd, a body representing local education authority leaders, argues that if there isn’t a crackdown on school selection - that is, schools selecting pupils – the already gaping achievement gap between better-off pupils and the deprived will widen.

Waterman’s research, commissioned by the Institute for Research in Integrated Strategies, provides evidence that the best-performing schools in the country are closing their doors to the children of less well-off families. Parental interviews are being used to covertly select children from wealthier families, in the hope of boosting league table performance. Waterman’s report points out that by insisting on admissions interviews, these ‘rogue’ schools are undermining the integrity of the admissions process - and with it the very principles of universally accessible education. Waterman shows that parents in the implicated schools have resorted to ‘dishonesty’, in order to get their kids in.
The question is, are these schools correct in their assumption that the better off the child, the better off their position in the league tables will be?

Despite New Labour’s attempts to redress the performance imbalance between rich and poor in education, the association between poverty and underachievement stubbornly persists. Research from 2003 by Feinstein shows that just six months after birth, class differences are clearly manifest in a child’s development. By six years old, the affluent child with low cognitive ability will have overtaken the clever but poor child. Exacerbated by an education system where success is determined on the basis of fulfilling test criteria rather than demonstrating creativity, class and attainment have become inextricable.

However, it is not only class-inherent disadvantage holding poorer pupils back. In March, Peter Lampl, Founder of the Sutton Trust and a key adviser on working-class access to leading state schools argued that ‘too many of the best state schools are middle-class bastions’. He points to the fact that only 3% of those attending the top-performing state schools are eligible for free school meals, compared to 17% the percentage eligible nationally.
An admissions system which can be exploited by the affluent, leaving the poor discarded in sink schools presents a real threat to social mobility. When both affluent parents and schools can select each other exclusively, the choices of the less privileged are even further diminished. Whilst the impact of socio-economic background is a tougher nut to crack, we can at least address the structural impediments to narrowing inequality through education. If the government is committed to equality it must ensure that the already advantaged affluent are not given further advantage in the education system.

Posted by Anastasia de Waal at 05:51 PM | Comments (1)

August 30, 2005

Failing to achieve

Best ever A-level and GCSE results yet another year running. The Opposition points to grade devaluation, the Government to ever-brighter pupils and improved teaching. Meanwhile in schools, indignant heads assure us that pupils and teachers simply ‘worked really hard’. So what’s the real score?

Thinking back to the last preoccupation in education, classroom behaviour, its not then surprising when independent research tells us that standards haven’t in fact improved. Yet independent research also indicates that exam papers haven’t actually got much easier either. Strictly speaking therefore, something has improved: pupils are considerably better at exam performance, and their teachers better at exam preparation. It’s little wonder then that schools feel indignant - pupils and teachers have worked hard, doing exactly what the DfES told them to.

The trouble is, statistical progress of this sort doesn’t constitute educational progress. In a system where teaching and learning are driven by test outcomes, educational aims have become distorted. The rot first set in when so-called ‘norm’ referencing was replaced with ‘criterion’ referencing as GCSEs replaced O-levels. The new system meant that the top grade was no longer reserved for those pupils in the nation’s top percentile. In the criterion marking scheme, you now needed only to satisfy the set criteria. For a Government fixated on proving itself through the achievement of education targets, criterion testing can be heavily exploited. The Government sets the DfES test targets which are then passed onto schools to be artificially achieved through spoon-feeding. Teaching is now about advising pupils how to best navigate through exam papers in order to pick up maximum points. And with league tables the markers of success, everyone involved is motivated to play the game.

Thus all-importantly, the greater number of A-grades does not amount to the same as an exceptional generation of better scientists and mathematicians. Rather, higher results signify the sapping of pupil and teacher creativity, and most likely lower standards of education. The bottom line is that schools are failing pupils in order to make them achieve the necessary grades. Our children are losing out on real learning, and our teachers are becoming robotic. Now we know just how good both parties are at following instructions, let’s give them some that are educationally worthwhile.

Anastasia de Waal

Posted by Robert Whelan at 03:41 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

They cost a lot, but are they working?

Lord Adonis' City Academies continue to cause controversy. The Telegraph is ambivalent on principle, since they are really a rightwing thing, but has repeatedly pointed out that for the amount of money being spent the returns are remarkably mixed. As the for the Guardian, since the idea of using the private sector to bolster the shortfalls in the public sector is automatically to be regarded as a bad one, the government's experiment is a betrayal as well as a failure. What with the widespread acceptance of the academic failure of comprehensives and the admission by the likes of Baronness Warnock that was inclusion was a mistake, the Labour project's day are numbered. The New Labour project is hardly faring better - patchy semi-selection in the form of specialist schools, catchment (i.e. income) selection in comprehensive schools and then of course these dubious academies. Type 'City Academy' into the search engines on any of the newspaper websites and you'll find a plethora of material, but here are two notable columns, one from the Telegraph, the other from the Guardian. It is patently clear that if Blair is to achieve his number one objective in office - and let's face it, it's looking a bit late now - he's going to need far better education, education, education.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 09:36 AM | Comments (1)

July 27, 2005

What choice do we really have?

Ruth Kelly has admitted that Labour has failed to close the achievement gap between the rich and the poor. ‘We need to think about why children from more deprived backgrounds do not always have the opportunity to access the better schools, and what sensibly, we might be able to do about that,’ she said at the IPPR. The government has actually been aware of this for some time, at least since 1998 when Andrew Adonis – the same Andrew Adonis who wrote in Class Act that the comprehensive school system has replaced selection by ability with selection by income – entered the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, but it has for a long time denied it and now begun to frame the discussion in terms of the need for choice.

However, it is not clear how choice is possible in the current environment without reducing the regulatory burdens that make it so difficult for new start-up institutions to flourish, without therefore opening up the educational market to all and any providers, and without bringing in something approximating to vouchers for parents.

But this government doesn’t really believe in free choice. Otherwise, how could it be going ahead with the closure of the 70 or so remaining grammar schools in Northern Ireland (despite the region outperforming the rest of Britain in exams) despite the fact that two thirds of parents over there want to retain the system, as The Times reports today?

Sir Kenneth Bloomfield, an executive member of the Governing Bodies Association, said: ‘The grammar school has been a wonderful escalator for children from backgrounds where in England they find it difficult to succeed. It’s not perfect but I can’t believe that by removing the most successful bit, that we are improving it.’

In Britain, those few grammars that remain after the educational equivalent of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1950’s, the BBC reported in 2003, are not just successful in terms of ‘raw’ results but also the best on the ‘value added’ scale. Last year’s the OECD’s PISA study of an enormous range of countries found that the gap between private and state education in Britain is greater than in any other country bar Paraguay and Bolivia. Grammar schools were once the bridge. In the past fifty years, Oxbridge entry from the state sector has gone down, from 60 per cent to 50 per cent.

Peter Morris, a teacher, said on this morning’s Today programme that he will be appealing to the Professional Association of Teachers at its annual conference in Buxton to vote to bring back ‘the most successful type of school that Britain has ever had’. There, to argue against him, Margaret Tulloch, secretary for Comprehensive Future, regurgitated the standard mantras.

Grammar schools don’t exist in Finland, she said, which is held up as the paradigm of comprehensive schooling. Yet the demographies, immigration patterns and educational traditions make it so different as to be inadmissible evidence. Grammar schools are hugely socially divisive, she said. Yet they are not as divisive as comprehensive schools. Grammar schools make those who don’t get in feel like failures, or ‘deferred successes’ in the newspeak. Yet the current policies of social inclusion, as Baroness Warnock recently admitted, have been a complete deferred success. Grammar schools are elitist, she said. And that really is the point. She's quite right they're elitist. For the very notion of excellence is redundant without a scale from worst to worse to bad, through good and better, to best.

Until the government is willing to provide parents with real options in the state and private sectors, which includes grammar schools, 'choice' will be nothing more than a myth.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:52 PM | Comments (1)

June 24, 2005

Unfunny and Impolitic Cuts in Higher Education

As from this coming September, the number of lectures undergraduates studying politics at Bristol University will be required to attend per week in their first year is to be cut from three to one.

They need not fear the reduction in their tuition might imperil their chance of degree success. For, according to the brief report of the cut in today’s Daily Telegraph, examinations at the end of their first year are to be phased out, while they have simultaneously been promised an increase in the proportion of firsts that will be awarded at the end of their studies.

All this is to happen at a University which has just increased its annual tuition fees to £3000 and lowered required entry points of prospective students from relatively educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, who, one would have thought, would be in need of more, rather than less, intensive tuition at the start of their studies.

In the unlikely event that any of these students fail to be pleased or amused at being so short-changed by their tutors, some of them may prefer instead to enrol at the world’s first school of laughter that, according to a report in today’s Daily Mail, opened this week in Berlin. Here students will be taught how to enjoy a laugh, which, according to recent studies, Germans apparently find harder to do than other Europeans.

Alternatively, those Germans who find it hard to be amused, perhaps, should be encouraged to enrol on Bristol University's politics programme which certainly sounds to have become a joke – and a bad one at that.

Posted by David Conway at 09:02 AM | Comments (1)

June 22, 2005

In defence of history: the Our Island Story appeal

Good news about Civitas’ project to republish H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. The Daily Telegraph’s fabulous campaign has been overwhelmingly successful. Within a week, as John Clare points out in today’s ‘Any questions?’, £13,345 has been raised, and the money keeps coming in. One of the lovely things about this article is the sheer enthusiasm of the readers and donors, and the newspaper’s leader, ‘Our story is worth telling’, adds further welcome endorsement.

What the Telegraph appeal shows (as did George Courtauld’s unexpected bestseller, the Pocket Book of Patriotism) is the simple fact that there are many people with a passion for a more unified civic identity in Britain and a desire to place history at the centre of that drive. Numerous research documents have recently recognised the value of history for citizenship, but few are clear about how to deliver the most important (albeit unfashionable) elements in teaching history – the chronology, which makes it intelligible, and the stories, which make it memorable.

Our Island Story is the best example we have been able to find, and that is why we are putting into the arena. It might be old, arid academics might think it is out of date, but they are the ones who are out of date, for children love it, and many parents cherish the excuse to read it to their children, as the Daily Telegraph’s readers’ comments make clear. This is not about hegemony - we are not suggesting it becomes the only resource, we merely wish to offer it as an alternative to the materials currently in schools.

In addition to the Daily Telegraph coverage, Civitas’ Our Island Story appeal was featured on this morning’s Today programme. Among other things there was a revealing report which provided the juxtaposition between a handful of Bangladeshi children who were expressing their profound interest in H.E. Marshall’s story of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, and, staggeringly, their headmistress, not having read it, saying, irrelevantly, that she could not possibly endorse a book that ‘detracted from their self-esteem.’ What?!

In interview, Civitas’ Deputy Director Robert Whelan fielded the questions with his usual panache, and managed to draw from Sean Lang of the Historical Association the concession that it is a ‘very important book’. Mr Lang’s opposition to the book was that ‘it’s of its time, but its time is not now’, which led to him agreeing on the need for a return to narrative history but not wanting to commit to anything other than the need for children to grapple with a plurality of narratives and construct their own narratives – undisputable for older children, but precisely what confuses children of seven or eight years old.

In other fields people are realising that unstructured child-centred learning is failing, but in the subject of history, too many young children still suffer at the hands of people who cling to the mantras of relevance and no-such-thing-as-one-truth. As Robert said this morning, we need to bring back into primary school classrooms a sense of events following other events, and of characters and stories, because ‘you simply cannot understand your country and its institutions if you just do a series of modules about women in ancient Egypt or the condition of the medieval serf.’

Posted by Nick Seddon at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

June 15, 2005

Our Island Story

CLICK HERE for further details of Our Island Story

In the Guardian on Saturday, Tristram Hunt decided to take up arms against Tim Collins, the obsolete shadow education secretary, by criticising the Conservative history education policy. Now Hunt is an excellent historian, and one with whom we at Civitas have had contact in the past, but the nature of his response to the Conservatives’ desire to combat the ‘yawning gaps’ in the curriculum by emphasising chronology and narrative is curious. For he launches into a rant about the defects of Whig history and cautions against – nay, pours opprobrium on Collins for allegedly advocating – the kind of error perpetrated by the Japanese ministry of education’s omission of Japanese wartime atrocities from its textbooks. But hold your horses sunshine. What makes you assume that any response to higgledy-piggledy and culturally relativistic teaching must necessarily be fascist thought control and the translation of history, the most complex of humanities, into a ‘simple-minded morality play’?

Let’s take stock of the contemporary situation. For a start, the government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has expressed its concerns about the current system’s inadequacies. In its most recent report, it bewails the ‘fragmentation of the learning experience’ – what David Starkey has dubbed the ‘mosaic’ approach – for its failure to inculcate in pupils a basic chronological framework. Not long after the QCA’s report was published, the Historical Association, having been commissioned by the government to audit the way the subject is taught, agreed that the subject is in a profoundly parlous state. Supplementing popular concerns of teachers, parents and academics, the QCA and the Historical Association both referred to the ‘widespread disquiet over what is seen as the gradual narrowing and “Hitlerization” of post-14 history.’ Even despite this, the number of school leavers able to say what Auschwitz was, or even provide precise dates for World War II is alarmingly low. What’s more, in a 2001 survey of 200 pupils, 30 per cent of 11- to 18-year olds thought that Oliver Cromwell fought at the Battle of Hastings; and, three years later, a poll of 1,300 pupils aged 10 to 14 found more than a quarter unable to say which war D-Day was associated with. I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry.

Hunt’s right that it’s a mistake to ‘stop teaching history at too young an age (14 rather than 16)’ but he then goes on to mention that ‘the 1980’s trend for multiculturalism downplayed many elements of British history that are only now being reversed.’ That multiculturalism downplays Britishness under aegis of the dictatorship of diversity is beyond doubt, and that it turns the study of the past into an identity politics contest is similarly certain, but why does he seek to mitigate the damage that has been done by those policies? One need not be a nationalist to understand that a shared sense of identity in a state is crucial for civic cohesion and stability. Even the most cursory of searches on the home office website immediately reveals extensive work on civil society and ways to bolster it, and the ippr has also done a good deal of work on this, recognising that there is in our society a very low level of identification with our formal institutions and operations of government, and that this is reflected in our voting patterns.

It would be absurd to argue that history teaching is the only contributing factor, but cultural lingua francas, irrespective of celebrated differences, can help to forge loose but nevertheless discernible bonds. Multiculturalism, as Trevor Phillips has admitted, has eroded cohesion and as David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, has observed, undermined the ‘glue of values.’ It is still very much a live force, and by treating it as a mere passing fad of the 1980’s, Hunt shows that he is out of touch.

A word about relevance, since this is often an argument used for politically correct histories, along the lines that history must be contiguous with my life for me to want to study it. I see no reason why as a seven-year-old kid a bunch of sex crazed Scandinavians with horns on their heads were any more relevant to me than to a seven year old Aborigine, and the same applies for the ancient Egyptians, the Han Dynasty, or even plump old Queen Victoria. But that misses the point, for history becomes relevant as we learn about it and interiorise its various vicarious experiences. I came to find longitudinal themes like the fight for freedom (from the Peasant’s Revolt, through Cavaliers and Roundheads, to the Glorious Revolution, the American War of Independence, political reform and the Suffragettes) interesting and engaging, and to see that by the accidents of my birth what had happened remains relevant to the land in which I was born and grew up. Good narrative history excites us and enlarges our perception.

Like Hunt, I don’t want us to ‘lose sight of the virtues of our critical, pluralist approach’, which he says is admired throughout Europe. Nor need he worry about narrative history with a sense of chronology being uncritical. The study of empire does not have to be unthinkingly patriotic – of course it can take in the Mau Mau and the Chinese Opium Wars, as well as the Indian Civil Service – but at least let’s teach it! What must be remembered, as we debate such issues, is that we’re talking about teaching a range of ages, and that younger children need different treatment to older students. When you’re young, what matters most is passionate, energised history. This needn’t be skewed or fantastical, but the truth is that children respond well to stories, to narratives that bring people and events alive in their imaginations. Even Marxist historians recognise that narrative history is the most effective foundation for communicating a particular configuration of the past at a later stage, since knowledge precedes understanding, as facts do argument. When children are older, what’s been learned can be modified, contended and even refuted.

This, finally, is partly why we’re so interested in Our Island Story by Henrietta Marshall, a history of Britain to which Antonia Fraser and the Guardian’s David McKee have both expressed their ‘lifelong gratitude’. In today’s Daily Telegraph, John Clare plugs our campaign to raise money so that we can do a reprint of this children’s classic. We are grateful to him for this, because we believe that one useful way to combat the lamentable situation is to publish high quality teaching materials and circulate them. When they're older, people will naturally turn to questions of propriety and historiography that Hunt and so many other professional historians engage in, but we've got to get them interested and informed in the first place...

Posted by Nick Seddon at 04:41 PM | Comments (3)

June 01, 2005

Anythingarian

In the first dialogue of Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation, Lord M. asks what about the religion of another character, and Lord Sp. replies that he’s an ‘anythingarian’. The coinage is more resonant now than ever before. If postmodernism is a uselessly incoherent philosophy, since it knows only what it is not, not what it is, it has nevertheless become a handy sociological description. For throughout Britain (and the West generally), we have for some time been witnessing a crisis of legitimation. Everything is contested. Nothing, as the paradoxical truth statement goes, is true. There is only, as Nietzsche declares, a perspective seeing, a perspective knowing. What postmodernism supremely represents, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, is an incredulity towards all metanarratives. No totalising theories prevail. In this world, there is only multiplicity and fragmentation. As the margins of society seek recognition from the centre and the centre becomes more obsessed with the romance of the margins, there is a simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal movement. All cultures are pronounced equal. Nothing in this kaleidescopic collage stays still, nothing can be established, nothing agreed.

History curricula have suffered awfully on account of this, since the mosaic approach to teaching adopted by cultural relativists has resulted in unprecedented numbers of school leavers having an inadequate knowledge or understanding of events, people, or the institutions that have evolved over the course of many centuries and have come to express and develop the thought of our society. Thanks to an overemphasis of the assumption that history is always history for someone, the legacy of the hard left is historical amnesia, dislocation and temporal parochialism. These problems translate across disciplines. In their 1998 book Class Act, Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, in the process of thrashing comprehensive schools, adduce the Institute of Education’s assertion that schools are guilty of too often ‘legitimising one popular view of mathematics’ and so devaluing ‘the students’ informal mathematical experience and skills… which are equally, if not more, valuable to the individual.’ Maths is oppressive; it should be replaced by ‘ethnomathematics’. As the headmaster in Lambeth who appointed an expert in Nigerian cooking, with no experience of maths, to teach maths in his school put it: ‘It is real life maths with Ibo cookery – transferable maths.’

A historian without a sense of chronology? A mathematician without an understanding of trigonometry? It’s all hilariously miserable. But surely a common language is one thing all accept as valid? Well, for making the rather innocuous and sensible point that English should be taught as a first language in schools, and that promoting Asian languages would lead to the relegation of English and the ghettoising of communities, the headteacher of Drummond Middle School in Bradford, Ray Honeyford, was, in 1985, vilified by left-liberal commentators and local politicians, condemned as a racist and suspended. The celebration of ethnic particularism is becoming more and more risible. Last year, Bill Crosby was forced to point out that West Indian children should not be taught slang in London classrooms since it would do them a disservice. The same applies to mathematics: the numbers will not change; there’ll just be more people who cannot add them up. Lazy, unrigorous thinking has sold short a generation of pupils who desperately needed education as an engine of social mobility. After such a catalogue, is it any surprise that according to Sunday’s news the government is hoping to recruit religious education teachers with no necessary knowledge of any religions?

Religious education is compulsory in schools, but it is not a national curriculum subject. In the Sixties and Seventies, the pressure from secularism, humanism, and the evident presence of multi-religious classes in many schools gradually led to an educational consensus that religious induction was to be outlawed. In time, ‘indoctrination’ became the favourite taboo word of educationalists. This, in a pluralist society, is reasonable. But now religious education has been hijacked by the multiculturalists. Despite all the QCA's talk of provoking ‘challenging questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, beliefs about God, the self and the nature of reality, issues of right and wrong and what it means to be human’, the fact that the Teacher Training Agency has written to humanities graduates to reassure them that teaching RE is no longer about learning the Bible merely serves to emphasise the extent to which religious education has become more about promoting diversity and an antiracist environment than about religion. How, if teachers are ignorant about the Bible, is religious education going to fulfil the QCA’s ambition to develop ‘pupils’ knowledge and understanding of Christianity, other principal religions, other religious traditions and other worldviews’?

It seems to me there are two points to consider. The first concerns the composition of our population. The second concerns culture and acculturation. Firstly, then, is the fact that 70 per cent of white British people (40 million) described themselves Christian in the 2001 Census. This is not even a race thing, given the high proportion of ethnic minorities who subscribe to the Christian faith: majorities of Black people and those from Mixed ethnic backgrounds were identified as Christian (71 and 52 per cent respectively). It would be fair to say that these people are being shortchanged by not being taught about the culture to which they adhere. Secondly, Britain has a strong history and tradition of Christianity. It really is bizarre to think that students should be encouraged to know more about Muslim or Sikh festivals than Pentecost or Christmas. Added to which, the Bible is the single most influential book in the entire canon of western literature, and readers with no knowledge of it will be severely disadvantaged. Likewise, philosophy students would have difficulty reading anything post-classical without at least a passing familiarity with scriptures, and Nietzsche, for instance, the great iconoclast, riddled his books with biblical references. An atheist needs to know what he or she is revolting against. Without that, there is no revolt, only that which Nietzsche so despised, the herd mentality.

Yet it is the herd that is running amock, a herd of anythingarians. And this, in Joseph Ratzinger's phrase, is the ‘dictatorship of relativism’.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 06:29 PM | Comments (1)

May 27, 2005

The Unholy Wisdom of British Academics

It was reassuring, just a little, to read in today’s newspapers that, at an emergency meeting held yesterday, the AUT finally saw enough reason to call off its boycott of Israeli universities for which it had voted at its annual conference last month, after a debate held on a Friday afternoon immediately before the Jewish festival of Passover, thereby guaranteeing no observant Jewish representatives could attend.

However, whatever reassurance the AUT's decision might provide of the moral sanity of Britain’s university teachers must, at least for the moment, be tempered by the knowledge that, with no less a perfect sense of timing, last Saturday of all days the London branch of the other trade union for academics, NATFHE, succeeded in placing on the agenda of that union's forthcoming annual conference this coming weekend an emergency motion calling on members to join the boycott.

One of the Israeli universities the AUT originally in its sights to boycott was Israel’s oldest-- the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened by Lord Balfour in 1925.

With all the characteristic wisdom and understanding for which their like is so world renown, the British academics calling for its boycott seem wholly unaware of how, ever since it opened, its whole orientation and thrust has borne the stamp of its first chancellor and subsequent president, the American Reform rabbi, Judah Leon Magnes.

Magnes championed an entirely non-political form of cultural Zionism that simply wanted to see a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine and not the creation of a Jewish state to which he was always bitterly opposed, having preferred, instead, a bi-national one.

An extract from a book, published in 2001, by Yoram Hazony, president of a Jerusalem-based institute for Jewish social thought and public policy, entitled The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul, reveals the crass stupidity and ignorance of the British academics who have called for its boycott and, indeed, their stupidity in calling for the boycott of any other, since the faculty and policies of all Israeli uniersities have all been so deeply influenced by it.

Hazony writes:

'Magnes … had little interest in the settlement of millions of Jews [in Palestine]… For him, the mission of the Hebrew university was to be twofold: First, it should take the lead in inculcating a Jewish universalism in the entire Jewish population [--that is, an outlook orientated towards universal humanistic ethical conceptions and entirely un-ethnocentric. DC].… Second, it would within its walls seek to “bring about the spiritual reconciliation of the two most gifted races of Semitic stock”.

‘Magnes remained at the helm of the Hebrew University for twenty-four years – the first ten of them in a position of near-total authority - during which time the core of its staff and the main strokes of its ideology were irrevocably cast.

‘Inevitably, Magnes’ insistence on keeping the university aloof from the dream of the Jewish state opened up a chasm between the professors, who saw themselves as the intellectual leadership of Jewish Palestine, and the great majority of the Jewish people….’

At the risk of straining the patience of the reader still more, one further quotation, from a letter Magnus wrote in 1929 to Felix Warburg, a major benefactor of the Hebrew University, in which he made known his personal vision of what purpose the University would serve, reveals the depths of the stupidity and ignorance of the dastardly group of British academics who have called for the boycott.

Magnes wrote: ‘The University is the place where Arab-Jewish relations can and must be worked out. That is … I aim to bring the University into politics in my sense and on behalf of my views.’[emphasis as in the original]

In the context of the present-day Middle East conflict, it is interesting to note that, when Balfour visited Jerusalem to open the Hebrew University, just one year on from an unprecedented large wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine following the seizure by the Polish government of Jewish businesses and the simultaneous closure of US borders to mass immigration, no serious Arab disturbances were occasioned by his visit.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien remarked in his book on the Arab-Israel conflict The Siege, ‘the absence of any such reaction in 1925 may suggest that there was some truth in the Zionist impression that the earlier violence [in 1921] was not so much spontaneous from below as fomented from the top: by British officers and Arab notables, especially Haj Amin.’

For those for whom his name might be unfamiliar, Haj Amin al-Hussaini was the then self-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who later entered into a formal alliance with Adolf Hitler before leaving Palestine to form an SS division of Arab and Bosnian Muslims in the Balkans to play his part in his Fuhrer’s particular solution to the Jewish question.

Haj Amin was closely relatd to one, Rahman Abdul Rauf el-Qudawa el-Husseini, an Egyptian-born graduate of the University of Cairo, better known to the world as ‘Yasser Arafat’.

It is a pity the Mufti's younger relative chose not to attend the University of the city over which his elder relative had been Mufti.

A lot of needless bloodshed might then, possibly, have been spared that part of the world -- and elsewhere.

Posted by David Conway at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2005

Team work

I remember so clearly rugby training in school games lessons. It was invariably cold and wet, and the first slide in the mud was like diving into a cold pond, all breathless and invigorating. If you liked that kind of thing, then rugby was fun. There were, of course, those who hated it, because they were fat, or lazy, or because they thought, with good reason, that rugby was a barbarous sport. For the first term or so, everyone played together, and the athletic and strong soon showed themselves to be better than the rest of the group. Skills – I promise there are skills in rugby – developed rather more gradually, but even still there were those who learned from scratch quickly, those who got better over a longer period of time, and others who were just plain useless.

In order for the school to produce a sports team, it made sense to siphon people off at different standards, some immediately going into the top group, some into the B, C and D squads. The categories were flexible. As some proved better or worse than initial thought, they were moved around, but what the squad divisions fundamentally enabled was people of similar strengths and abilities to progress at the speed that suited them most. Those that were bad mucked around with their coaches and had a good deal of fun; those that were good were sculpted into an efficient working team and had a good deal of fun. Early in the second term, the first team played and won their first couple of matches.

During the next four years, players in the different groups shifted around and permutated. At the same time, those who showed no interest in rugby were welcome to find out what they might instead be good at, and they tried out football, basketball and hockey. It turned out that some of the most uncoordinated on the rugby pitch were brilliant footballers, and some of the most club-footed footballers excellent hockey players and so on. By streaming people, everyone was able to excel. The natural rugby players did well at that sport. Those who had been rubbish at rugby were not forced to play alongside those that were good, to be danced round, and trampled over and generally humiliated, but instead were able to show their abilities at other games.

It seems to me self-evident that with discretion the same principles apply to academic and intellectual pursuits. So it says something about the prevailing orthodoxy that scientific and sociological research papers are needed as evidence to prove what any intelligent person should be able to comprehend immediately. The evidence for the failure of comprehensive education and the success of selective education has been rehearsed here before, in findings by the London School of Economics, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Andrew – now Sir Andrew – Adonis, head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Now David Jesson of York University has found that when bright pupils are put with twenty or more other bright pupils they do better than they would if they were with less able students. ‘Such clusters exist in the state system,’ says the leader in The Times, ‘in grammar schools and in the best comprehensives. They stimulate academic achievers and offer some defence against the corrosive peer pressure that leads some to mask their abilities for fear of teasing.’ Once again, the implications for comprehensive schools are not great; but the advantages of various forms of selection are so obvious that this is almost difficult to credit as news.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Education, education, education

Mr Blair says he wants to move away from talking about trust in him to focus on education. Yet the Government’s claims about educational attainment since 1997 also throw doubt on his honesty

Labour’s education manifesto contains a headline comparison between 1997 and 2005. In 1997 this country was 42nd in the ‘world education league’ and in 2005 we were third best in the world for literacy at age ten. The only international comparison of literacy at age ten is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) whose last results were for 2001, not 2005. England did indeed come third (Scotland was 14th, but no doubt has a different manifesto).

Now here comes the geek bit. The response rate to the survey was only 57% of the original sample. Only two other countries out of 35 fell below 60% (and they also came high up the table). Most others had response rates over 80% (Germany 98% and France 93%). Moreover, pupils in England were in their 5th year of schooling, whereas in most other countries they were in year 4 (only two other countries tested in year 5).

Why is the sample response rate more than just the preoccupation of maths anoraks who should get out more? The main fault of our education system is that it fails the least able pupils in each age group. Our best schools are probably as good as the best anywhere in the world, but our worst schools are well below par, as official figures testify. In 2003/04 only 53% of 16 year-olds achieved five or more GCSE passes at grades A* to C and 4% failed to pass anything. At age 11 only 74% achieved the required standard in maths, well below the Government’s own target of 85%.

A recent OfSTED report found that 44% of boys aged 11 and 29% of girls were leaving primary school unable to write properly. It attributed the failure to poor teaching and declared that one in three lessons in English and maths were unsatisfactory.

Here is a question for Mr Blair. How many of the schools considered by OfSTED to be providing unsatisfactory lessons respond to international surveys? We might conjecture that the 57% response rate was because badly performing schools did not want to make their failure obvious to the outside world. If the schools that responded tended to be the good ones, it would make the overall results look much better than they really were. Some supporting evidence comes from 14th-ranked Scotland, where the initial response rate was 76%.

The Labour manifesto does not only pretend that the reading figures are for 2005 when they are for 2001, it also implies that the country has improved from 42nd in the ‘world education league’ to third. But what it calls the ‘world education league’ is a comparison of the impact of the education system on the economic competitiveness of countries. Comparing this wider measure with the PIRLS reading study is a bit like claiming that the England cricket team has improved since 1997, as shown by the tremendous success of the rugby team in winning the world cup.

In any event, the most recent comparison of international achievement, called the ‘world education league’ by the press, was the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which gives figures for 41 countries in 2000 and 2003. Between those years, the UK dropped from fourth in science to 11th, from seventh in reading to 11th and from eighth in maths to 18th. Perhaps Mr Blair is right. The debate should move on to education.

Posted by David Green at 02:20 PM | Comments (2)

April 27, 2005

The ladder of opportunity

Given that it’s rather difficult to discover reliable facts about what millionaires do with their cash, the sociologist William Rubinstein carried out a study on dead ones in 1984 and 1985. He found, among other things, that those whose fathers were wealthy businessmen or landowners still made up 42 per cent of the ranks of millionaires, from which it could reasonably be concluded that in Britain the surest way to get rich was to be born rich. Notwithstanding the rosy promise of John Major to build a classless society by 2000, and the earnest New Labour Manifesto pledges to continue ‘breaking down the barriers that stop people fulfilling their talent’, it appears that those from less privileged backgrounds are now even more likely to continue facing disadvantage into adulthood, while the wealthy continue to benefit disproportionately.

One finding emerges fairly clearly from the literature on the subject: levels of mobility are low compared to ideals of equality of opportunity. It does not follow that those at the top are to blame. A recent study conducted by the LSE, Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America, has compared the life chances of British children with those in the US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. It examined the extent to which a person’s childhood circumstances influenced their later economic success as adults. The four Scandinavian countries performed best, with social mobility being greatest in Norway. Canada was also found to be a highly mobile society. Germany was placed close to the middle while Britain and America trailed well behind. The gap in opportunities between the rich and poor in the US is at least static. In Britain it is getting wider: intergenerational mobility fell markedly in Britain, with less recorded for a cohort born in 1970 than for a cohort born in 1958.

Even in a perfectly mobile society, in which everyone had an exactly equal chance of reaching the highest positions, only a small minority would do so, since there are only relatively few positions of power, status or wealth at the top. Nevertheless, the amount of intergenerational mobility in a society is a major index of the degree of its ‘openness’, and many commentators and political parties link mobility and the education system. Confirming studies such as that by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which have shown that the expansion of higher education in the UK has benefited those from richer backgrounds far more than those from poorer backgrounds, the LSE report found that while the proportion of people from the poorest fifth of families obtaining a degree has increased from 6 per cent to 9 per cent, the graduation rates from the richest fifth have risen from 20 per cent to 47 per cent. ‘The strength of the relationship between educational attainment and family income,’ it says, ‘is at the heart of Britain’s low mobility culture’.

What’s not clear, of course, is the extent to which it is the money or what comes with the money – such as parental education, motivation and other aspects of family culture – and this complicates the causality. So it is still reasonable to ask what is going on in British education. According to the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (which at the end of last year showed that in 3 years UK pupils had gone from seventh to eleventh in reading, from eighth to eighteenth in maths, and from fourth to eleventh in science), in the UK, education at an independent school offered greater advantages than anywhere else in the study apart from Brazil and Uruguay. What has proved decisive for fee-paying schools is their independence from government meddling in the forty years following the Plowden Report. Ineffective teaching strategies have dominated against all the evidence for such old fashioned methods as synthetic phonics-first. Now, several years too late, the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills has severely criticised the establishment, and the traditionalists might reasonably hope their time is about to come again.

There are many other issues too, of course (bursaries and maintenance grants are needed for university applicants, as well as wider provision for the early years than the government is currently planning and free school buses for primary school children), but Britain did once have a bridge between the state and private sectors. Grammar schools may be a dirty word for some, but the system of selection at eleven years old, abolished during the years under review, offered quality schooling that was accessible on demand rather than affluence. In last year’s tests for 14 year-olds, 9 out of 11 government city academies were among the worst performing 200 schools in England. By contrast, 31 of the 32 schools adding the most value between the ages of 11 and 14 were grammar schools. Reading Girls Grammar School was the top performer and Dr Challoner’s Grammar was the best school on the value-added scale. In getting rid of them, Britain replaced academic selection with social selection. As Stephen Machin, part of the LSE research team, has said, it is ironic that the elitism that so-called progressives attacked, ‘probably got more people through from the bottom end than the system we have today.’

It would be nonsense to blame New Labour for all problems that have accrued under successive governments, but if this administration gets in after the next election, it will have its work cut out. Creating an upwardly mobile society, with more space at the top, will require (much better) education, education, education.

Posted by Nick Seddon at 02:45 PM | Comments (2)

April 11, 2005

Second voter briefing: education

Here is the second voter briefing, covering education standards. We have also added links to some government websites.

Posted by David Green at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2005

Eating their words

A staggering one in five 11 year-olds cannot read properly. This is the alarming finding announced yesterday by the Education and Skills Select Committee. The Committee's criticisms of primary literacy teaching arrive amidst a series of attacks on the Government’s National Literacy Strategy. The Committee declared the current reading record ‘unacceptable’, demanding an ‘immediate review’ on the way that our children are taught to read.

For those who have faithfully taken national test statistics as a reliable measure of standards in literacy, the Committee’s revelations come as a shock. National results from the literacy Standardised Attainment Tests (SATs), examinations taken in the last year of primary school, convey rocketing improvement since the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) eight years ago. According to these figures there has been a 30% rise since 1995 in the number of children achieving Level 4, the expected standard of reading and writing for 11 years-olds. However a wave of new evidence has clouded the optimistic picture of attainment put forward by the DfES. Most notably, OfSTED’s February 2005 evaluation of the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies found one in three literacy lessons to be unsatisfactory – while half of all boys and a third of girls leave primary school ‘unable to write properly’. This crushing report was shortly followed by much-publicised research from the Centre of Policy Studies which alleged that the NLS was failing over 1.2 million children by not equipping them with the literacy skills necessary for secondary school.
The validity of the national test results themselves is part of the concern. Yesterday the Committee contributed to criticisms of the SATs, arguing that results could be ‘skewed by associated factors, such as ‘teaching to the test’’ – therefore rendering them misleading. Other sceptics of statutory testing have also suggested that a rise in scores may be more likely attributable to lowered benchmarks than higher achievement.

Yet the Government refuses to accept that the NLS is flawed, persistently brandishing progress in national test attainment, and ignoring the scepticism surrounding it. Amongst practitioners on the other hand, there appears to be a consensus on where the NLS is going wrong: the lack of emphasis on 'phonics'. The NLS effectively entails a rejection of what is termed ‘synthetic phonics’ teaching, whereby at an early age the focus is on the sounds of the alphabet and letter combinations, enabling children to 'decode' words. The Education and Skills Select Committee argue that this early ability to decode words is key to later success in reading. However, the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly recently reasserted the DfES’s rejection of such phonics-centred teaching, arguing that so ‘prescriptive and reductionist'an approach was ‘not the way forward’. The NLS model on the other hand, uses what the Education and Skills Select Committee term a ‘compromise’ between competing models. In brief, whilst the NLS approach does touch on a form of decoding words phonically, there is a very strong emphasis on decoding using grammatical, contextual and pictorial cues.

The Scottish education system provides a prime example of the potential success of the synthetic phonics-based reading method. Scotland is particularly pertinent to the anti-NLS argument, as it has deliberately moved away from methodologies used in the Literacy Strategy, to return to a more ‘traditional’phonics-centred model of teaching reading. Arguably on the basis of this policy change, Scotland has witnessed significant improvements in primary level reading standards.

In view of the extensive evidence supporting phonics-based literacy teaching, why has the UK Government discarded it? It’s back to the problem which has infiltrated New Labour’s Department of Education from day one – the novelty factor. Improvement in education persists as New Labour’s mantra, and misguidedly improvement has been equated with innovation – if it’s not new, it cannot contribute to progress. This notion of innovation then links to New Labour’s efforts to embrace ‘progressive’ liberalism in education policy – what the Shadow Education Secretary Tim Collins, has referred to as ‘failed 1960s theories and 21st century political correctness’. And certainly it is largely in a revolt against conservatism that the Government has rejected traditional teaching methodologies. This explains the current DfES’s tendency to dismiss anything which even smacks of old school, or at the very least to re-brand it beyond recognition.

The reality is that the innovation in New Labour’s education policy would be better paired with chaos than with improvement. Continuous changes in key DfES personnel have exacerbated what has become a policy area rife with 'mongrel' pedagogies and continual u-turns. And as an unsurprising consequence, slipping standards. What the DfES will do next on the literacy front is difficult to predict. Continuing with an approach to literacy teaching which is clearly flawed will sooner or later only do further damage to the reputation of New Labour education policy. However, reverting back to traditional phonics would mean the Government essentially eating its words.

Anastasia de Waal

Posted by at 05:59 PM | Comments (3)

March 16, 2005

When kindness kills standards

A newly defined threat to standards is the misguided notion that education exists to raise children’s self-esteem - via measures of inclusion and personalised learning. Education’s purpose has long-enjoyed heated debate: do we send our children to school to set them up to be the workforce of tomorrow, or does education strive towards intellectual expansion? There is however wider consensus that the primary purpose of education is not to raise children’s self-esteem. This is not to say that the rewards of learning and ensuing achievement won’t heighten a child’s self-worth. Rather, that boosting pupils’ morale must be reinstated as a by-product of teaching and learning, rather than as a primary goal.

Whilst principles of inclusion and differentiation have been long infiltrating the school system via the National Curriculum, recent policy changes are heightening this culture of what is essentially political correctness. The latest move to marry child welfare services with schools' services, together with a reemphasis on inclusion and most recently, the new personalised learning mantra, are all contributing to the pursuit of what should be the secondary goal – pupil self-esteem. Many teachers’ unions are voicing concerns about the metamorphosis of teaching as knowledge transmission to teaching as social work.

The offending trend is centred around the personalised target principle, whereby each pupil is set individualised learning targets for each subject. These targets are set according to the stage of learning the child is currently at. The target system is tainted by a multitude of practical problems. Firstly, where the average class size is 30 pupils it is extremely difficult for teachers to come up with meaningful targets for each pupil, for each subject. Secondly, such an individualising system is both difficult to manage, as pupils work under one roof on different tasks, as well as antithetical to a unified learning environment. Practicalities aside, the target system also entails a multitude of pedagogical problems. The target principle means that children are praised and rewarded according to their own personal record of achievement. The basis of this principle lies in the culture of positive reinforcement where criticism, however constructive, is a dirty word. For example, let’s say there are two 7 year olds, John and Jeremy. John is at the top of the class, and able to write a coherently structured story in joined-up handwriting. His Literacy target is to move onto using more complex words in his composition. Jeremy is nearer the bottom of the class (although huge effort would have been made to conceal this from him). He has just started to form letters correctly and write on the line. Jeremy’s target is to construct recognisable sentences, containing a verb and a subject. As both pupils achieve their targets, they are equally rewarded in an endeavour to dispel any feelings of failure.

The point is, that the target system not only endorses this very different learning pace it also celebrates it as the buzzword ‘differentiation’. Yet, despite its theoretically democratic purpose, differentiation can be regarded as negatively labelling, and thus predetermining, a child’s learning capacity. The result is low expectations, and ensuing low achievement. Moreover there is great contradiction within the education system, as ultimately it does not allow for differential learning rates. At the end of every Key Stage (from 7 years old to 18), children must take standardised tests – to determine whether they are at the level they should be. Therefore whilst Jeremy is now successfully writing coherent sentences – a personal success - he will fail to reach the nationally expected Literacy level in the Standardised Attainment Tests (SATs).
Thus the very self-esteem building approach is actually a disservice to children’s self-confidence. Sooner or later, either within the examination system, or upon entering the adult world, children will discover that we live in a meritocracy, not an egalitarian utopia. Crucially, the bottom line and inevitable outcome of the ‘all must have prizes approach’ is further decline in standards. Children are simply not being challenged. There is a fundamental distinction between rewarding effort, and letting children rest in what educational jargon refers to as a ‘comfort zone’ by not criticising constructively. Children are tougher than they are being given credit for, their self-confidence less fragile than the DfES would have us believe. Furthermore, children respond very well to challenge, and very badly to boredom. Thus it is no wonder that a third of the secondary school population are illiterate and innumerate.

As we know so very well the correlation between low self-esteem and poor educational attainment, this misguided stab at political correctness must be scrapped. Whatever happened to being cruel to be kind?

Anastasia de Waal

Posted by at 04:07 PM | Comments (1)

March 09, 2005

Expletives Deleted ... but which swear-words remain permissible in school and why?

It is reported in today's Times that ‘pupils in England and Wales are to be banned from using sexist insults at school because teachers fear that derogatory words can reinforce behaviour that leads to domestic violence. The Government and the National Union of Teachers are campaigning to expunge words such as “slag” from teenage banter.’

All very commendable, doubtless. But this bold new initiative of the government's to discourage future domestic violence does give rise to several intriguing questions:

Were pupils allowed to use these and other swear-words in school before the diktat and why?

Which swear-words do pupils remain permitted to use at school and why?

Until such time as the Secretatry of State for Education enlightens the public on these vital issues, my reaction to this new edict of the government's is *** (expletive deleted)!

Posted by David Conway at 10:02 AM | Comments (5)

March 03, 2005

Blaming the teachers…

“We have to be more serious about meeting individual children’s needs,” announced Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly this morning. In the wake of a disciplinary ‘crisis’ in our schools as well as (unsurprising against this backdrop) allegations that the DfES has overstated the rise in education standards, Kelly is now proposing to redirect power to the parent and pupil.

OfSTED’s latest findings on disruptive behaviour in schools, combined with the Centre for Policy Studies’ report on substandard learning leading to ‘violence and vandalism’, are potentially disastrous for the government. All this loud investment in education must have been misguidedly spent, and as a consequence we face a generation of juvenile delinquents. However rather ironically, these revelations actually present a platform for attracting New Labour votes: you the parent are dissatisfied with the current education system, we are a responsive party and thus by re-electing New Labour it will be within your powers to dictate school life according to the specific requirements of your child. This is clearly an implausible claim in a school system where pressures of time mean that teachers are barely able to learn the names of all their class, let alone teach them on an individual basis. Yet in a climate so taken with rhetoric about individual rights, such notions of individualised learning are likely to appeal.

The disciplinary crisis has been described alternately by the DfES as either ‘gang culture’ or ‘low level disturbance’. Either way, the DfES has succeeded in dodging any possible PR damage by evading both the blame, and the root of the problem. For the first time in a long time, we are reminded that it is indeed teachers who are at the frontline of education. But predictably, this reminder comes with strings attached - hand in hand with the assertion that the onus for the behaviour crisis is on them. In the OfSTED report ‘Managing Challenging Behaviour’ the bottom line is that poor behaviour is directly linked to ineffective teaching. This is a reasonable conclusion. The proposed solution however, is less so. The proposition is for greater effort to be made by teachers to respond to the ‘individual needs of the pupil’ – read ‘individual weaknesses of the pupil’, the result of inadequate curricula and conditions. This morning Kelly reasserted this notion of personalised teaching, when she announced that up to 50% of 11-14 year olds’ school days will be ‘freed up’ to allow for ‘tailored tuition’. The concept of ‘tailored tuition’ completely ignores the real issue. Moreover how would it be achieved in school reality? Firstly, with their hands tied tightly by the National Curriculum and test result targets, how can teachers even attempt to personalise the curriculum, particularly for 30 + pupils? Furthermore, why is there a need in the first place, for what is essentially individualised problem solving, designed to rectify ingrained failings in the curriculum?

The point is being cleverly missed. An agenda allegedly addressing the individual needs of pupils both side steps the underlying issue as well as conveying a genuine interest in the customer-power of the parent. ‘Managing’ bad behaviour is exactly not what needs to be done. Instead, it’s time for the plaster to come off, to bring an end to treating the symptoms and time to get back to policy basics. The key issue lies ultimately not with ineffective teachers - for they are so closely controlled, there is little leeway for incompetent autonomy – instead in the foundations of the current organisation of the education system. The DfES must face up to this rather than retrospectively treating the casualties of a poorly constructed curriculum, oversized classes, and teacher instability resulting from alienating teaching conditions. Until the finger is rightfully pointed back to policy makers, the discipline crisis will continue to spiral. For once, top down action is desirable.

Anastasia de Waal

Posted by at 04:57 PM | Comments (6)

February 25, 2005

Call a spade a spade

Ruth Kelly’s attempt to address what she terms the ‘intellectual snobbery’ surrounding vocational education is in fact, exacerbating it. What is proving to be an inherent educational snobbery in the DfES towards non-academic skills will undeniably, have the effect of further segregating pupils into two channels of high and low achievement.

Having dismissed Tomlinson’s overly optimistic recommendations to implement a unified diploma designed to create ‘parity in esteem,’ the Education Secretary claims to be pursuing an alternative route to re-balancing the status gulf between academic and vocational subjects. Kelly’s plans for 14-19 education allegedly seek to put an end to the second rate reputation of the vocational subjects through a form of re-branding which will revamp their image and quantifiable educational value.

The very premise of Kelly's plan is counterproductive as she proposes to redress the image of vocational skills by making them essentially pseudo-academic. To raise the status of more practical subjects, the manner in which they are taught as well as their outcomes will now more closely mirror their academic counterparts. Consequently, pupils learning vocational skills are to be formally taught in the classroom as well as through first-hand experience, and grades achieved to be treated as comparable with academic subject grades. Furthermore, the aim is to get those learning hands-on skills not into the job market as soon as possible, but to continue formal education to university level. This appears to be a falsely egalitarian move shrouded only superficially by politically correct rhetoric. Inevitably in this system some courses will enjoy high status and others low, rendering this hybrid model actually damaging, as it undermines both standards in skills acquisition and the value of academic achievement as well as the real scholarly purpose of institutions such as universities. If academic learning is genuinely not superior, why is there a need to get everyone to participate in it? Kelly’s reforms thus reinforce the snobbery she claims to be targeting, by highlighting the monopolising currency and value in education and public discourse of academic-style formal learning.

Vocational skills, common sense would assume, are best learnt in relation to their employment context, not removed to an artificial classroom environment. Indeed, as Kelly herself keeps saying, A levels and GCSEs will remain the gold standard; so new plans for education will simply act to accentuate this dichotomy, reasserting vocational learning as the poor cousin. A public re-evaluation of vocational skills cannot be achieved from within the education system in isolation, particularly not in this artificial and transparent manner. It is unlikely that even Kelly believes this to be possible. However she must somehow reconcile a commitment to tomorrow’s economy with Blair’s pledge to get every child achieving more - in a context where achievement is rigidly defined.

The point is that there are, of course fundamental differences between vocational training and academic learning, and rhetorical attempts to negate these simply highlight the devaluation of vocational skills. Perhaps what really needs addressing is not so much the education system, but the image that non-academic skills have in wider British society. In the 14-19 White Paper Kelly repeatedly refers anxiously to the high number of pupils going into vocational training abroad, misguidedly attributing this to their countries’ education systems rather than to cultural attitudes within their labour markets. Once the DfES is able to banish the notion that success in today’s ‘knowledge economy’ is achievable solely through academic-style qualifications, we may be able to work towards a training system to generate a highly skilled and subsequently highly valued, manual labour force.

Anastasia de Waal

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Comments (4)

February 15, 2005

Education Standards

Are education standards going up or down? Here is our survey of the evidence (PDF).

Posted by David Green at 06:33 PM | Comments (2)

February 09, 2005

One damn thing after another (not)

The old saying that history is just one damn thing after another is no longer true, according to Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Last week the QCA published a report confirming what many teachers, university lecturers and parents have been complaining about for years: history is now taught in such a fragmented way that children have no chance to develop a chronological sense of the order in which important events happened. Survey after survey has told us that a majority of people questioned thought that Oliver Cromwell fought in the Battle of Britain, and other such absurdities: now we are getting it from an important government agency charged with monitoring what is actually going on in schools.

The list of failings is startling. Not enough time is allocated, to start with. Only 4% of curriculum time is allocated to history in Key Stages 1 and 2. To make it worse, certain periods are covered two or three times, while other periods are completely ignored. The phrase which was taken from the QCA report by the newspapers – the Hitlerisation of history – describes the way in which twentieth century history, especially the Second World War, is covered in depth, with no reference to earlier centuries. It is as if the twentieth century just sprang out of nowhere. The British Empire is conspicuous by its absence.

The ‘modular’ approach to history – asking children to imagine themselves to be medieval serfs or Egyptians building the pyramids – has added to the confusion over the order in which things happen. One friend of mine told me that his nephew, who has been educated at an expensive independent school, asked him if the Victorians came before or after the ancient Egyptians.

According to some of the teachers who spoke to the QCA, history is sometimes being done in half-terms, alternating with geography. It is also getting muddled up with citizenship. Of course, knowledge of the history of your own country and its institutions is a vital part of becoming a good citizen, but that doesn’t mean that history as an academic discipline should become subordinated to the short-term aims of politicians, like increasing the youth vote.

Now that the QCA has confirmed what many people have been complaining about for years, we must hope that politicians will learn the lesson and stop using history to promote their concerns about gender, race, equality and multi-culturalism, and will instead just let enthusiastic history teachers get on with what they have always wanted to do, which is to encourage a love and understanding of the past.

Posted by at 03:31 PM | Comments (1)

February 02, 2005

Education indefinitely

When Tony Blair famously stated his priorities as ‘education, education, education’, no one could have foreseen the extent to which this subject would come to dominate the news, on an almost daily basis. Pronouncements from the Secretary of State, speeches by the Inspector of Schools, reports by OfSTED, seem to pour forth in an unending stream, outlining failures and promising success.

The frankness with which which those charged with running the state education system describe the problems which beset it is something new. The old idea of all pulling together and not rocking the boat seems to have been abandoned. This is a good thing, because it helps if the public discourse bears some relation to reality, and the reality is that for many children in Britain today, the education they receive is simply appalling.

Rich parents can opt out, of course, either by sending their children to independent schools, or by moving to areas where the state schools are good. But many thousands of parents are simply stuck, having to watch while their children’s futures are blighted by their schools’ failure to impart knowledge or control bad behaviour.

It would help if the government could make up its mind which line it wants to pursue. For years, the buzz-word has been ‘inclusion’, meaning that disruptive pupils have to be kept in the classroom. Now, according to Ruth Kelly, the policy is to be ‘zero tolerance’. This sounds more sensible, although throwing a system into reverse can damage the gears. The teachers’ unions are (unsurprisingly) supportive of the new line, although in some cases they are claiming that it must be accompanied by special facilities to teach and train the disruptive pupils. But why? Educational resources are scarce, and should be concentrated on those who want to learn. You cannot educate children against their will, and it is almost as true to say that you cannot educate children without the support of their parents. Education is a privilege, not a right. Young hoodlums who disrupt the classroom should be expelled until such time as they realise that, without education, their lives will go nowhere. It might take a long time, and indeed, in some cases the moment of revelation may never arrive, but it is better to be realistic about a grim situation than to live in a world of fantasy policy initiatives that are supposedly going to make children sit still and learn, against their will.

Posted by at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

Making independence a reality

Oxford University has announced that it is to restrict the number of places available to British students by 1,600 in order to have more places to offer to overseas applicants. The reason is a very simple financial one: fees for British students are paid by the government, at such a low level that the University is left out of pocket, while overseas students can be charged realistic fees which actually make a profit for the university. The overseas students are effectively subsidising the British ones. As there are still large numbers of such students wanting to study at Oxford, it makes financial sense to alter the ratio of imported to home-grown undergraduates.

It would be nice to think that places at Oxford, or any other university, were awarded on grounds of academic merit alone. We like to think of universities as places of higher learning and repositories of the culture. Even people who don’t go there probably feel that their existence adds to the quality of life in the country.

Unfortunately the awarding of places at universities has become so politicised that admissions tutors are complaining that they are not up to it, and would like the decisions to be taken over by committees who have more political awareness. The government wants to increase the size of the university population, but it doesn’t want to pay the costs. Students therefore have to pay part of their fees – unless they qualify for means-tested grants. Access is supposed to be widened, with preference given to students from certain postcodes and underachieving schools, which means that entrance requirements have to be lowered. Universities find that they have to teach students basic skills they should have learned at school. British universities, even those at the top of the tree, are slipping down the international league tables as a result. Meanwhile, middle-class parents who have sent their children to good independent schools, often at great financial sacrifice, find that their offspring are actually discriminated against in the selection procedure, and less likely to get in than applicants from bog-standard state comprehensives. And if they do get in, the parents will be paying extremely high fees to subsidise those who pay nothing at all.

In an excellent article in today’s Times, Simon Jenkins argues that Oxford should stop complaining and take the obvious step – going private. It should stop accepting money from the state and regain control over its own admissions process and academic work.

Simon Jenkins writes, as ever, very persuasively, but why stop at Oxford? Why stop, even, with the Russell Group of elite universities? Surely every university should be independent of state interference? They do, after all, enjoy the legal status of independent charities. If they had to cover their own costs, they would charge whatever fees reflected their academic standing. This does not mean that less well-off students would be excluded. There are ways of running a ‘needs-blind’ admissions policy, that would guarantee a place for every student who would profit by it by combining bursaries with the offer of paid work on campus and generous but realistic loans. This is how the best American universities manage it. Why should it be beyond us to instigate a similar system? It would be worth making the effort to get the politicians out of the ivory towers, and to turn universities back to being institutions of higher learning rather than factories of social engineering.

Posted by at 12:57 PM | Comments (9)

January 20, 2005

Why Classical Liberals have Greater Cause to be Alarmed by Bell than British Muslims

On 17th January, David Bell, Head of Ofsted, delivered a widely reported lecture to the Hansard Society on the subject of British citizenship and how best our schools should be deployed so as to turn out good citizens, especially now they are required to teach citizenship.

Mr Bell’s wide-ranging speech touched on a number of different aspects of this thorny subject.

Most media attention was directed to the concerns voiced by Mr Bell about the likely socially divisive consequences of the rapid growth of faith schools, especially Muslim ones, unless they ‘adapt their curriculum to ensure that it … helps [pupils] acquire an appreciation of and respect for other cultures in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony’.

Mr Bell’s concerns here have been greeted with great protestation by British Muslims. Dr Monhmaed Mukadam, chairman of the Association of Muslims Schools, has accused Mr Bell of Islamophobia by singling out only Muslim schools as potential seed-beds of sectarianism.

Whether, in having drawn special attention to the potential divisiveness of Muslim schools alone among faith schools, Mr Bell is guilty of having incited hatred of a religious group is an issue on which, perhaps, we can await instruction from the courts after the government’s bill making incitement to religious hatred a crime has completed its passage through parliament.

My bet is that no English court would ever so regard Mr Bell’s lecture, although it might well do so if exactly the same sentiments were put less guardedly or by some less reputable establishment figure, something which, in itself, should give any classical liberal who values equality before the law cause for concern.

However, there was something else said by Mr Bell in his lecture that to date has gone un-remarked on by the media that should be of far greater and more immediate cause for concern to classical liberals than anything he has said about the need for faith schools to adopt curricula that inculcate tolerance and respect for others.

From a classical liberal point of view, what is truly alarming in Mr Bell’s lecture is the account given there of what all schools should be aiming to impart in their pupils by way of an understanding of their common British heritage as citizens and of why, in virtue of such a common heritage, such citizenship should be valued and cherished. The contentious passage in question in Mr Bell’s lecture goes as follows:

‘We must not allow our recognition of diversity to become apathy in the face of any challenge to our coherence as a nation. I would go further and say that an awareness of our common heritage as British citizens, equal under the law, should enable us to assert with confidence that we are intolerant of intolerance, illiberalism and attitudes and values that demean the place of certain sections of our community, be they women or people living in non-traditional relationships.’

What is deeply disturbing here is that someone in so powerful a position of authority as Mr Bell, should, in a lecture about British citizenship and why British citizens should value it, have equated tolerance under a common law, which is a major feature of Britain’s national heritage and has made Britain such a tolerant and liberal society, with ‘intolerance of intolerance, illiberalism and attitudes and values that demean the place of certain sections of our community.’

Doubtless, it is possible for the British school system to foster national cohesion through teaching its pupils to be ‘intolerant’ of any but liberal attitudes. Were it to do this, however, it would not have and could not have made them genuinely liberal nor appreciative of their British national heritage which has always involved tolerating those not liberal in their outlook, provided any illiberalism in outlook is confined to the sphere of thought, not action.

What, therefore, should be of especial concern to classical liberals in Mr Bell’s remarks is its implicit message that all those who are unwilling to celebrate diversity and espouse politically correct attitudes that embrace the government’s understanding of racial equality, affirmative action, and multiculturalism, etc., are not to be tolerated in tomorrow’s schools or allowed to disseminate their own outlooks.

It is, thus not so much British Muslims but classical liberals who have greater cause to take alarm at this clear warning of the Bell.

Posted by David Conway at 04:22 PM | Comments (2)

January 19, 2005

Keeping faith-based schools in perspective

The debate about what we now call faith schools is becoming muddled by the grouping together of schools which may be teaching insurrection and disobedience to the law with schools which teach adherence to a particular creed which may be contrary to mainstream, modern, secular thought.

David Bell’s speech, delivered to the Hansard Society on Monday, attracted headlines for claiming that the growing number of independent faith schools is threatening the cohesion of society. There are now over 300 fee-paying religious schools, including 50 Jewish schools, 100 Muslim schools and over 100 evangelical Christian schools. David Bell acknowledges that, in a free society, parents have the right to educate their children in their own beliefs, but that ‘faith should not be blind. I worry that many young people are being educated in faith-based schools with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society.’

His particular complaint is against the teaching of citizenship, not only in faith schools but throughout the system. Many classes are unsatisfactory, and he claims that ‘scepticism, cynicism and even fear’ surround the subject.

The government was keen to add citizenship to the national curriculum because of problems caused by the rise in anti-social behaviour amongst young people, and their unwillingness to engage with the institutions of a democratic society. However, the expectation that such fundamental problems of failure of socialisation could be cured by a couple of half-hour classes a week were always unrealistic. Teachers, already oppressed by government demands that they compensate for many things going wrong in the wider society, are understandably unenthusiastic about citizenship, and schools, for the most part, do not allocate significant resources to it.

But surely faith schools are more likely to produce good citizens than schools in which children find no over-arching framework of values? If children are taught within a world-view which encompasses transcendental values, they are less likely to engage in crime and anti-social behaviour, and more likely to play their part in society.

If there is any evidence that schools are undermining our democracy by their teaching, then there would be a case for intervention. It should also go without saying that if there were any evidence of encouraging illegal activity, this should be a matter for the police. But we must not allow ourselves to be panicked into thinking that, because people hold strongly to their religious perspectives, that there are grounds for state intervention. Believing that the world was created in seven days may offend many people’s sense of scientific reality, but children can make up their own minds about the evidence as they grow up. The important thing is that these children are, for the most part, growing up in loving and supportive families, who don’t need the government to interfere with their parental rights.

The state would do well to concentrate its resources where they are needed - on those children, who are now numerous, who are growing up without any sense of values at all. It is their behaviour that the government - and the rest of us - should be worrying about.

Posted by at 01:42 PM | Comments (2)

December 17, 2004

The Third Reich and the Fourth ‘R’

No one could remotely accuse today’s secularists who make up the bulk of the metropolitan ‘liberal’ elite of Europe and the United States of sharing the same political agenda as Adolf Hitler.

However, they both share one common objective that should send chills down the spines of true lovers of liberty, given how easily this iberal elite seems able to accomplish it today, and, supposedly, in the name of liberal values and ideals.

That objective is the de-Christianisation of Europe and America, and ultimately the world.

Although Hitler was prepared temporarily to play along with the Christian Church while he felt it expedient to do so, in private he let it be known he was concerned above all to free Europe, and ultimately the world, from what he considered to be the emasculating incubus of Judaeo-Christian values, and in particular, the ideal of human equality and the ethics of compassion, into whose grip he considered Europe to have fallen.

Paradoxically, it is very same values and ideals in whose name today’s supposedly liberal elites are busy pursuing the very same objective as Hitler, albeit by very different means.

Today, supposedly out of concern not to offend or discriminate against any minorities, these ‘liberal’ secular elites call for, and succeed in accomplishing, the removal of all traces of Christianity from public schooling.

How precisely this objective is accomplished varies from country to country, but the general tendency is the same. Thus, for example, in Italy, one school in Como has reportedly replaced the word, ’Jesus’ by the word, ‘virtue’, in the carols its children will be singing this year; while a school in Treviso is reported to have replaced the Christmas Nativity play by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Likewise, in America, school districts in New Jersey and Florida have reportedly banned Christmas carols.

Schools in Britain have supposedly been left to choose for themselves how and whether to celebrate Christmas. Increasingly, they are reported as having chosen to dispense with any reference to Christianity. As many as 25% of English and Welsh schools will not be holding carol services this year, and as many as 50% of these schools will be substituting secular seasonal celebrations instead.

All this is supposedly being done in the name of greater ‘inclusivity’, despite religious minorities in these countries being known to prefer that all take some religion seriously than none be encouraged to take any seriously.

Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, David Bell, gave public support to this trend in a speech in April of this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act in which religious education and worship were made mandatory.

In that speech, Mr Bell questioned whether ‘we [are] right to be requiring from our young people levels of observance that are not matched even by the Christian faithful.’ He went to enquire whether there is any ‘continuing symbolic value in a common celebration of this country’s [Christian] heritage, and continuing practical value for pupils’ education, in behaving as those of faith do by undertaking an act of worship even though some are of no faith.’

For an answer to his questions,. Mr Bell would do well to turn to T.S.Eliot’s account of the ‘Idea of a Christian Society’ given in three lectures delivered at Oxford in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of hostilities. There, he wrote in support of such a form of society as follows:

‘Unless we can find a pattern into which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos … As political philosophy derives its sanctions from ethics and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality’.

Some might object to such a metaphysically loaded justification being given for religious education in general and a Christian one in particular. But the propriety of such a form of justification is precisely what is at issue. While the likes of Mr Bell might have little time for religion, as many as 70% of Britain’s population turn out to be willing to own up to belief in God and the vast majority of these consider themselves to be Christian.

In such circumstances, the British educational authorities, and other countries, like Italy and the USA, no less Christian in culture, abuse their authority when they deprive the children whose education they superintend from initiation into or opportunity to participate in the religious traditions of their parents’ and their country.

Whereas Jesus bid his follows to render unto Caesar that which was his, today’s elite wishes no one to render anything save to Caesar.

As Eliot said back in 1939, the country faces three choices: to continue to sink into apathetic secular decline; to transmute into some kind of totalitarian democracy; or, finally, to become a positive Christian society, by no means the same, as he was at pains to point out, as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.

Currently, Her Majesty’s Opposition seems at a loss how to recapture the support and enthusiasm of the country, given how New Labour has stolen so many of its economic policies. Perhaps, the way to its recovery lies in its deciding to stand up for Britain’s predominantly Christian culture. God knows, someone needs to.

Season's Greeting!

Posted by David Conway at 04:56 PM | Comments (1)

December 02, 2004

How Much Faith Should We Have in Faith Schools?

Today’s papers contain the results of tests in English and mathematics carried out last summer on 11 years olds in England's primary schools.

They establish beyond doubt that, on the whole, faith schools achieve much better results than so-called ‘community’ schools which have no denominational affiliation and at which religious education and collective acts of worship have all but disappeared in recent years, despite still being legally mandatory.

Whereas faith schools make up only a third of England's primary schools, they account for as much as two-thirds of those whose pupils achieved the maximum possible test scores. Moreover, faith schools accounted for almost half of the 200 primary schools at which greatest progress had been made by pupils in these subjects since they were tested in them at the start of their schooling there.

To what are due the superior results faith schools, on the whole, seem able to achieve?

Their supporters tend to attribute the superior performance of faith schools to the educationally beneficial effects of their having a religious ethos. Their opponents tend to attribute their better performance to faith schools tending to attract larger proportions of middle-class pupils than attend community schools.

The statistics now available would seem to permit sufficiently detailed comparison between faith and community schools to enable an informed decision to be made between these two rival hypotheses concerning what accounts for their differential performances.

Should, as seems not at all unlikely, attending a school with a religious ethos be found to have a positively beneficial educative effect on pupils, quite independently of their social class, this fact would seem to have important policy implications for the future direction primary schooling should take in this country.

Those eager to know the results of such a comparison are advised not to wait until the government or the educational establishment has carried it out. Neither seems at all likely to be keen to discover or reveal that the religiously anodyne, if not wholly secular, multi-cultural approach towards primary schooling currently favoured by the authorities is educationally regressive.

Posted by David Conway at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2004

Know Your Place

Prince Charles stands accused of wanting people to ‘know their place’. According to the current Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, the Prince is hostile to the ambitions of ordinary folk, whose interests are championed by the present Government. Does this accusation fit the facts?

If Mr Clark were really in favour of allowing everyone the chance to make the most of their talents he would, at the very least, expect schools to aim for the highest possible standard of attainment. But, in truth, the present government has done quite the opposite. At every level where measures are available, there is evidence, not only of falling standards, but also of the decline being deliberately concealed by moving the benchmarks. The Government is more interested in social engineering than in real achievement.

Here is some of the evidence. First, employers and universities, have been pointing out the consequences of school failure for some years now. In August 2004, a CBI survey of over 500 firms found that 37% were not satisfied with the basic literacy and numeracy of school leavers, up from 34% in the 2003 survey. During the previous 12 months, 33% of firms had to give school leavers basic training in literacy and numeracy.

The latest issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement reports a survey of about 400 university academics. It found that 71% agreed that their ‘institution had admitted students who are not capable of benefiting from higher level study’. And 48% said they had ‘felt obliged to pass a student whose performance did not really merit a pass’. Nearly 20% admitted turning ‘a blind eye’ to student plagiarism.

Key Stage 2
At Key Stage 2 (age 11) level 4 represents the expected standard of literacy for children of that age. In 1996 48% reached level 4 and in 2002 it was 75%. Was the achievement real? The University of Durham's Curriculum, Evaluation and Management Centre found that there had been no real increase. It applied the same test of ability between 1997 and 2002 in 122 schools involving about 5,000 pupils. In reading it found no increase in ability.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) commissioned a report into the claim that standards had been lowered. It compared 1996 and 2000 and claimed that, overall, their evidence 'gives the lie to any theory of conspiracy to undermine' standards. However, when the report compared English at Key Stage 2 (for eleven year olds) between 1996 and 1999 it found that reading standards had fallen. Reading (and total marks) for the 1999 test were, on average only 4 marks lower, but the overall 1999 cut-scores for levels 4 and 5 were nine marks below those in 1996, overcompensating for the harder 1999 reading test by 5 marks.

GCSEs
The latest results for 2003/04 show that only 53.4 % achieved 5 or more grades A* - C at GCSE or equivalent. 4.2% did not achieve any passes at all.

In August 2001, Jeffrey Robinson, a senior examiner in GCSE maths for the OCR Examination Board, claimed that pupils achieving As and Bs would have received C and D grades ten years earlier. The pass mark for a C grade had fallen from 65% in 1989 to 48% in 2001.

'A' Levels
The Engineering Council produced a report in 1999 and compared A level grades with a standard diagnostic test devised by the University of Coventry. The same test was applied between 1991 and 1998. In 1991 those with a grade B at A level in 1991 scored 40.5/50 on the diagnostic test. In 1998 those with a B scored 36.8/50. At grade C the gap was from 39.9 in 1991 to 32.1 in 1998. As the report remarks, the score of 32.1 in 1998 was 2.3 marks (4.6%) lower than the N grade achievement in the same year.

A study by the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) published a report on 'A' level achievement over time. It found that the proportion of pupils obtaining two or more 'A' level passes between 1975 and 1995 had increased from 12.1% to 19.9%. To test whether the achievement was real Dr Robert Coe of Durham University has been able to compare actual achievements between 1988 and 1998 using the International Test of Developed Abilities (ITDA). The test is applied voluntarily in a minority of schools, and the results may not be representative of all schools. However, across six subjects (biology, English, French, geography, history and mathematics) achievements fell steadily. The average ITDA score for maths in 1988 was 72.3 and 59.3 in 1998, and for English Literature 57.0 in 1988 and 51.5 in 1998. However, the average 'A' level grade increased over the same period from 4.59 in 1988 to 5.96 in 1998 and in maths from 3.78 in 1988 to 5.69 in 1998. (The 'A' level grades are coded as follows: A=10, B=8, C=6, D=4, E=2, N=0, and U=-2.)

Posted by David Green at 08:09 AM | Comments (2)

November 19, 2004

Call Me Old-fashioned or What … But What Did the Prince Say Wrong?

Outraged attacks on the Prince of Wales filled today's airwaves and press. What occasioned the wrath of so many was his having had the apparent effrontery to remark in a private email that far too many of his younger compatriots today consider themselves qualified for jobs far beyond their talents and aptitudes.

The burden of the attacks on the Prince are two-fold. First, it is no bad thing so many young people today harbour high personal ambitions. Second, the Prince has no business to criticise others for wanting to better themselves, when he is able to lead the life of Riley without enjoying any conspicuously greater talents or natural abilities than they.

Neither criticism seems at all justified.

As regards the first, what the Prince said seems spot on. In no way was what he said inconsistent with recognising the desirability of young people setting themselves demanding and ambitious personal targets and life-goals. What the Prince was complaining about was not young people having high personal ambitions, but the frequency with which all too many of them today have formed hopelessly unrealistic ones, based upon vastly inflated estimates of their own abilities.

The Prince went to speculate why so many young people did, linking their so doing to our current education system which discourages them from ever having to confront and recognise their own limitations through making severe demands on them.

It was this conjecture of the Prince that provoked the especial ire of Charles Clarke, Secretary of State for Education. ‘Everybody has a field marshal’s baton in their knapsack’, he remarked, implying it wrong of the Prince not to want people to harbour the very highest personal aspirations whose successful realisation would require them to have correspondingly exceptional abilities.

It is truly tragic the country’s education system today lies in the hands of a man who seems genuinely to be of this view. That he does, perhaps, explains the Secretary of State’s determination to increase the participation of school leavers in higher education until it reaches the government’s target of 50%, in face of all the evidence that simply not enough of them are up-to-the-mark and that our Universities only succeed in absorbing ever-increasing numbers by admitting far too many manifestly unsuitable and then keeping them by lowering standards to ensure they do not fail.

On the very same day as the Secretary of State expostulated against the Prince, the Daily Mail carried a report on the results of a survey conducted by the Times Higher Educational Supplement of almost 400 UK academics. The survey revealed that over 70% of them believed their institution to have admitted students manifestly incapable of benefiting from a place, and 50% admitting to having felt obliged to pass students not deserving to.

When, under pressure from government, our higher education system encourages young people to form unrealistically high expectations of themselves, small wonder is it we find ourselves with the culture of which the Prince complained.

The reason it is tragic for our country’s education system to lie in the hands of a man glad it has such a culture is that it is bound to produce only frustration and disappointment in large swathes of the population. To see why, we need to recall the words of a truly great and gifted man, the liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill.

In his famous work of 1861, Utilitarianism, Mill declared the ultimate criterion of morality to be what is conducive to human happiness. Responding to the objection that happiness cannot be the object of morality, since it lies beyond the capacity of humankind to attain it, Mill conceded happiness to be such if, by it, was meant a life of rapture. He then went on to observe in words on which our Secretary of State should be made to dwell daily:

‘The philosophers who have taught that happiness is the end of life…meant … not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, … and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.’[emphasis added]

It is the last clause of Mill’s quoted statement on which the Secretary of State would do well to dwell. If Mill is correct, the education system over which he presides is busy helping to form a culture that condemns the mass of population to permanent frustration, disappointment, rancour and envy.

As regards the second criticism to which the Prince has been subjected, the one denying him the right to condemn others no less gifted than he for wanting to live as well as he, two things may be said on behalf of the Prince.

First, he did not choose to apply for the post he currently holds. He found it thrust on him by birth.

Second, although not requiring any exceptional talents or gifts, the position of heir apparent certainly does demand a heck of a lot of job-training from a very early age. It also probably condemns whoever is made to undergo it to far less parental care and attention as a young child than can possibly be in their best interest.

Few would wish to claim the Prince flawless. Doubtless, the Prince would not be one who did. However, to malign him for having privately expressed an undoubtedly sound opinion about a deep fault in our present culture is to demand from him a degree of restraint that is as unwarranted as it would be impossibly onerous for anyone to attempt to exhibit.

Posted by David Conway at 03:14 PM | Comments (3)

October 21, 2004

F Ofsted -- the Grade its Reports Merit

Ofsted is a governmental body set up by the 1992 Education Act whose full name is the ‘Office for Standards in Education’. Its original remit was to inspect and report on the quality of all state schools. If, based on an inspection, Ofsted judged the quality of educational provision of a school to be unsatisfactory, then, unless the school addresses and rectifies those aspect of provision the report deems unsatisfactory, the school inspected stands in danger of being compulsorily shut down.

Since its creation, the remit of Ofsted has grown steadily, with more and more different kinds of educational establishment being brought under its inspectorial wing. In 2002, Ofsted acquired power of inspection over the country’s private schools. Its powers were extended to them on the alleged grounds that such powers over private schools as the state had under the 1944 Education Act were insufficient to compel those offering inadequate provision to improve the quality of their provision on pain of closure otherwise. Meanwhile, competition between such schools was deemed unable to exert market pressure for improvement, allegedly on the grounds that parents could acquire insufficient information about what went on in private schools to enable them to make informed decisions about which to send their children to.

As from 1 September 2003, independent schools in England and Wales became subject to Ofsted inspections. Such of them it deemed offered unsatisfactory provision became vulnerable to threat of closure, unless they changed their provision in the ways prescribed by the Ofsted reports. The powers Ofsted have over the independent sector are truly enormous, having become sole arbiter of what it is and is not acceptable for them to provide.

The way Ofsted has chosen to exercise its powers over the private sector is anything but re-assuring. In the first twelve month period since it acquired these powers, it found no fewer than 95% of the 60 independent schools it inspected during that period unsatisfactory, requiring them to change in the ways prescribed or face closure.

If the private schools Ofsted judged unsatisfactory were genuinely so, then arguably it would be providing a genuine public service, despite it straining belief to suppose parents able and willing to pay large sums for private schooling of their children to be otherwise unable to know which schools are worth sending their children to.

Overwhelming evidence exists, however, that Ofsted is a very poor and biased judge of what is satisfactory private educational provision. A case in point is the Ofsted report issued earlier this year about Charterhouse Square School, London, based upon an Ofted inspection of it in March 2004. On the strength of what it claimed to find at this inspection, Ofsted deemed Charterhouse Square School failed to meet the requirements necessary for its continued registration as a school with state approval to operate.

Ofsted arrived at its verdict despite acknowledging Charterhouse Square to have an exemplary record in pupil attainment levels for English and mathematics, to offer excellent provision in such non-core subjects as dance and music, and despite finding the morale and behaviour of the children good and parents most happy with and well-informed about it.

Ofsted deemed Charterhous Square School unsatisfactory on the grounds of finding its pedagogy over-reliant on more traditional approaches at the expense of being permissive and child-centred . The school was also judged unsatisfactory for having preferred to focus its five year olds on reading and writing rather than learning IT skills.

What makes the Ofsted report on Charterhouse Square School so disturbing, especially when taken together with the enormously high rate at which Ofsted has found other independent schools unsatisfactory, it is that Ofsted is not delivering comparably unfavourable overall verdicts about state-schools that it knows employ no less traditional teaching methods than Charterhouse Square but which achieve far lower attainment levels in core curriculum subjects like English and mathematics.

A case in point is the Islamia Primary School in Kilburn, London, a comparably sized voluntary-aided mixed primary school in Kilburn, London. Unlike Charterhouse Square School, Ofsted deemed the Islamia School to be ‘an effective school where pupils achieve good standards in English and mathematics’. This was despite its pupils’ attainment levels in English and mathematics being far less good than those of Charterhouse Square school. Likewise, Ofsted found Islamia school ‘good value for money’, despite also finding all the following aspects of its educational provision to be unsatisfactory: its provision for under fives said to be given ‘too few opportunities … to develop an appropriate degree of independence’ , its procedures for child protection and for ensuring pupils’ welfare’, its ‘accommodation’, its learning resources, its attendance rates and its support for those of its pupils for whom English is not their first language.

There is not the slightest wish here to contest the legitimacy of Osted’s overall verdict on Islamia School being a perfectly adequate school. All that is being claimed here is that Ofsted is being manifestly less than even-handed in the unfavourable verdicts it is delivering on manifestly still-more adequate private schools than the Islamia school. That Ofsted is being such is profoundly disturbing when it enjoys ultimate power of deciding whether such schools can remain open and which schools must close.

Lovers of liberty, not to mention, high educational standards, would do well to be reminded of the words of warning John Stuart Mill issued in 1859 on the dangers of the sate being allowed to become the sole arbiter of what is an acceptable form of education. In his great essay, ‘On Liberty’, Mill wrote:

'A general State education [system] is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.… [I]n proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendencies to one over the body. An education established by and controlled by the State should only exist, if exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence…. In general, if [a] country contains a sufficient number of persons qualified to provide education under government auspices, the same persons would be able and willing to give an equally good education on the voluntary principle, under the assurance of remuneration afforded by a law rendering education compulsory, combined with State aid to those unable to defray the expense.’

In sum, in response to Ofsted’s claim to be champion of educational standards, lovers of liberty might wish to responding by singing altogether in unison, ‘We don’t need your education; we don’t need your thought control’.

Posted by David Conway at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

The Tomlinson report is a distraction

The Tomlinson report into the education of 14-19 year-olds is a missed opportunity. By common consent our system, supposedly designed to ensure that rich and poor alike receive a good education, fails many of our children.

About 5% reach the end of compulsory schooling with no formal qualifications. Only 42% of 16 year-olds achieve a grade C or higher in both English and Maths GCSE. Many employers find young recruits lacking in basic skills. And worse still, even among those taking A-levels, a significant number of universities find that they have to provide catch-up courses for first-year students.

We should be having an entirely different debate. The introduction of a diploma with entry, foundation, intermediate and advanced stages will, of itself, be irrelevant. Reducing the number of external examinations, as the report proposes, will lower standards. Teacher assessment is notoriously unreliable because it expects each teacher to be a judge in his or her own cause. If a large number of their pupils do badly, perhaps it is because of bad teaching, a conclusion no teacher is likely to encourage. And the attempt to equalise status – parity of esteem – is a naïve absurdity. The status of occupations cannot be dictated by law or determined by a government policy. Such attempts are simply futile.

Instead of restructuring the qualifications framework, we should be focusing on the underlying causes of education failure. Above all, it is because the public sector is a monopoly. The small private sector allows an escape for some, but the real challenge is to create opportunities for the vast majority of the population by allowing new schools committed to high standards in learning to be established. Monopoly tends to diminish the discovery of better ways of meeting human needs and competition increases the chances that better solutions will be found.

Posted by David Green at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2004

Less than Full Marks for Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools

In a speech made yesterday to a secondary school in County Durham, Mr David Bell, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools for England and Wales, laid out his vision of what purposes our schools should serve in today’s ever more globalised world. According to Mr Bell, they should seek to accomplish two main purposes.

The first is to teach the 3 R’s. This assertion of Mr Bell may come as a pleasant surprise to all traditionally minded individuals more used, in recent times, to hearing pronouncements by educationists on the purposes of schools that seem to view their prime function more as adjuncts of the social services than as educational establishments.

What Mr Bell identifies as the second main purpose of schools gives less cause for reassurance. He claims that, aside from imparting these basic skills, today’s schools should seek to prepare their pupils for their future life as responsible citizens, and to do so in ways that foster social cohesion as well as encourage their self-awareness as citizens of a wider world-community beyond their country with attendant moral responsibilities. This function schools are supposed to fulfil today through their teaching ‘citizenship’, newly introduced as a compulsory subject in the National Curriculum.

At first glance, what Mr Bell identifies as the second main purpose of schools may appear no less innocuous or meritorious than what he identifies as being their first. What, it might be wondered, could be more innocuous or worthy of endeavour than that schools should seek to turn out morally responsible and politically literate alumni aware of their wider moral responsibilities as well as the civic ones associated with their national citizenship?

The answer to this question is nothing. But this is provided schools and their Inspectorate can be relied on to have correctly identified which responsibilities associated with each of these two roles their pupils should go on to fulfil. Unfortunately, other remarks by Mr Bell in his speech, plus the way the citizenship curriculum is increasingly coming to be specified and delivered, suggest what is being purveyed under that term in today’s schools is very different and altogether more questionable.

Worryingly, what is being offered in today’s schools as citizenship education, and is seemingly being offered with the full knowledge and blessing of the Chief Inspector, is nothing short of a systematic attempt to subvert the formation in their pupils of any robust sense of national identity or pride in their country, and their replacement by a cosmopolitan sense of global citizenship in which there is no form of identification with any single nationality.

For example, after remarking innocuously enough that ‘citizenship education … offers us a forum … for looking at ways of resolving conflicts and living together in mutual respect’ and that ‘education has an urgent and important part to play in promoting social cohesion’, Mr. Bell proceeds immediately by remarking that: ‘[This] begs [sic] questions about who we are, about national identity. Over the summer I know many of us reflected on what the numerous crosses of St George displayed for Euro 2004 really meant. Were they signs of the cheerful camaraderie of loyal football supporters – or was there something more sinister in the public expression of Englishness?’

From the context in which Mr Bell posed his question, it is clear he intended it as a rhetorical one and hence as an implicit assertion that any affirmation of or pride in English national identity is tacitly xenophobic and an insult to religious or ethnic minorities.
Anyone who so thinks will likely wish to use the citizenship slot in the National Curriculum to downplay the salience of traditional conceptions of national identity and to elevate the status of global citizenship in the hope the latter will provide a sufficiently robust and accommodating sense of common identity as is needed for social cohesion. Despite the best of intentions, however, any such a policy is liable to increase rather than reduce social fragmentation and to erode rather than increase social cohesion.

It took the saner voices among the educational establishment well on twenty years to realise the folly and complete ineffectiveness of the more progressive methods for teaching literacy and numeracy once canvassed and widely adopted in schools and against which Mr Bell rightly inveighs. Let us hope it will not take a civil war, Sarayevo or Kosovoa-style, to alert the educational establishment to the need for a common culture to foster social cohesion, or to make them appreciate that England’s traditional tolerant and liberal culture is far better suited for the purpose than any artificially manufactured new one, dreamt up by educational progressives concerned to give equal billing to every minority for fear of offending or failing to give equal respect to any, however bizarre or illiberal it might be.

So, ‘ten out of ten’ to Mr Bell for having rightly recognised the importance of schools teaching numeracy and literacy. A lower grade is warranted for his ill-considered claims about what their civic function should be.

He and his fellow enthusiasts for multicultural citizenship education would do well to do some more homework on this subject. They could do worse as a start than by reading Samuel Huntington’s recent book, 'Who Are We? America’s Great Debate'. If, as they all claim, citizenship education is something that should go on beyond school years, they would find it an instructive and timely way for them to practise what they preach.

Posted by David Conway at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2004

Educational Opportunity

This week the Higher Education Funding Council ‘named and shamed’ 17 universities for not meeting their quota of pupils from state schools. Threatened with the prospect of losing state funding if they do not discriminate against children from private schools, some universities have publicised their strategy for meeting their quota. Exeter University, for example, asks for only one A and two B’s for pupils from state schools, when it would require 3 A’s from a private school student.

The Government’s policy is a strategy of hard-line egalitarian social engineering, concealed behind a smokescreen of ostensible concern for less fortunate pupils. It is an advantage to have committed and supportive parents, but the present government sees this advantage as unfair.

However, a genuine concern for children with un-supportive parents would focus purely on how best to help them overcome their difficulty, not on penalising the others. Schools would be urged to make up for disadvantage with remedial teaching and extra support. It would also be legitimate to urge more fortunate parents to consider it their duty to try to help out in their local primary school, perhaps by volunteering to spend time giving additional reading practice to slower pupils.

But there is another inconsistency, which gives a clue to the Government’s real motivation. A determined policy of discrimination against children who had gained an advantage from having supportive parents would also penalise children whose parents had purchased private tuition. After all, the more money the parents have, the more easily they will be able to afford private tutors. Money is clearly buying results.

The trouble with targeting private tuition is that rather a lot of party comrades have resorted to it. But, in any event, the real target of the policy is to undermine independent schools. These schools, with their honour boards, ‘school spirit’ and legendary ‘old-boy’ and ‘old-girl’ networks, are the bitter enemies of the class-war zealots who now control policy making.

Posted by David Green at 09:56 AM | Comments (1)

September 29, 2004

Why ‘Sure Start’ is a Sure-Fire Way Not to Start Caring for Our Young

In his speech at the Labour Party Conference yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair listed ten policy objectives whose accomplishment he intends to make the central task of any Labour administration that might be returned for a third term at the next general election.

One of these ten objectives is the provision of child-care facilities for as many children between the ages of 3 and 16 whose parents wish to avail themselves of it between the hours of 8am and 6pm. The manifest purpose of the objective is to enable all parents, especially mothers, to undertake full-time paid work.

In the case of school-age children, their schools can clearly serve for the purpose during the periods between 8 and 6 that fall outside formal schooling.

In the case of pre-school children, achieving the objective will necessitate hugely expanding nursery provision. This is something the present government has already begun to do through its Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative that forms part of a wider government programme called ‘Sure Start’. The ostensible aim of Sure Start to support the career aspirations of parents, whilst simultaneously improving the cognitive and emotional development of their children, by extending childcare provision to all.

The Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative has committed the government to creating 45,000 new childcare places in England by the end of 2004, places largely intended for the poorest families.

On the very same day as the Prime Minister’s speech was reported on the front pages of today’s papers, the inside pages of one national broad-sheet contain a report of the results of a survey of current pay-levels in the child-care sector that make for disturbing reading. The survey, carried out by and reported in Nursery World, reveals the government has managed to expand nursery provision very rapidly by simply luring staff from private nurseries through offering massively greater pay for what is essentially the same task.

While the Government might in the immediate term have been able to expand the number of nursery places by simply throwing money at the task, money that has been set aside under the Sure Start Programme, how it has done so - namely, by ‘poaching’ staff from the private sector by offering substantially more than the going market rate for the job - suggests that, unless money continues to be thrown at the task indefinitely, there are simply not enough trained staff to enable its objective to be met, unless some other public service is contracted or taxes are raised.

The government has not identified any public service it intends to contract to finance its expansion of nursery provision. Nor have voters exhibited the slightest sign of willingness to pay more in tax than they currently are to finance an expansion of nursery places. It follows, as day follows night, that the government will fail to meet its objective of providing affordable high-quality nursery places for all.

That it will fail might not be such a bad thing. Studies have revealed that mothers of very young children have, in general, no wish to be denied the opportunity of caring for their very young children themselves, for at least part of the day. Moreover, other studies have shown very young children tend to thrive better when cared for by their mothers than when cared for by others.

The idea of universal child-care provision is a radical feminist pipe-dream. For everyone else, especially all who care more about the welfare of mothers and their small children than about fulfilling the feminist agenda, it is or should represent a nightmare. Mercifully, given the manifest political unfeasibility of the idea, we can be thankful it will never be become a reality. Unfortunately, until the government fully wakes up to that fact, it will continue to sleep-walk supposing the idea feasible, wrecking private-sector nursery provision in the process. Nice one, Tony.

Posted by David Conway at 04:27 PM | Comments (1)