Civitas Blog

Apparently having taken little heed of the intense criticism fired at the initial introduction of a “baby curriculum”, the government has provoked a new riot amongst pre-school education experts.

The number of privately educated pupils being accepted into the UK’s top 20 universities is gaining over state educated pupils, despite government policy to encourage universities to widen their intake. The BBC’s somewhat aggressive headline ‘Private pupils grab top courses’ makes it sound almost like their achievement is more down to their superior grappling technique, perhaps practiced during the push and shove of the tuck shop queue!

According to Illinois University professor Lilian Katz, we are getting our children to learn to read too soon. ‘It can be seriously damaging for children who see themselves as inept at reading too early,’ Professor Katz told the Guardian.
But the real burning issue in the UK is that we have not been getting our children to read early – because of poor methodologies.

The Conservatives have barely stuck their head above the parapet with their new education green paper but the backlash from the self-appointed champions of the disadvantaged has already begun. Fiona Millar attacks their policies as re-heated Thatcherism.

Admittedly, the Tories have left themselves open to this sort of criticism. Their policies are a bit of mishmash that combine suggestions for greater parent choice and hesitant supply-side reforms with centrally driven directives that threaten teacher autonomy every bit as much as the New Labour regime. These policies include targets to get every child reading by the age of 6 using synthetic phonics and more streaming by ability within schools. The problem, as we have commented before, is that no matter how well designed these ideas are, imposing them centrally often produces perverse consequences. The, originally Conservative implemented, National Curriculum is a case in point: centralisation leads to politicisation and the easy corruption of teaching by whatever ideologies are nested within Whitehall.

Echoing the calls of a Civitas publication, The Corruption of the Curriculum, the chairman of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, Michael Spinney, has launched an offensive against the teaching of “fashionable causes” enshrined in the National Curriculum: ‘Increasingly, we live in an era where teaching and learning are sacrificed in favour of fashionable causes, often with disastrous effects upon standards of learning.’

In response, independent schools are introducing their own curriculum, which focuses on the no-frills basics such as spelling in English, times tables in maths and dates in history.

The Times Education Supplement (TES) today reports a battle between teachers and management at a City Academy in Middlesborough. Teachers are taking industrial action against the Unity City Academy senior management team, following a demand that each teacher hands in a lesson plan for each lesson.

Will the latest - and most powerful - blow finally force the government to review its primary school strategies?

A report on standards for Cambridge University’s Primary Review published today, finds conclusively that although there have been improvements in primary maths and science, there have not in literacy – since the 1950s.

More powers, new targets, less tolerance for failure, a boost to several central government run schemes (Teach First and Teach Next), are the only discernible content of Brown’s latest speech on education. The tone of the speech makes it sound as if the government, having annexed and occupied the education system decades ago, still finds itself combating a never-ending insurgency of ‘failure’. These forces of failure cannot be tolerated and must be eradicated.

The government is using the words ‘carping’ and ‘doom-mongers’ again. This can mean only one thing: that exam results are out.

Sure enough this year’s GCSE results have been released, showing a 2.3 percentage point increase on last year’s results. Schools Minister Jim Knight hoped to pip critics to the post by arguing that there was no room for carping as the government had reached its target of 60% ‘good’ (A*-C) grades, ‘a year early’. The results are unlikely to silence critics however, particularly once maths and English are brought in.

The highly problematic outcomes of testing in schools is definitely coming to a halt.
Across the media today are the early conclusions of an enquiry into education. The Cambridge University-led Primary Review today published its interim report with depressing findings. Based on interviews with parents, teachers, children and members of the community, the Review team headed by Professor Robin Alexander reported ‘deep anxiety’ amongst children. Whilst a wide range of issues was found to be troubling children, from pollution to terrorism, ‘scary’ testing was something which was highlighted as worrisome.

The frustrations of being a teacher in the state sector are neatly encapsulated in the pages of today’s Times Education Supplement (TES). There is the usual medley of difficulties faced daily in schools: the weekly discussion about issues with testing and exam arrangements, the independence of schools jeopardised by central control and of course the still-raging school dinners debate. But it is two pieces in particular which illustrate the contradictions in teaching today. The first piece is an editorial by the chief executive of the General Teaching Council (GTC) arguing that teachers need to earn their professionalism; the second piece tells us of the government’s aspiration to emulate the supermarket chain Tesco in schools.

Civitas has marked the start of Children's Book Week (www.booktrusted.co.uk/cbw/) by making available for the first time in a commercial edition a phonics-based reading course that has achieved sensational results with children from all backgrounds, including the most deprived.

Irina Tyk wrote The Butterfly Book in 1993 to make available to other teachers and parents her method of teaching reading using phonics - a system that teaches children to read by recognising the 44 sounds that make up the English language.

In August we published a report questioning the value of higher national achievement at A-level. We were interested in examining whether yet another year of rising grades were a useful indicator of achievement and in particular, how these record grades were being obtained. One of the main ways that A-level grades have been increased has been through the introduction of the AS-level re-takes. This in itself tells us that the rise in A-level grades is not straightforwardly down to greater knowledge and skills amongst A-level students.

Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has just announced that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority will be overhauled into an independent watchdog equivalent to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England or the Food Standards Agency. This rather raises the question of what exactly the QCA is at the moment, considering that it is barely ever mentioned by ministers without the accompanying authoritative claim that it is an independent ‘guardian of standards’, and that an even more independent international panel has described the resulting exam system as one of the most tightly regulated in the world. Just how much more independent can you get? Apparently, much more.

'Pressure to reform tests’ runs the headline on the front of today’s Times Education Supplement (TES). The article reports that newly published evidence presented to the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee shows that criticism of current testing arrangements in schools have reached a climax. The TES reveals that out of the 52 submissions to the Committee, just one depicted today’s testing regime favourably. Needless to say, that one submission came from the old DfES.

Hugo Chavez certainly knows how to shore up his socialist consensus in Venezuela for the long term: ban all schools from teaching anything else. He has already ensured that college level students won’t be able to study medicine without first pouring through Marx’s Das Kapital and some of Fidel Castro’s speeches. But his tactics for co-opting private schools into his preferred ideology could really do with some refining. After all, his aggressive stance is attracting a lot of bad press. If he had only studied New Labour tactics, he could have learnt how to bring many private schools to their knees without anyone noticing!

One of Gordon Brown’s first moves as Prime Minister was to stir that alphabet soup of government departments. The DfES* was split up, a few bits of the DTI** got mixed in and we ended up with the DCSF*** and DIUS****. One might imagine this was little more than an excuse to get some fresh headed paper, stick a new logo on the departments' biros and create some new junior ministerial posts to reward the government’s most outspoken parliamentary supporters.

Weak reading lies at the heart of the educational apartheid between the advantaged and disadvantaged, and England’s low social mobility. The inability to read properly is the single greatest handicap to progress both in school and adult life.

As of this week, all children in primary schools will be taught to read using 'first and fast' synthetic phonics. This means that children's first experience in school of learning to read will be to learn 44 letter sounds which they will be taught to blend together - or 'synthesise' - to form words.

Background: despite additional billions invested in education, a significant achievement gap between rich and poor persists. [p2] At the heart of this lie poor reading skills:

• Original 'flagship' National Literacy Strategy has failed to drive up reading standards

• Government policy was based on flawed methods touted for decades by 'trendy' academics

This government’s move to systematic synthetic phonics in the classroom brings new hope that children of all backgrounds will be taught to read properly, according to a report by the independent think-tank Civitas.

As of September, schools will have the power to apply for parenting orders. This means that head teachers will be able to ask the courts to impose a requirement on parents to attend guidance sessions where they receive help and support in dealing with their children.

In the wake of the annual controversy sparked by inflated A-level results, real evidence has emerged that GCSEs are similarly suffering a crisis of quality - writes Thomas Woods. Writing in today’s Telegraph newspaper, a languages examiner has revealed the existence of a co-ordinated system of ‘teaching to the test’. In the French Oral section pupils are at liberty to memorise a string of answers which they are assured will be required in the exam. The writing section (which is now 100 per cent coursework) involves students reeling off identical essays using ‘writing frames’ already set out for them by the teachers. Token attempts at variation are provided with the individuals’ choice of holiday and weekend activity.

It's not the efforts of A-level students in question, but the government's efforts to educate them.

A new report released today by Civitas argues that A-levels have become more about preparing the government for the next election than preparing students for their future; that knowledge and skills have been forfeited to make government policy add up, and that students have been discouraged from taking subjects with riskier 'grade-returns'.

The Results Generation, exposes the way in which the government has focused on artificially generating indicators of improvement instead of focusing on actually improving schools. This prioritisation of grade gaining over quality devalues both A-levels and students.

Key Stage 2 results published yesterday by the government don't stand up to scrutiny. Instead, teachers have been compelled to generate artificial results, at horrifying costs to pupils.

Results released by the DCSF show that 80 per cent and 77 per cent of pupils have reached the government's expected standard, Level 4, in literacy and numeracy respectively. However it is widely accepted by educationalists that Key Stage 2 results cannot and should not be taken at face value.

'Not only are these results exaggerated, achieving them has had hugely damaging consequences for children' says Anastasia de Waal. 'The only people these "record" scores serve is the government.'

Cameron gave a much publicised – as well as much satirised by the newspapers’ cartoonists – speech on Tuesday. School discipline was the theme in, as the Times Education Supplement puts it, ‘a speech designed to appeal to traditional Tory values’. Appealing to Conservative values was something more than one commentator considered rather urgent, with many a quip about Cameron’s inability to discipline his own party printed the following day. But looking at the content of the Tory leader’s speech, it would seem that concern rather than ridicule was in order.

Passing a lesser-known London park this morning, it was pleasing to see a neat phalanx of young men raising the Union Jack - writes Peter Smith. Rather than joining their peers for a ‘night on the tiles’ to mark the end of school, these young men – teenage boys, if you will – are members of the Scouting movement. At 8 am today, thousands of Scouts from across the world celebrated the one hundredth birthday of an organisation that has instilled civic virtues in tens of millions of young men.

One wonders what Robert Baden-Powell would make of the Scout Association today. Its beginnings were austere: a handful of boys taken on a week-long ‘experimental camp’ at Brownsea Island, Dorset, followed by the re-publication of field craft books originally written for soldiers in the Boer War. But Baden-Powell was (as marketing strategists say) ‘on to a good thing’ and the organisation stands as it does today, with 28 million members today.

What’s the secret to the Scout Movement’s success? Many famous leaders in politics, science, exploration and culture are proud to be still associated with one of their childhood pastimes. In a word, its values. Scouts are taught to become self-reliant, responsible, caring and committed members of society; in other words, they become adults. Baden-Powell mixed working class and public schooled children to promote integration and team work across social divides. The formation of young minds according to a common syllabus but with plenty of scope for individual challenge and creativity provides a keen template to educationalists, social commentators and politicians today. It remains a showcase for how entrepreneurial people can better the lives of many others without the interference of central government. Scouts everywhere, happy birthday, and here’s to another hundred years.

The call to scrap GCSE coursework takes on a new resonance in light of the most recent evidence. An investigation for BBC Radio Five Live, conducted by the Teacher Support Network, has shown that the pressures on schools to raise results has led to widespread cheating.

Asked this morning on BBC Breakfast if there was one history book he would recommend, historian and Observer columnist Tristram Hunt answered “Our Island Story”. This of course is H.E Marshall’s enchanting children’s history book which Civitas brought back to life in 2005. Since this single mention, just hours ago, sales of Our Island Story have rocketed. How we know is because, incredibly, the book’s hardback sales rating on Amazon has zoomed up to 25 on their Hot 100 Books list. (To give you an idea, all but the very latest of the Harry Potters are just a few ahead in the sales league).

When the Civitas report on Blair’s failure to improve education over the last decades was released, Jim Knight MP squared off against Robert Coe, whose work we have cited, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (approximately 12 minutes in from the beginning). To the whole nation, he denied that exams had got any easier during Labour’s time in government and that an A level today had exactly the same value as a decade earlier. Perhaps he had no other choice but to take this line. The dramatic rise in exam results had to be due to the prudent stewardship of New Labour’s education reforms. What a difference a couple of weeks make! Now a new government adviser acknowledges that A levels have lost value at least in his area of Physics and Maths.

It is a response utterly characteristic of New Labour: ‘deal’ with a problem – generally years late – by creating a completely new one.

As we’d suspected, under Brown the direction of school reform is not going to change. For the last ten years, a critic’s template might well have been produced to pull out each time a new schools’ scheme was announced. Initiative after initiative showed almost uncanny consistency in managing to evade the causes of the crisis at hand. Continuing this trend was yesterday’s announcement of a secondary curriculum overhaul, a move, theoretically, to give teachers more flexibility.

It will take some time to unpick the latest additions and subtractions of the National Curriculum. But the main theme this round seems to be lowering children’s horizons. More compulsory elements of the History Curriculum have been axed, reduced down to essentials like the Glorious Revolution in order to tie into the requirement for pupils to understand the relationship between the Monarchy and Parliament. These reductions have been smuggled in under the guise of greater ‘flexibility’. If this were true, it would be admirable: allow teachers and schools to use their professional expertise to design a course that they think works for each class.

But there won’t be much opportunity for this while the school has to teach pupils how to open a bank account or how to calculate the size of their ‘carbon footprint’. If you want a vision of our children’s future, imagine trips to the Roman ruins at Cirencester cancelled so that the whole class can be shown the wonders of the local bank. Or instead of a trip to a local university to see the latest super-computer or MRI scanner in action, the local dump to spot how much rubbish their parents are failing to recycle!

See our report, The Corruption of the Curriculum (previewable on Amazon) to understand how we got here.

Today we hear from the BBC that a well-known and highly successful private girls’ school, Colston Girls’ School in Bristol, is taking steps to move into the state sector.

As a comment response to Wellington Grey's plea to AQA to save Physics as a body of knowledge rather than a series of opinions developed by a mass media consensus, Dr Debbie Barnett wrote:

I am also a Science teacher, and although not a Physicist, I share your despair at the diluting of Science in the vain attempt to make it accessible to the masses! I teach Chemistry and Biology and feel that the objectivity of Science and been replaced by a need for pupils to use language in a way that requires an eloquence not always seen in even the best Scientists. AQA have replaced proper Science with newspaper Science. Pupils are switching off, Science teachers are looking for ways out of teaching or jobs in private schools so they can teach the IGCSE.

As Blair prepared his goodbyes this week, we’ve been looking at his record in schools. Our verdict? Improved results denote a decline in standards. Have a look at the full report which examines the ways in which results have been boosted, here.

Yet more trials for testing and tests this week. The General Teaching Council has called for the standard assessment tests (Sats) taken by pupils at ages 7, 11 and 14 years old, to be scrapped. The teaching standards watchdog argues that the tests are doing nothing for standards, simply stressing out pupils and teachers.

Echoing many of the problems our latest report The Corruption of the Curriculum has examined, Wellington Grey writes in an open letter to AQA and the Department for Education:

I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers — if there will be any.

I graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and pursued a lucrative career in economics which I eventually abandoned to teach. Economics and business, though vastly easier than my subject, and more financially rewarding, bored me. I went into teaching to return to the world of science and to, in what extent I could, convey to pupils why one would love a subject so difficult.

For a time I did. For a time, I was happy.

The school curriculum has been corrupted by political interference, according to a new report from independent think-tank Civitas. The traditional subject areas have been hi-jacked to promote fashionable causes such as gender awareness, the environment and anti-racism, while teachers are expected to help to achieve the government's social goals instead of imparting a body of academic knowledge to their students.

See full press release.
Embargo: 0.01am, Monday 11 June

On Wednesday the Daily Mail ran a piece quoting Civitas, about the shortage of science and maths teacher which is leading to more mixed-ability classes in comprehensive schools. The concern is that this is not only diluting learning, but exacerbating poor pupil behaviour.

A secondary science teacher from Brighton who read and agreed with the article wrote in to us about her own experiences in the classroom. Here, in diary form, is what she considers to be the underlying reasons for disruptive pupils – as well as her solutions.

'Today I have again been up against the coalface so to speak. With an insight, perhaps we may not entirely blame pupils for poor behaviour in schools. Let me explain

In the Sunday Times today David Cameron responds to critics of his grammar schools’ policy by presenting everyone who disagrees with him as a backwoodsman entertaining policy delusions. But the strongest critics of Mr Cameron’s education policy are not diehard defenders of grammar schools. They fully accept the need for policies to be modernised and presented in the most persuasive language, but argue that Mr Cameron is not going about modernisation in the most effective way.

It’s been a week of tussles for education. As the grammar school row within the Conservative Party rumbles on – Graham Brady quits but then the Tories appear to ‘climb-down’, as education secretary Alan Johnson put it – the only thing about Tory policy which is clear is that the party is in disarray. Alan Johnson’s contribution to this week’s education debates has however not been limited to commentary. The education secretary’s attentions have been on the other set of schools some regard as ‘elitist’ - private ones. Johnson wants independent schools to do more to justify their charitable status. In what comes across as a bit of an own-goal in light of New Labour’s tireless emphasis on education, Johnson has proposed that one way to do so would be for private schools to ‘lend’ their teachers to the state sector. The implication is that private school teachers are better. This is something which would doubtless be hotly contested by the many who argue that it’s the conditions in private schools which are better, rather than the staff. Talk of private vs. state sector conditions brings us on to today’s education controversy: the Department for Education and Skills’ warnings over the dangers of getting children to put up their hands in class.

The Conservatives u-turn on grammar schools has dominated this week’s education news. That there was rebellion in the Tory ranks was not surprising, grammar schools being a pinnacle of previous Conservative education policy. What was surprising, however, was the fact that the rebellion struck only now. Cameron, Willets and Osborne have all said that grammar schools will not feature on the new Conservative agenda. Yes, this week Willets attempted to dismantle the entire pro-grammar schools case, arguing that grammars did the opposite of what many conservatives believe: arrest, rather than increase social mobility. Nevertheless, it has been quite clear from the day that Cameron slid into his commanding saddle – or rather since his bid for the saddle - that the new leaders of the Tory party are not interested in Conservative ideology. Nor are they pursuing a new ideology: the Conservatives’ route to power is a haphazard one, directed by polls rather than principles. A political strategy that might be dubbed the pursuit of All Ways in contrast to New Labour’s Third Way. The problem, and the cause of in-fighting, is that the Conservative backbenchers are torn. On most days, party members want to get into power no matter what; yet on the days that the pillars of their core beliefs are whipped out from under their feet…well, their feet get suddenly chilled.

The element which has worried me most about education reforms under New Labour, is the way that learning has been squeezed out in order to accommodate improvement. It sounds like an oxymoron of course, but the Government’s desire to be seen to be doing well, as educationalist Alan Smithers once so pithily put it, has often forfeited children the opportunity of genuinely doing well.

Anyone hoping for a change in attitude to schools at the next election will be sorely disappointed by the news that the Tories have cloned their new education policy from Labour. In a repentant tone, David Willetts casts aside grammar schools and embraces Comprehensive education. The disingenuous reasoning behind this move: ‘We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright, poor kids… This is a widespread belief but we just have to recognise that there is overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.’

Widespread it may be despite the sustained attack on selection, but it also happens to be true. Indeed, this ‘overwhelming evidence’ seems to point in the opposite direction to which David Willetts is now facing. As Alan Smithers has pointed out, Northern Ireland retains a grammar school system and has significantly superior exam results. In 2005, 31.2 per cent of A level results were A grades compared with the UK average of 22.8. Even the overall A level pass rate was higher suggesting that the selective system offers a boost for even the less academically able students. 71 per cent of GCSE results were A*-C grades compared with the UK average of 61.2. These results show fairly conclusively that one current system of selective education benefits all pupils far more than the current comprehensive system.

Just a few more weeks remain under the leadership of the man whose realisation of ‘education, education, education’ we’ve been witnessing for the past ten years. With school improvement Tony Blair’s chief priority, the all-important question is, how has he done? The verdict? Better on effort than strategy.

The Sunday Times reports that the new Thomas Deacon Academy has not found room for building a playground amongst its (mostly taxpayer) £46.4 million funding. Justifying this move is the claim that all the pupils of this school will be so enthused by the curriculum that they will not require playtime in which to let off steam (a situation that one teacher blogger considers to be without precedent). The project manager of the academy even makes the further claim that removing all unsupervised time from the school day will prevent bullying. True in the same way that stomach stapling can be pretty effective at tackling obesity.

Looking at the school on Peterborough’s official website, the situation doesn’t appear quite as horrendous as the Times article implies. There is indeed no playground but a combination of grass and artificial pitches are there for structured sports activities (more than many schools can offer) and in the not unlikely event of this no-playtime policy falling flat on its face, these areas could probably be used to kick a football around.

We learn today that despite a 5.9% rise in school fees, the independent sector is thriving. Annual figures published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) have garnered particular attention this year, with the chairman of the ISC, Nigel Richardson, suggesting that private schools are finding themselves especially in demand because they ‘are providing something that in less complicated times families might have been better able to provide for themselves’. What Mr Richardson refers to is the time parents spend with their children. But does the private sector’s appeal for parents not lie in something much simpler: a generally superior standard of education?

I remember calling the LibDem’s office in Brussels a couple of months ago, asking for their education spokesperson in the European Parliament (or even an MEP with a particular interest in education) and being told there was no-one because ‘education is not an EU competence and is still the exclusive domain of member states’. This is true in the sense that the EU Commission has no independent power to propose law in this area; EU related policy on education is instead based on voluntary cooperation between the ministers of member states meeting in the European Council. Member states retain the right to veto any initiative passed in this forum and such initiatives are, at least technically, non-binding.

Yet there can be little doubt the EU is carving out a role for itself in education, coveted in particular by constant reference to teaching the ‘European Dimension’. These anomalies are typically tagged onto documents relating to the Lisbon Agenda (with its focus on lifelong learning and the like as part of the drive to make the EU ‘the most competitive economy in the world’) and various other EU-funded exchange and youth programmes. The EU budget for Education and Culture is now somewhat incredibly 1 221 270 895 euros. And then we have the Bologna Process, which has been discreetly usurped by the Commission, and subject to a damning report by the Commons Education Select Committee released yesterday.

Next month, Warwick Mansell is to bring out a book which will finally turn speculation and guesstimates about the extent of test coaching in primary schools into definitive, and above all, official figures.

BBC News Online reports this week that 'Penalty notices or on-the-spot fines for parents whose children play truant do not work’. According to a study by Kingston-upon-Thames LEA’s principal education welfare officer, Ming Zhang, the government’s truancy tackling strategies have failed. The main conclusion of Zhang’s report is that irresponsible parents, whom the current truanting mechanisms primarily target, are not to blame for truancy. Whether this is the case or not, one thing’s for certain: fining parents isn’t getting errant pupils to school.

The new Educational Conscription blog is chronicling the burgeoning opposition to government proposals to extend compulsory education up to the age of 18. The big shift in policy is not the increased availability of further education to young people, a long held and frequently frustrated government aspiration. Instead, it is the use of coercion, with the threat of sanction, to ensure young people comply with these objectives. Fearing that the value of their educational initiatives won’t be evident, the government wants to give young people an offer they can’t refuse. Hence, the correct approach is to examine this as a civil liberties issue – not as just another initiative in the myriads of education reforms.

The DfES ought to be proud: they’ve cracked the child psyche and come up with the best way to encourage good behaviour in formerly wayward and wild pupils, namely, for schools and teachers to offer ‘prizes’ and increase their use of ‘encouraging language and gestures’. This is some of the guidance offered by the Elton Report (something commissioned 18 years ago – which, incidentally, is a longer time than I’ve been alive!), that the government has just brought in.

The guidance also states that ‘a rewards/sanctions ratio of at least 5:1 is an indication of a school with an effective rewards and sanctions system’ - which makes me wonder exactly what constitutes an ‘effective system’ in today’s society. Though I’m all for teachers being encouraging and supportive, I’d like to point out that whilst we may be children, we’re not ‘dense’. It is painfully obvious when a teacher is being genuine in their praise and when false praise is used. Words may be cheap, but they are more ‘effective’ when used sparingly.

The Office of National Statistics' release of the latest Social Trends report has brought the issues facing Britain about which we are most concerned into sharp relief. David Green was interviewed on Radio 4's Today program this morning on the consequences of increasing lone parents (listen again here).

Robert Whelan was interviewed by the Daily Mail, commenting on several problems that the social trends report highlights. He also commented on the dangerous trend, sanctioned by the government, of treating poor pupil behaviour differently according to their ethnic background. Minority children over the years have gone from feeling the stings of racism to experiencing the patronising stereotypes of so-called 'anti-racism'. All without even the brief respite of being judged equally as peers regardless of the colour of their skin or religious background.

And finally, Nick Seddon has an article published in the Guardian on local government leisure trusts and their misuse of charitable status to redirect funds from the voluntary sector into providing statutory services.

The Times Education Supplement’s [TES] front page headline, ‘One in four parents who home-educate children provides little or no teaching’ ties neatly in with the alarming news that our already very high secondary school truancy rate ‘is at least 18% higher than thought’ [BBC News]. The connection between home schooling and truancy lies in the revelation that ‘some schools are encouraging parents of persistent truants to register as home educators to get their attendance up’. The other connector is bullying: 1 in 3 pupils truant because they are being bullied – and it is thought that a significant number of children are removed from school and educated at home in order to evade bullying. But the ultimate connection is, as stated by the TES headline: that some home schooling might boil down to truancy.

Education secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement that school dropouts will be criminalized has met a mixed response. ‘Attendance orders’ will be slapped down on teenagers detailing a course that they should attend; teens who breach the order face a £50 fixed penalty or prosecution. As Alex Frean points out in The Times, criminalizing school non-attendance is not in itself a new concept in our education system. What’s new is that the move criminalizes pupil rather than parent, and of course that the offence applies to over 16-year-olds.

As was commented on here last week, Leeds University recently cancelled at the last minute an advertised public lecture organised by its German department on how the Nazis fostered anti-Semitism in the Middle East.

The University claimed the lecture was cancelled because its German department had not gone through the mandatory procedures for such events that would have involved a risk-assessment exercise that would have enabled it to provide adequate stewarding arrangements. Because it hadn’t, so the University claimed, the lecture had to be cancelled on safety grounds.

The University vehemently denied cancelling the lecture in response to complaints from its Muslim students.

Below is the text of an email to the University’s Vice-Chancellor sent in advance of the cancellation of the lecture by an engineering student there who, apart from his name, signed himself former head of its ‘Palestinian Solidarity Group’.

According to The Times interpretation, splashed across their front page today, ‘middle-class pupils face losing out on university places if their parents have degrees and professional jobs,’ after the University and College Admissions Service [UCAS] announced land-mark changes to the university admissions system. Prospective students will now be asked to declare both whether their parents went to university and what type of job they are in. The Times’ assertion that this move could potentially lead to middle-class pupils being discriminated against is tied to UCAS’ confirmation that the underlying motive is to ‘support the continuing efforts of universities and colleges to widen participation.’

‘Every school in England should set up a council so pupils can have a voice in the appointment of teachers and running the school, a Commons committee says,’ reports the BBC News website today under the headline ‘School councils a must, say MPs.’ Based on research done by London University’s Institute of Education [where, notably, most government-used policy evidence seems to come from] the Education and Skills Select Committee are advising that the government should make school councils compulsory.

Who is going to win this lottery? It looks as though the answer might be the private sector – and not social integration.

The Telegraph reports today that over 200,000 pupils in the UK will miss out on their first choice of secondary school this year. Going by last year’s figures, the problem is concentrated particularly in inner-city areas. In 2006, 33% of Birmingham students failed to get their first choice place. In London, Wandsworth, Brent and Westminster faced similar figures of 36%, 28% and 32% respectively.

Meanwhile in Brighton, the Labour run local authority has made the arguably laudable attempt to clamp down on selection via house price by introducing a lottery for oversubscribed school places. The aim is to prevent further economic and social segregation that the limited number of places in good schools has managed to entrench up until now.

School ‘improvement’ strategies which alienate teachers and thereby set schools back, have become a recurring theme under the New Labour government.

‘Class war over classics’ is the Times Education Supplement’s front-page headline. Following the Government’s list of books in their Key Stage 3 reforms, the TES reports that staff are planning to simply disregard the diktat: ‘They said it was misjudged, politically motivated and “will not be taught”’. Whilst education secretary Alan Johnson describes the texts in question [for example, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] as “untouchables”, critics such as the English Association secondary committee’s is quoted as saying: “I would be stunned if any of these writers are taught.” Although anti-elitism has been referred to in the argument for dropping texts like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, the main objection to keeping these texts on the syllabus is that they are too difficult – rather than too irrelevant - for Year 7 and 8 pupils. The TES quotes one teacher as saying: “ Is whoever chose these writers prepared to come and teach them to my bottom set Year 7s?”

But are the educational community underestimating pupils, and perhaps thinking about the test levels they must get their pupils to reach? The ‘classics clash’ coincides with new research from London University’s Institute of Education, which throws into question both teachers’ expectations and the ability sets pupils are put into. The research, which shows that ‘many secondary school pupils in England find their school work too easy and want harder lessons,’ found that between 18% and 25% of 13 and 14 year-old pupils want to be in a higher ability set in order to do harder work. According to Professor Susan Hallam who led the research: “It seems highly likely that what is happening is that teachers’ expectations are not sufficiently high for quite a lot of students.”
Does this mean then, that the Government’s push for more challenging classic texts will benefit pupils? Probably not. The trouble is, that with the pressures put upon teachers to achieve targets in the Key Stage 3 assessments, harder texts won’t equate with more of a challenge for pupils. As Dr Bethan Marshall from King’s College London predicts, “teachers will pick a few short stories or excerpts to get around it.” One clear lesson from the debate, an increasingly old lesson, is that all these central diktats – on what’s taught and what’s tested - are doing little for learning. Were schools allowed to respond a little more to their pupils, rather than just Whitehall, the curriculum might become more ‘fit for purpose’ [that is, learning - though it’s easy to forget].

With half of the Europe project team conducting research on the continent, this week's Tuesday blog entry will look sadly neglected. In the meantime, we can take a quick look to the US where a school choice revolution might be finally beginning in earnest after a few faltering starts. The sign of any real choices in education for parents seems as far off as ever in the UK. A recent report that I have compiled of the overseas evidence in support of parents having a free choice of schools to send their children and the British government's inability to include this in their reforms has been uploaded here.

News-wise the education scene has been comparatively calm this week. That is to say, no senior DfES official has resigned, no national attainment results have been published and there hasn’t been a curriculum overhaul [that’s scheduled for next week]. Announcements and judgements have nevertheless been made and it appears that no news [relatively speaking] doesn’t mean good news…

I wasn’t immediately enamoured with the DfES’s new plan, based on an independent report by Sir Keith Ajegbo, to ensure every lesson on the national curriculum teaches the values of diversity, race relations and multiculturalism. There are the natural anxieties that the extra requirements would just get in the way of teaching core subjects properly and involve teachers having to push the latest government propaganda that wouldn’t make it past the class clown without being brutally mocked. However, my mind changed as soon as I heard that a similar, and already highly successful, scheme is already in full swing at the London School of Economics.

In terms of column inches, the announcement that British values will be taught in schools has been this week’s top education story – see David Conway’s blog, posted yesterday. But by no means is this topic now closed: the Daily Mail and the Times Education Supplement [TES] have both revisited the story with relish today. This time however, although the two papers take quite different attitudes to it, the focus is on the ‘diversity’ aspect of these forthcoming British values. The Mail ran the story under the headline ‘New curriculum will “make every lesson politically correct”’, stating that ‘children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science’. The TES’s reporting on the other hand, was considerably more cheerful, running the story under the headline ‘Tackle racism head-on.’

On the back of a DfES-commissioned study by PricewaterhouseCoopers [PwC], the government is predicted to respond to the current head teacher shortage by bringing in an additional management layer of non-teacher personnel. Bearing in mind the reason for the current recruitment crisis – a barrage of ever-changing and often contradictory directives – the government is responding in what has become trademark New Labour strategy: not addressing the issue but conjuring up an expensive sticking plaster. Unfortunately bolstered by the PwC report, the DfES’s attitude is not to trouble-shoot but rather to trouble entrench.

Some think that, within any liberal democracy, the state must be entirely secular and neutral as between different religions and none, as both France and the USA are. State schools, on this view, must be entirely secular in their teaching and ethos.

Others deny liberal democratic values to be incompatible either with religious establishment or with the state-funding of faith schools. To be compatible with liberal democratic values, all that is required of a state is that it extend tolerance to all tolerant religions, and impose no element of coercion in matters of worship, religious education, or religious conscience.

This afternoon Ruth Kelly, the now communities and local government secretary and [ironically of course] former education secretary, will announce why it is that she decided to send a child of hers with learning difficulties to a private school. Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday broke the story that a Labour minister had decided to take their child out of the state school system. In a rather extraordinary and highly uncharacteristic display of discretion, the MoS did not publish the name of the minister in question ‘in order to protect their identity’. The reaction to the story has been interesting.

The chancellor’s speech on Wednesday was a critical one. More than a pre-budget indication of things to come financial, it was a pre-prime minister speech, an indicator of things to come under a new leadership. What a pity that a speech so critical for Brown was so uncritical of Blair. Despite the Blair-Brown personal spats, the forecast looks as though new leadership will not signal many new directions. Brown is set to roll out more of the same, apparently resolved to continue Blair’s policies, with only a little tweaking here and there.

OfSTED critics - an ever-increasing community - frequently attack the inspectorate’s judgement scale. Virtually very time that OfSTED publishes national evaluations of how schools are doing, the teaching community protests that they have ‘raised the bar’. In light of how deep the inspectorate’s flaws run and how fundamentally defective the very premise of the inspection system is, concern about OfSTED’s grading system has always seemed to me to be redundant.

‘Give us the freedom to teach’ was the smartly revamped Times Education Supplement front-page headline on Friday. A TES-commissioned poll of 600 teachers showed that two thirds of teachers believe the national curriculum to be overly prescriptive. Not a surprising finding – though perhaps that as many as a third of the teachers did not consider the curriculum to be too prescribed, is. Connected to this finding was that over half of the teachers polled thought that pupil behaviour would improve were schools allowed to set their own curriculum. [Again, what is surprising is the fact that nearly half didn’t think that the rigid curriculum related to the current epidemic of poor behaviour in schools.] Commenting on the poll’s findings, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers argued that both Conservative and Labour governments had made the same mistake of not giving teachers sufficient flexibility.

Read more about the TES poll’s findings here:
http://www.tes.co.uk/2308499

On Saturday, the BBC’s education correspondent, Mike Baker, published an article about a ‘redemptive’ literacy strategy, Reading Recovery. A New Zealand import, Reading Recovery is a ‘highly structured intervention strategy for rescuing children who are struggling to take even the first steps towards reading’. Using the scheme, children whose reading abilities are below what they should be, can, in a matter of weeks, raise their reading level enough to put them ‘back on track’. Research just out on the impact of Reading Recovery shows that children on the programme improved at a rate four times faster than those who were not. This evidence of its effectiveness, together with rising concern about the number of primary school-leavers who are unable to read properly, is sparking new debate as to whether the government should invest in the strategy. Whilst very effective, Reading Recovery is also very expensive, costing between £2,000 and £2,500 per child. Though the courses are short, the expense is incurred by the fact that they work on a one-to-one basis between the child and a specially trained teacher. As the BBC article points out, using the programme in schools is something that both the last and present government have considered – and implemented – before. However, both governments ultimately decided not to prioritise the cost of Reading Recovery in their long-term budgets. Yet, high levels of poor literacy amongst children seem to be prompting reconsideration. To not invest in early intervention programmes such as Reading Recovery, as the BBC’s Mike Baker points out, would be a false economy. Rather than waiting until secondary school with proposals such as ‘catch-up classes’, or worst still, never remedying poor literacy, the widespread introduction of Reading Recovery would be very valuable. At the same time, however, we must be careful about being satisfied in the schools system with redemptive methods. Not always, but often, poor reading skills by Year 2 (age 6/7 years old) signify flaws in the Literacy Strategy. And thus, whilst it is good investment to include Reading Recovery in the budget, the underlying need for intervention must be addressed: we need to remember that its requirement may denote a failure in methodology.

‘I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list’.

So complained one final-year history undergraduate at Bristol University, according to a story in today’s Times, upon learning that all he would receive by way of formal tuition this year for the £1,200 he had just been charged in tuition fees would be 2 hours a week of lectures.

When his cohort of history undergraduates first arrived at Bristol, they had reportedly been informed they would receive a minimum of six hours a week tuition in their final year.

The head of the history department invoked ‘incredible pressures on resources’ to justify that reduction.

The nineteenth century theology don the Reverend Charles Spooner used to complain of his students having hissed all his mystery lectures. Today’s undergraduates are complaining of missing all their history lectures in a quite different sense from that which dear old Spooner had had in mind.

On what are their tuition fees being spent is the question one cannot help asking on reading the story. One would like to hope on bulk purchases for the University library of
Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall's Our Island Story . From today's story, a read of it sounds likely to give far more instruction to Bristol's history undergraduates than they shall be receiving from their lecturers.

On Friday, OfSTED announced that - put crudely - boring lessons and boring teachers are to blame for unruly behaviour in schools – not class size, an over-stuffed and over-prescribed curriculum and demoralised teachers. A crude synopsis of the report but not as crude as OfSTED's assessment of the situation. In light of the way in which government directives have straitjacketed teachers via OfSTED, forcing them to follow often inappropriate and un-engaging curricula and positively disallowing any room for tailoring classes to pupils, the inspectorate’s conclusion is as unpalatable as it is crude. Giving pupils ‘wider choice’ in the curriculum, say OfSTED, is the key to better behaviour. If only schools were able to. What is more, the climax of the injustice accompanies OfSTED’s observation that those schools with a high teacher-turnover are the ones with the worst behaviour. Whilst this is surely true, OfSTED seems to be blaming the wrong party. Retention survey after retention survey has shown us that it is the incessant pressure to produce reams of paperwork and fulfil endless tick-box criteria – activities enforced by OfSTED - that is driving teachers out at alarming rates. Public criticism of OfSTED’s conclusions in the report Improving Behaviour came in the form of comebacks from the teaching unions. Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers made a cutting retort: ‘It is difficult to understand how OfSTED has come to this conclusion when it does not measure the quality of teaching during inspections.’ Yet interestingly, the NUT did not point the finger at OfSTED’s straitjacketing as a contributor to poor pupil behaviour, going on only to say: ‘Bad pupil behaviour is not determined by a single factor. Frustration at the curriculum is not an excuse for disrupting lessons and OfSTED is wrong to suggest it is.’

Particularly pertinent in light of the new anti-ageism legislation was the TES’ front-page headline on Friday: ‘New staff teach best: research explodes accepted myth of experience as young teachers outperform their colleagues’
But behind the Institute of Education and Nottingham University’s findings lies a rather different story.

Last week the Liberal Democrats proposed dropping primary testing at their party conference - and in light of the damaging distortions entrenched in the SATs, how right they are.

Some deep-seated problems, including high crime, falling education standards, unsustainable immigration, the low quality of the NHS, and rising welfare dependency are not being properly confronted by our political leaders. In particular, political discussion of public services like health and education still seems wedged halfway between the age of collectivism and a more consumer-friendly alternative.

Discussions are taking place across the political spectrum about the next steps and Recalibrating the Right is our contribution. It argues that we need to re-think the guiding principles of a free society, the obligations we owe each other and the traditional values we should uphold in order to discover the beliefs we should embrace in the immediate future. What's good about our country - and there's plenty to admire - and what's gone wrong? How can we come together to fix the problems that our political leaders are afraid to confront? What should be the relationship between a people and its government?

The first chapter sets out the guiding principles for reform and we are publishing it online to give our supporters a chance to contribute to our emerging work. We invite anyone who is interested to contribute their thoughts before the draft is finalised and published as a book. There are two ways to contribute: you can email us at this address or you can comment via this blog.

A batch of newly published educational statistics reported in today’s Times makes troublesome reading. They show boys are progressively falling behind girls at school in the 3R’s. Neither boys nor girls, however, would appear to have much to write home about concerning their respective attainment levels in these areas, assuming, that is, they know how to. For they remain woefully below the expected standard in mathematics and reading at age 14 for both sexes and have fallen this year in the case of both sexes.

Of course, poor national literacy and numeracy has never stood in the way of the apparent ever-improving national performance of our schoolchildren at GCSE, A-levels, and gaining entry to University whose undergraduate numbers have increased by a third in the last decade. Yet, in these areas, the story once again is of girls consistently coming to out-perform boys, by achieving better GCSE and A level results at school and by now outnumbering boys at University in all subjects.

How worried should we all be about the apparent decline and fall of the English schoolboy?

Professor Geoffrey Crossick, who chairs the universities' umbrella group Universities UK, is clearly one who thinks we all should be. He is reported to have voiced concern about ‘a subset of young men who are not going to university’ who turn out to be ‘mainly low-income white males … just as capable of going to university as others but who are not getting the chance to benefit from going’ because, according he says, they feel ‘locked out of the higher education world’.

Professor Crossick’s proposed remedy to save this educationally endangered species from permanent exclusion from the delights of spending three years wandering in the groves of academe, at the likely personal cost of clocking up an enormous debt, is affirmative action on their behalf in the form of an outreach programme targeted at persuading them to aspire after a University place.

One possible way to pitch such an outreach campaign would be to draw to their attention the superabundant supply of young women they are likely to encounter at University. I suspect, however, such a proposed outreach campaign would not survive scrutiny from the equal opportunities mandarins at the DfES.

Another more promising campaign line would be to draw the attention of these boys to the following highly significant statistic released without much comment along with all the other newly released ones. Despite being outperformed by their female counterparts at A level and outnumbered by them at University in all subjects, male undergraduates apparently still do better than female undergaduates at final honours, gaining more firsts despite being fewer in number.

In this anomalous statistic, are we just seeing the effect of a process of educational natural selection whereby only the most talented and keen males now apply for University? Or are we seeing something else many of us have long suspected? This is that introduction of modular-style course-work-based continuous assessment at GCSE and A level has consistently favoured girls, who tend to be more diligent, compliant and conscientious than boys, who, being more wayward and high-risk-taking than girls but just as proficient at least potentially, tend to out-perform girls in assessment when undergone in the more demanding conditions of the examination hall?

Should the latter be the reason why male undergraduates still outperform female ones in final honours, then, perhaps, it will become somewhat less of a mystery why, despite all the educational progress that girls have made in the last thirty years, women remain out-earned by men in the workplace. This pay-gap continues to vex Jenny Watson, chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, who is reported to have responsed to the news that girls now do much better than boys at school and gaining a place in University by urging us all to ‘remember that while girls are forging ahead at school, they are still falling behind in the workplace and continue to suffer a 17% pay gap’.

One possible explanation for this pay-gap, however, as well as for the better male undergraduate performance at final honours, is that, in general, males are simply more competitive and more driven to excel than females.

Not only does this fact explain why, despite all the odds now being stacked against them, men still out-number women at the top of all hierarchies open to both sexes, a fact which does much to account for the paygap between them. It also explains why, under conditions of fair competition between them, which assuredly prevail in University assessment only when conducted by means of double-marked anonymous final unseen examination the mode of assessment favoured by all the best Universities in the determination of final honours, male students always tend to outperform their female counterparts.

Of course, none of this will or should be of much consolation to those young white males who won’t go to university because they have failed to learn to read and write at school, let alone gain the requisite A level grades. Sadly, they are the prime casualties of years of progressive educational policy, especially that directed towards achieving ‘equality of opportunity’ between the sexes in education which has been a code-word for women being giving preferential treatment in academia in all manner of subtle and not so subtle ways.

Professor Crossick is reported to have remarked in connection with the young white males whom he intends to encourage to aspire after a University education: ‘What is bad for society is having subsets of the population who don’t think higher education is for them’. In my view, still worse for society is having influential subsets of the population who think, like he, that higher education is and should be for everyone, and, like Jenny Watson, think the pay-gap something that necessarily can and should be closed, so long as it favours men.

Since Blair’s return from holiday, social exclusion has been at the forefront of his public statements. Alienation from his party aside, Blair has trailed the publication of a government report on social exclusion (out tomorrow) with a series of statements about the proposed strategies. The most notable - and most publicised - have revolved around tackling the ‘root causes’ of social exclusion. The first pronouncement was to do with identifying potentially problematic children, the second with lowering the teenage pregnancy rate. Yet although the alleged novelty of the proposals is their back to basics nature, they in fact focus too much on tackling the symptoms, in the short-term. Crucially, this means that despite the close connection between the two issues – struggling children and teen parenthood - the strategies are barely linked to each other. The two sets of proposals pay far too little attention to the socio-economic circumstances within which both children with difficult upbringings are born into, and teenagers give birth in.

The proposal to intervene in families which risk producing ‘antisocial’ children, whilst declared to be early intervention, effectively skips the core problem. What makes specific groups of children more susceptible to a difficult childhood, is clearly neither innate in them nor in their parents – it is innate to their circumstances. Blair identified the children of teen parents and alcohol and drug abusers as potential risks. Yet the point is not that bad parenting skills are concentrated within these groups but rather that the situations these parents are in present huge hurdles to their being able to optimally provide for their children. What needs addressing therefore, is why certain teen pregnancy and drug and alcohol addiction are concentrated in certain sections of society. Intervening in childcare arrangements, as the government’s recommendations suggest, leaves the underlying issue unresolved.

The strategy to lower England’s teenage pregnancy rate similarly fails to have a sufficient grasp of the root causes. New proposals simply continue and extend the contraception awareness approach, despite the fact that this approach has had only a limited effect. Such a one-pronged strategy both ignores those girls who are deliberately getting pregnant and does not address the deficit of information about the adverse outcomes of teen parenting for both mother and child.

A large part of the problem is the motivation behind the new strategies for tackling social exclusion. With only a little time left in power, and therefore only a little time to fulfil his promises regarding social equality, Blair is perhaps thinking more about his political legacy and less about the long-term impact of his policies. Most concerning, is that once the money has been earmarked for these hasty strategies, it will be very difficult to reallocate it after Blair’s departure. A fulfilled legacy indeed.

With the publication of A-level, GCSE and SATs results there's been much discussion about the impact of being in school - but how has being out of school for the summer affected the class achievement gap?

The summer holidays, according to sociologists from Johns Hopkins University (recently quoted in an article in the New York Times), are a key compounder of the class achievement gap. Whilst middle class pupils consolidate and extend their learning, low-income pupils slip significantly behind. This type of finding is very significant for the New Labour education project which is based on the premise that the best way to solve socio-economic inequality is through schooling. Moreover, it is significant in light of the government’s declared 'zero tolerance' for deprivation as an influence on performance. The improvement drive under New Labour has involved disallowing background as a reason for underperformance. Admirable as the goal may be, trying to negate the impact of socio-economic background has, amongst other things, meant trying to get schools to do the impossible. However, the main problem with Blair's optimism over the equalising potential of schools is that it is not only naïve it leaves home life disadvantage un-tackled. In this sense such a ‘myopic’ focus on education has institutionalised the issue of socio-economic inequality and monopolised the solution. Rather than continually increasing the time children spend in school, a greater focus on tackling root inequality via family-related policy would be more effective. The difficulty is that doing so now would mean the New Labour government admitting a certain level of defeat. Admitting that though education holds enormous potential it cannot be treated as a single magic wand, would defy the very principle of the government’s reforms in education. However, there is a desperate need to start doing so when past failure has forfeited addressing the causes of inequality. If we are to properly address the achievement gap, we need to ensure that we don’t idealise the impact of schooling and re-acknowledge the impact of home-life – in order to concentrate on tackling the disadvantage itself.

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?

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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’.

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?)

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.

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.

‘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’.

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.”

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.’

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.

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.’

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

Whatever reassurance yesterday's decision might provide concerning the moral sanity of Britain's academics must be tempered, for the moment at least, by the knowledge that, with no less a perfect sense of timing, last Saturday, of all the days of the week that could have been chosen to conduct their meeting, the London branch of NATFHE, Britain's other trade union of r academics, succeeded in placing on the agenda of its forthcoming annual conference this weekend an emergency motion that calls on its members to join the boycott.

One of Israel's universities that the AUT had sought to boycott was its oldest-- the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, opened by Lord Balfour in 1925.

With all the characteristic wisdom and understanding for which British academics are so renown, those who called for it to be boycott seemed wholly unaware of how, ever since that university first opened, its whole orientation and thrust has always borne the stamp of its first chancellor and subsequent president, the American reform rabbi Judah Leon Magnes. He was champion of an entirely non-political form of cultural Zionism that aim simply for a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine, not the creation of a Jewish state to which Magnes was always vehemently opposed, preferring instead a bi-national state.

The crass stupidity and ignorance of the British academics who called for the Hebrew University to be boycotted is revealed by what said about Magnes and the university of which he was chancellor in 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, Hazony's book liekwise reveals the equal stupidity of the British academics in seeking to boycott any other Israeli university. For what it reveals is how deeply influenced by the Hebrew University have been the staff and policies of all other of Israel's universities.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)!

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.