Annals of Self-Awareness: Cristina Odone Edition

Hugh

You slightly ignore the fact that she's only taken her cue from Miliband who has defined the squeezed middle on anyone on less than a six figure salary.

SJH

You could start by spelling her name right: it's "Cristina". And "Odone" is her maiden name.

Baron

everything’s relative, of course, but one can be sympathetic to your take on the issue, Alex, there indeed are many families on an income not much higher than the allegedly average fees of £30,000 for private tuition, what should they do, if they want to give their offspring the best education their money isn't enough to buy?

What has ever puzzled Baron has been the inability of the country's wise and sagacious to design an educational system that would benefit more than the 7% of the young fodder, not all but at least more sizeable chunk of it, it almost feels as if the failure may be deliberate, those who could drive the change for a set-up spreading knowledge wider have vested interest in not doing so.

Orthodox Joe

Well SJH, if anyone's going to start anywhere, it may as well be Odone herself. Her dubious reference to 'her' children would be a good place. Her child with her present husband isn't at Westminster. *His* child with his previous wife is.

Sarah Bath

This may come as a shock to both you and Ms Odone but there are quite a few headteachers in the public sector earning £180,000 and they're not all in London and the South East either!
SB Devon

Simon Stephenson.

Baron : 11.57pm

"What has ever puzzled Baron has been the inability of the country's wise and sagacious to design an educational system that would benefit more than the 7% of the young fodder, not all but at least more sizeable chunk of it, it almost feels as if the failure may be deliberate, those who could drive the change for a set-up spreading knowledge wider have vested interest in not doing so."

I think this interest is principally ideological. It doesn't suit the left-leaning educational establishment to produce, through the State system, young people who are self-confident and self-respectful, who are positive about their personal ability to carve out a life for themselves, and who have had their minds encouraged to focus on the abundance of what is available to them, not on how unfair it is that there seems to be a bit more abundance available to a select few.

The social construct of the left is that Joe Public is kept unhappy by being oppressed by the rich and the strong, and that the only solution to this is to use the State to neutralise the power of the strong to oppress. What is not allowed to enter their consciousness is the possibility that the vast majority of the Joe Publics may be perfectly capable of neutralising oppression on their own, if given the tools with which to do it, but that access to these tools depends upon them not being brought up to regard themselves as victims. I have to wonder if the strongest influence driving State education policy isn't the internal need of leftie educationalists to prevent a situation from arising that challenges their worldview.

LibertarianLou

The heads earn those salaries because the market values their skills as heads at that price.

Cristina Odone chooses to send her kids to Westminster for £15k a year. She obviously feels therefore that the heads deserve those salaries.

This is called the free market.

This is exactly the way it is supposed to work.

If most parents at the school didn't think their kids were getting an education worthy of £15k a year they would move them. They don't - even Ms Odone doesn't.

LibertarianLou

I think Simon Stephenson has basically just explained why we have no more new grammar schools and why assisted places got scrapped.

Of course Cameron isn't brave enough to reverse these decisions either which is a shame because it would actually win him a lot of votes I suspect.

Simon Stephenson.

Libertarian Lou : 11.11am

"I think Simon Stephenson has basically just explained why we have no more new grammar schools and why assisted places got scrapped."

Maybe, but merely re-introducing grammar schools won't solve the problem. I'm not suggesting that the answer is for the brightest 10% of Joe Publics to be given an elite education, comparable with the private sector, while the other 90% are left to fester. I'm suggesting that both the 10% and the 90% are given the same opportunities and encouragement to develop self-respect and self-confidence as are given to children in the private sector.

The private sector's claim to fame is not that it nurtures the cream to Oxbridge and beyond, but that it gives so many of the average and the below-average the tools to make the most of what they have got.

Fergus Pickering

My children went to a grammar school and I'm very happy for them. But I can't help noticing that most of the children round here, very leafy, go to grammar schools. I'm not saying anything, just noticing. Where do the 70% of children who don't go to grammarschools live?

Baron

Simon, sad as it is, Baron fears you’re right.

and another thing:

“…fees have been increasing rapidly in recent years (an unfortunate by-product of the competition to attract pupils)”, says Alex.

Alex, will you please explain the mechanism at play here, it seems odd to argue that to attract pupils the schools raise their fees, surely the opposite should apply if the pricing mechanism were to work properly.

Baron

Sarah Bath @ 8.02, my blogging friend, if you’re right it only re-enforces Baron’s argument of the roots of the shite we’re in, it ain’t the scarcity of tax revenues, it’s the insane spending across all the domains controlled by the State.

Is everyone aware that the public sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP is valued at the cost of it, i.e. the more resources it consumes, the higher the remuneration of the public sector employees, the higher the GDP growth? It wouldn’t shock at all to discover the rather anemic growth rate of GDP in recent quarters has come mostly from the public sector, most of it on borrowed money, of course. Lunacy.

James

Ms Odone's reference to £30,000 a year as being "the average private school bill" (which an internet search confirms was the original text) has now been silently changed to "the average boarding school bill". Which does make the "squeezed middle" claim even sillier - who genuinely believes that sending children to boarding schools is a hallmark of that group?

Simon Stephenson.

Baron : 3.11pm

Yes, I spotted this illogicality too. but forgot to comment on it.

My guess as to why school fees have raced ahead of general inflation is that education costs are very people-focused, not much productivity improvement is possible, and so, unlike many other industries, there is little downward moderation of cost increase from technological progress. You can't replace a teacher with a cheap robot. Moreover, Labour's flooding education with money led partly to teaching salaries growing faster than the national trend, and this has, of course, had its effect on the salaries needing to be offered in the private sector.

Alex Massie

Baron, Simon - Yes, increased salaries in the state sector has had an effect. More so, however, has been the competition for the private pound: that is, vast expenditure on capital projects to upgrade facilities, playing fields, extra-curricular activities and so on to "keep up with the competition". there's been a bit of an arms race in these areas (my own old school has spent a couple of million upgrading its science labs) and this is reflected in annual above-inflation fee increases.

Simon Stephenson.

Alex - Yes, I can see what you're saying. At 58, perhaps I'm 15 years too old to see neophilia and makeover-fever as normal, advanced human behaviour. It still seems to me that more often than not it's just the creation of a fetish in an attempt to make displacement activity look constructive.