Controlling the classroom

Jim Smith

If you compare hours attended at private schools compared with state schools you will discover that private schools cost less per hour per pupil than state schools.

Mike

My wife has worked as a senior teacher in both the state and independent sectors and can offer some cutting insight into the differences. The resources in the state schools are generally better, salaries (inc. pension) are better, and many of the teachers are better. But...in the independent sector teachers, teach smallish and usually motivated classes (their parents are paying) in the state sector it's crowd control and a vanishingly small number of disruptive pupils destroy the eduction of the vast majority. A tiny minority whom it's impossible to exclude and who's parents frankly don't give a toss. These are the same pupils that the grim Ed Balls wants to keep in school until 18 to keep them off the unemployment roll

Trumpeter Lanfried

All schooling should be entirely voluntary, but no-one should be entitled to any state benefits (including maternity allowances and council flats) until he or she has demonstrated a basic competence in the three Rs at age 16.

The Chocolate Orange Pandit

Trumpeter - There should be no such thing as council flats, except for OAPs, whether the tenants can read or not. We've got to get rid of this notion that it is our duty to provide for the wilfully improvident.

C Powell

I have 3 children in private school, which costs me dearly. On reason is that I want them to have a proper education and not be subject to the whims and half-baked ideas of every idiotic Education Minister. If the school has to go truly private and give up charitable status in order to be free from the general interference and bossyboots dictats from those with an agenda which has nothing to do with education and everything to do with social control and engineering, then so be it. If the government were really concerned to give more chances to bright but poor kids they'd bring back assisted places, introduce vouchers etc. But they're not; they're just interested in damaging excellence wherever it can be found and attacking the middle classes.

CS

What about the disabled, Chocolate Orange Pandit?

CS

Mike, I'm not sure that the pupils are necessarily motivated to learn by the fact that their parents are paying. I know one or two public school boys who are as thick as custard. My sister is lucky enough to live near a good state grammar school (i.e. the parents don't pay a penny) yet all the kids there seems motivated and relatively disciplined. Isn't the deciding factor on how well kids do at school not their social class or parents' income but how educable they are? There are working class children who are just as educable as their middle class counterparts because their parents prize learning and reading. If there is an element of educability (please let that be a word) according to class, it's surely a self-sustaining onw. Working class parents bring up their kids in an educationally fertile home so the kids get a good education, get better jobs and join the middle classes. When they then go on to have kids, having been brought up that way themselves, they naturally provide the same home environment for their kids. So their kids get good jobs. And it's often works in the reverse too. Kids aren't taught to value education so they get low-paid jobs and don't know to teach their own kids to value education so they too get stuck in a low-paid rut. The answer to education isn't throwing money at it (though an intact school roof does no harm) but getting people to value education. The poorest family in the country can transform their kids' prospects by that and it won't cost them or the state a penny (more than it costs already). There are whole communities in this country (I know because I come from one) where the wholesale lack of education combines with today's perpetual reassurance that nothing is ever your own fault to produce a culture where education is sneered at. People see themselves in a social rut but their solution is not to try to climb out of that rut but to deny that the rut exists at all. Make education a dirty word and you'll never have to face your lack of it because others will conceal their education in your presence rather than offend the chip on your shoulder. And that's why we can't male schooling voluntary, Trumpeter. Must we condemn children to live their lives never seeing over the horizon because of the pure luck of who their parents are? Make education after 16 voluntary certainly but by then we'll have given them the opportunity to show a disposition to be educated or not. They may be other people's kids but no man is an island. Except the Isle of Man.

dexey

"to produce a culture where education is sneered at" It hasn't helped that every polytech is now a university and that B.Ed and BA Social Sciences are thought to be degreees.