The tyranny of choice

Wily Trout

Good schools are usually the achievement of a strong, effective headteacher. Sadly the Local Education Authorities have made sane life virtually impossible for any headteacher who has those qualities, because of their obsession with uniformity and obedience to politically correct ideas and because of the illusion of power that the Authorities have conveyed to parents, which often results in the Authority backing parents against schools who try to discipline badly-behaved kids. So strong effective headteachers are hard to come by. The control-freakery of 'Authorities' (as they like themselves to be called) has been self-defeating in terms of improving the quality of comprehensive schools.

Hugh

"They should be both literally and metaphorically uniform, offering an equal education to all kids from all backgrounds, with no risk of schools being defined as “failing”. As I say, if Ofsted and the government believe schools are failing they should do something about it, quickly."

Yes, they should all be equally "good", and I'm reasonably sure the government wants them to be so, but they're not. And, yes, if the government "believe schools are failing" then they should do something about it. But, again, that is surely what the government has tried to do, yet hasn't quite cracked it by all accounts.

You don't really seem to say how this could be achieved or what Middle class monkeys who live in the catchment area of a school that is, er, "crap" should do, but then you don't really seem to believe there are such things as schools that are good and schools that are bad.

Ross

"there are plenty of areas where choice makes us, on the whole, less happy"

Since when has happiness been the purpose of schools or hospitals. They exst to provide and education or healthcare. You may be mistaking them with clowns or brothels which do exist to make people happy.

victimising seacole

Oh dear me. Can we assume from all this huff and puff that Rod bought his house in a crappy area with even crappier schools and he's getting worried cause the Liddle kinderlings are now of school going age? Of course parents should have choice. What's the matter with you Rod. Becoming a bit of an unreconstructed Marxist in yer old age?

J

"Children should go to their nearest comprehensive school, without right of appeal. If that school is failing then the local education authority, or the government, should take steps to ensure it no longer fails, by either sacking the headteacher, or spending more money on it."

This is absolute b*llocks Rod.

Get on a train, get yourself to a place called Moortown in Leeds.

Go to the High schools in one of the richest parts of West Yorkshire and see if the locals want to send their kids there.

Oh, and wear a stab proof vest.

Baron Pipin II

As a country, we spend per pupil nearly 5times as much in real money than we did 40 years ago, yet 15% of school leavers are still either completely or partly illiterate. On the other hand, the public school sector continues to educate to a standard that is the envy of schooling results everywhere. It doesn’t require a nuclear brain to figure why. The former has been and will remain a political football; the latter has been, until now, largely independent of political interference.

Lungfish

Schools should be smaller, class sizes should be smaller. All teachers should be irascible old gits who aren't restrained from dishing out the odd slap by stupid laws. Maybe then we could produce a generation of kids who can actually read and write.

Kittler

Go to the geographical extremities of these lands and you will find education at its best and no choice, just the one comprehensive with all other possibilities unfeasibly remote.
Working examples that prove your case.

Balham Bugle

What utter bollocks.

If failing school could be turned around by Government and money, you would have thought it would have been done already. We have had over a decade of a Government which did believe that a huge increase in educational spending and greater centralisation was the answer. I haven't noticed a renaissance in our schools.

Its hardly the Middle Class Monkey's are the issue, but the poor families who can't get out of the areas with failing schools or can't afford private schools.

Hasn't it occurred to you that "choice" is a means rather than an end. School systems with choice produce better results for less money. It gives more opportunities for the poorest families. And it recognises that Governments, as a whole, are useless at running schools.

PS - Where will you be sending your children?

Mark Baker

Choice is not the aim. Good schools and hospitals are the aim. Choice is the mechanism to get them. It will only work though, if the worst are allowed to fail, which is an anathema to governments.

EC

From Harold Wilson onwards the politicians of the ruling parties have completely buggered the state education system.

Will privately educated Gove be any better than Bslls or the rest of them? Almost certainly not.

For the majority of state secondary pupils there is no choice!

hiro

Couldn't agree more, Rod.

Jez

This was a model school in the poshest part of Leeds;

http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/Leeds-teenager-stabbed-in-front.3736349.jp

Bangladeshi, Pakistani, West Indian, African, Kosovan, Somali (and the rest) now make up the majority of pupils in this school.

There will be many from these ethnic groupings that will want to study hard. A sizeable amount of the male (and recently female) student population may be heavily involved with Gangs.

If this was the area where i live, then unfortunately the latter would immediately cancel out the former (for me personally) when i contemplate what is in the long term interests of my kids.

Now Rod;

"Children should go to their nearest comprehensive school, without right of appeal. If that school is failing then the local education authority, or the government, should take steps to ensure it no longer fails, by either sacking the headteacher, or spending more money on it."

$pend whatever dollar you want on that, the day you force me to parachute my children into the above mentioned 'Neather wet dream' is the day my family and I claim asylum in Iceland.

You've got to start getting real.

'2009 Britain' real.

Lungfish

Baron Pipin- looks like you won't have to set sail on that mission.

rod seacole liddle

Choice is both the means to an end and an end in itself. As a mechanism to identify bad schools it is flawed because a)it is class biased and b)league tables often hide more than they disclose. As a mechanism for a decent education system it fails because failing schools find it ever more difficult to succeed.

Where will my kids go? The nearest state school.

Baron Pipin II

Lungfish @ 10.51

You’ve let me down then. How disappointing. You do it again, and I’ll file for divorce.

Fergus Pickering

'The nearest state school'. You mean you won't look at it?

Simon Denis

So why sacrifice children - to whomsoever they belong - to keep open a failing school? Take all of them away and let it fold. Meanwhile the good ones can expand to accomodate the refugees.

EC

Failing schools are primarily symptomatic of failing communities. The quality of the head teacher,LEA, staff and governors are important factors but are secondary issues.

State education should be of a uniform and a good quality. It should be secular, as in France, and all religious dress codes should be banned.

Ray

"But there are plenty of areas where choice makes us, on the whole, less happy, and schools are one of them. Another is hospital treatment. There are certain times when the state can make our decisions for us, and when we would wish it to do so."

Rod ... what is the weather like on your planet?

uneducated workie ticket

Choice was only ever a mirage in both education or health for the vast majority of us but gave an excuse to fund a massive (Liebour) beauracracy to administer it.

Our education 'choice' was a school where teachers were regularly assaulted and whose remit didnt extend throughout all the school grounds. The alternatives were worse. They were great at celebrating diversity because there was eff all else to. The final straw was the diverse elements deciding that a certain chip shop was out of bounds to whitey. My kids Indian and Chinese friends were brighter than us and got out a year before.

So we've moved - a long way - to somewhere consistently good (not supposedly) where staff can concentrate on teaching rather than anger management and crowd control. And dont anyone tell me it was a skewed 'perception' that things were that bad.

Patient choice is so wasteful its unbelievable. Fill forms in, send them, someone rings up to go through your details, you go to hospital, you dont get your choice of consultant. Dont get me wrong, I dont want 'choice', I want a good basic standard of medical care or education in my local establishments. And another thing when government statistics are lies why pretend that we can make informed choices on the basis of them. Orwellian and Kafkaesque in equal measure.

I dont know where the 'dont give a stuff about parents' comes from. Most people do because you want to keep a critical mass of motivated parents and children in your school so the right balance is maintained. I realise in metropolitan middle class public school, tutor employing, fake religioning circles, that attitude may be prevalent but it wasn't in my old East End stamping grounds.

rod seacole liddle

The kids are sacrificed either way; under the current system, though, they suffer more because the bad schools become caught in a spiral of decline.

And nah; if I'm hypocritical about this, Victimising Seacole, then it's the other way around; I don't live in London and there isn't really an alternative to the local school, which is itself fine. That's as it should be. I can see there are much bigger problems in our inner cities.

Unreconstructed Marxist? Hardly, but well to the left of centre on most issues..........Unreconstructed Gaitskill would be nearer the mark.

Joan

Fiona Millar has written many times on this subject and talked about it many times on television.

So where do she and Alastair Campbell send their children? To a comprehensive - in a Hampstead postcode!

How does she write such trash with a straight face?

Peter Hitchens notes that Alastair Campbell and Fiona Millar "were educated in selective grammar schools but are now passionate advocates of comprehensive schools...

"Mr Campbell and Miss Millar just so happen to live in the costly and very small catchment area of a group of London's most exceptional state schools, including two rare single-sex comprehensives."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1169267/PETER-HITCHENS-Our-ruling-elite-class-apart.html

So there's the truth about the egalitarian Ms Millar.

If you want more details on those two and on where plenty of other politicians send their kids to school, do read the Hitchens piece.

Baron Pipin II

The arbiter of ‘the choice’ in education and the NHS was designed as a substitute for competition, because even the pseudo-liberal fruitcakes who interfere in our lives seem to understand that only competition gets tangible, beneficial and permanent results. It won’t work, however, because choice in a monopolistic environment unlike genuine competition in free environment doesn’t improve either quality or quantity of supply, but merely changes its allocation. As always, that segment of the population that ‘the choice’ was aimed at are losing out.

I know it pains, particularly in a society that has been deadly determined to eliminate pain in whatever shape and form, but nothing short of freeing both the educational and the health delivery sectors from the clutches of public ownership will do. Nobody but the market imposes anything on the car makers, mobile suppliers etc. The arbiter is the market, i.e. each of us, and the deal is between you and the competing suppliers. No middlemen involved with committees, clipboards, targets and all that garbage. It’s not ideal, but it works. And please, spare me the cliché of an argument that our health isn’t a car. Of course, it bloody isn’t. The more the reason that we should not entrust it to a massive, self perpetuating bureaucracy. I bet you that if hip replacements were privatised years ago, people with healthy joints would be queuing up to have them replaced because a bunch of private, profit hungry entrepreneurs would have come up by now with self-propelled artificial joints. I bet you some more that if the State were to look after off-air communications each mobile would be sold with a luggage size attachment - the battery, and the waiting list would stretch for years.

I lived in a society in which everyone owned abit of everything. It imploded. Each of us owns abit of the NHS. It will implode, too.

Bill Seacole Corr

Ah, those happy schooldays!

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2009/10/classroom_apart.php

... happy some some, anyway

logdon

Ed Balls on Monday's Ten O'Clock BBC News, maintained that people who falsify their main address to get their children into a better school should be prosecuted.

When he and the odious Missus did precisely the same for financial advantage, they were just obeying the rules.

And got off, scot free.