As a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the ever-growing burden of coursework and, naturally, by revision. As soon as the pupils finish their exams they are sent home, since no power on earth can make them stay. For those of us who pay boarding fees, this early departure means that the cost per child of time actually spent on the premises is now £1,000 per week. The wider point, which applies to state and independent sector alike, is that the term which used to be the best for sport, the best for pleasure and the best for friendship has slipped away, and is now half incarceration, half holiday. We shall look back on this period as one in which public policy (very little of this is the fault of individual schools) lowered educational standards and attacked all those aspects of learning — the best bits — which cannot be quantified.
Everyone agrees in theory that moderate Muslims should be encouraged and extremists isolated, but does this happen in practice? This week the Sunday Times had an interesting piece about a mosque in Brighton. An undercover reporter had attended the mosque. In conversation, Abubaker Deghayes, who runs the mosque, told him that Tony Blair was a ‘legitimate target’ for terrorists, and he prayed to Allah to support men who carried out such attacks. What is particularly depressing about the Abubaker story is that he won. He came to Britain from Libya, helped, for humanitarian reasons, by Imam Abduljalil Sajid, who set up the mosque. Dr Sajid is a genuine moderate.
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