Education

Can I tell you about one of the best weekends of my life? It involved no foreign travel, no booze, no party, no love affair, no sun, sea, shopping or beach. It was the second weekend of my A-level year and I had been set the first History of Art essay of term: on early Florentine sculpture. My teacher had lent a book from his shelves, I’d borrowed another from the library and half-a-dozen more from my mother. I sat all weekend, rapt at the kitchen table with Andrea Pisano, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi spread around me. I wrote a seven-page essay in my tiny monk’s handwriting and could

Congratulations to Shami – sorry Baroness! – Chakrabarti for joining the exciting, ever-growing pantheon of ultra-left wing metropolitan Labour hypocrites. Her dameship was appearing on the Godawful Peston on Sunday show. Asked why she opposed selection and grammar schools while at the same time sending her brat to the selective, £18,000 per year, Dulwich College, she said: ‘I live in a nice big house, and eat nice food, and my neighbours are homeless, and go to food banks. Des that make me a hypocrite, or does it make me someone who is trying to do best, not just for my own family, but for other people’s families too?’ Yes, of course

As a Conservative, when I look at where we’ve had the biggest impact in government, there’s one area that really stands out. And that’s education. Through a lot of hard work, not least from teachers… ….we have come a very, very long way. Thanks to the reforms carried out by Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan… … we’ve seen standards raised and 1.4m more children in good or outstanding schools. In higher education, the global rankings now show our universities right at the very top… ….with record numbers of our young people applying. Crucially, over the last six and a half years we’ve also seen a renaissance in apprenticeships…. … well

When I wrote my last Daily Telegraph column critical of Btecs, an exam now taken by about a quarter of English university entrants, a friend of mine in the world of university admissions told me to wait for the reaction of Pearson Plc, which owns Btec. While A-levels and GCSEs are rigorously examined and discussed, Pearson get away with releasing very little data about Btec and plough a lot of money into marketing their exam. And they don’t very much like it being criticised. Rod Bristow, the president of Pearson UK, has written to today’s Daily Telegraph suggesting that I was wrong to suggest that Btecs have gone through serious inflation – and, ergo,

Yesterday afternoon the government released a new Green Paper which focussed on its initial proposals for expanding the number of high-quality school places throughout both the primary and secondary sectors. This task is particularly urgent given the existence of a demographic bulge currently passing through the primary year groups. The proposed reforms are united by an overarching theme, which is a desire to provide a higher-quality education for the children of those parents who are ‘just about managing’ (a phrase the document frequently returns to), and whose earnings are just above the free school meals cut-off (around £16,190). The paper tackles the problem of how best to meet the needs of this group

The Church of England’s relationship with state education seems simple enough. Its schools have been a major source of strength, significantly slowing its rate of decline over the past few decades. Many congregations have been swelled by parents seeking a better-than-average state education for their offspring. From an Anglican point of view, what’s not to like?  Well, this: selection by church attendance is unpopular with those who do not benefit, giving the Church an image problem with its non-members. This makes some of its members, including me, uneasy. Also, the integrity of church attendance is in doubt, in parishes near a popular school. The cliché of the pushy parents faking