Education

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Lessons in lolly

Do you ever tell your pupils that debt is a bad thing?’ I challenged the headmaster of a thriving Midlands prep school. His answer was more nuanced than I was expecting — but since independent school heads are also educational entrepreneurs these days, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. ‘I’d be anxious about too much moralising in this area. Actually a lot of our pupils’ parents are business owners, for whom debt can be a good thing when it allows their businesses to grow. But we do try to teach the older ones that debt always has to be managed, and to ensure that our 13-year-olds leave here with some

Rhiannon Williams

Tongue-tied

Picture the scene: an Englishman loudly-ordering food in a Parisian restaurant. The waiter rolls his eyes at the customer’s stubborn commitment to soldiering on in English, and everyone in the-vicinity has the good grace to look suitably embarrassed. This may sound like a tired 1970s stereotype. Except, tragically, it’s just as likely to serve as a prophecy for our future. Three quarters of the UK’s residents are unable to hold a conversation in any language other than English. This reluctance — or lack of interest — is echoed in this summer’s academic results. This year the number of entries to French GCSE exams fell by 8.1 per cent compared to 2015,

The Spectator

School portraits | 8 September 2016

Rugby When Rugby School first allowed girls into its sixth form in 1976, just ten joined. In 1995 it went fully co-ed and today there are 373 female pupils. The ankle-length skirts that form part of the uniform look old-fashioned, but the school’s co-educational aproach is far more progressive. The transition wasn’t all smooth, though. When the first head girl was appointed, some boys hung protest banners in the Warwickshire school’s chapel and boycotted a service marking the bicentenary of former headmaster Thomas Arnold. These days the head girl and head boy work seamlessly together and Rugby performs solidly in the league tables, with IGCSEs in most subjects and 29

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Room for inspiration

The curious thing about an art room is that you never remember the look of the place. Each summer, a school art room sloughs its skin: life drawings are unpinned from the walls, maquettes carried home for the holidays, canvases taken off easels, portfolios collected by school leavers, the whole place stripped of colour and finery. The room is white and empty again, a canvas primed for September. What stays from year to year and what lingers in the senses of former pupils is the smell. Chalk and charcoal, oils and turpentine, wet clay and slip mix, Swarfega jelly and Pritt Stick, sugar paper (a smell like damp hymn-books) and

William Cook

From bored to boarding

Thirty-five years ago, shortly after my 16th birthday, my parents finally got fed up with me and packed me off to boarding school. Now, half a lifetime later, my 16-year-old son is about to follow in my footsteps. The two scenarios aren’t quite the same (back then, it was my parents’ idea — this time, it’s my son who can’t wait to get away), but as I pack his trunk and think how much I’ll miss my one true pal, I can’t help wondering — am I doing the right thing? Naturally, I have no idea — like most of life’s big decisions, it’s a roll of the dice. Yes, I can

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Field studies | 8 September 2016

Think back to any time you spent outside at school, and you’re most likely to recall a muddy sports field. At my school, one of the few times we were let loose into the surrounding countryside was when we took our Duke of Edinburgh’s award. Apart from that, the vast majority of our time was spent inside at our desks. Is that a good thing? The official curriculum might not factor in the great outdoors, but many schools have come to realise the benefits — both long-term and short-term — that being outside brings to their students. Traditionally, private schools have led the way in teaching youngsters about the ways

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Theresa May: We have selection in state schools already, selection by house price

Theresa May received the traditional desk banging reception when she addressed the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers. May pleased Tory MPs by emphasising that they  would have more opportunity to feed into policy making process now through George Freeman and the policy board and the green papers that will—once again—precede white papers. But what most excited Tory MPs was what May said about opportunity and grammar schools. May said that she would give a speech on a 21st century education system soon, explaining how selective schools–in other words, grammars–fit into the mix. Strikingly, she defended an ‘element of selection’ arguing that there is selection already in the system, and it

Tuesday

Hamish Macdonell

Sturgeon takes another tiny step towards Scottish independence

It has become one of those journalistic clichés to talk about ‘firing the starting gun’ in politics. There has been some debate among the hacks at Holyrood as to whether or not Nicola Sturgeon has already ‘fired the starting gun’ on the next Scottish independence referendum campaign. So, to do justice to that cliché (and to mangle it completely), I suggest something like this: today the First Minister reached for the key to the cabinet holding the starting gun, which would launch a second Scottish independence campaign. She hasn’t yet opened the cabinet but she has the key in her hand, should she decide to place it in the lock and turn. What

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 1 September 2016

Behind the cover-up Some facts about Burkinis: — The Burkini was invented by Ahedi Zanetti, a Lebanese-born Australian businesswoman, in 2004 after watching her niece trying to play netball in a hijab. — Muslim lifeguards started wearing them on Sydney beaches in 2007. — According to Zanetti, 40% of her customers are non-Muslim. — Two years ago, several swimming pools in Morocco were reported to have banned them for hygiene reasons. Drowning by numbers Five men drowned at Camber Sands in Sussex after being trapped playing football on a sandbank. Where did the 311 people who drowned in Britain last year die? Coast/beach 95 River 86 Out at sea 26

Toby Young Toby Young

France began breeding jihadis in 1989

E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done so much harm to schools in the West. Hirsch identifies three ideas in particular: that education should be ‘developmentally appropriate’, with the emphasis on learning through discovery; that it should be ‘child-centred’, taking account of different ‘learning styles’; and that the overarching aim of education should be the cultivation of ‘critical thinking’ skills. I’ve spent

Charlotte Moore

The don’ts of ‘parenting’

In the American way, the child psychologist Alison Gopnik’s new book has an attractive sound-bitey title dragging a flat-footed subtitle in its wake: ‘What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children’.  And what this new(ish) science tells us is that we parents — or at least, our American counterparts — are doing it all wrong. Gopnik’s ‘carpenter’ is the parent who has a preconceived idea of how the child should turn out. A door is made according to a set of rules; if they are followed, it will be fit for purpose. The carpenter parent will raise the child ‘by the book’,

Thursday

Toby Young

In praise of free schools

Congratulations to all those free schools who got their GCSE results this morning. We don’t yet have the full picture, but early reports are good. Top marks to Tauheedul Islam Boys’ High School in Blackburn, a free school that opened in 2012. Ninety-five per cent of its pupils achieved five A* to C grades in their GCSEs, including English and maths, a metric known as ‘5A*–CEM’. To put this in context, last year’s 5A*–CEM national average was 56.1 per cent. Another school that has done well is Dixons Kings Academy in Bradford. It was one of the first 24 free schools to open in 2011 – it was originally called

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 August 2016

Those who want to revive grammar schools are accused of ‘bring backery’ — the unthinking idea that the past was better. But many of their accusers suffer from the rigid mindset of which they complain. They say that grammar schools ‘condemned most children to failure at the age of 11’, and that, even at their peak, grammars catered for less than 20 per cent of the school population. Why assume that the return of grammars must re-create either of these things? Grammar schools grew up, historically, in different ways and at different times. Then, in the mid‑20th-century mania for uniformity, they were standardised and, in the later 20th-century mania for comprehensives, almost

Toby Young Toby Young

The problem with grammar schools

By rights, I should be one of those Tories who is passionately in favour of grammar schools. After all, I went to one myself. My attachment to them should be particularly strong because before arriving at William Ellis in Highgate I went to two bog-standard comprehensives and failed all my O–levels apart from English Literature, in which I got a C. The only other qualification I left with was a grade one CSE in Drama. William Ellis was the making of me. Had I not got in, I doubt I would have ended up at Oxford. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a passionate opponent of grammar schools either. I wouldn’t

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Labour struggles with empty frontbench after series of resignations

‘Well this does seem like an upside down house,’ remarked Nick Gibb at Education Questions today. ‘We have the frontbench on the backbenches and the backbenches on the frontbench.’ The session was in fact rather weirder than that. It wasn’t just that Labour’s former frontbenchers such as Tristram Hunt and Lucy Powell were asking questions from a few rows back, or that Angela Rayner, the new Shadow Education Secretary, was only a few days into her new job following the appointment and swift resignation of Pat Glass. It was also that Rayner had to ask nearly all of the Opposition’s questions herself, because most of the frontbenchers sitting next to

Thursday

Anthony Horowitz

I always defended Michael Gove. Then I met him | 30 June 2016

This piece first appeared in The Spectator on 15 March 2014.  A few weeks ago, I was a guest at a huge tea party for children’s authors, publishers and commentators at the South Bank, but the atmosphere, over the cupcakes and finger sandwiches, was decidedly frosty. There were three keynote speakers and their speeches all targeted a man so vile and destructive that the audience visibly recoiled every time his name was mentioned. He was, of course, Michael Gove — and I wasn’t sure I should tell anyone that I had always rather admired him and, moreover, was about to interview him for this magazine. It might be better to keep

Sunday

Ed West

Why do we indulge the crimes of the Left?

What a strange human being the historian Eric Hobsbawm was. I was reminded of this the other day while reading a new report by the New Culture Forum on attitudes to Communism almost a century after the Russian Revolution. It includes this exchange between Michael Ignatieff and Professor Hobsbawm: Ignatieff: In 1934 … millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a communist? Hobsbawm: … Probably not. Ignatieff: Why? Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal,

Thursday

Julie Burchill

So much for education, education, education

‘Your old man’s barking!’ I remember hissing indignantly at my then best friend Toby Young way back in the 1980s after his father, Michael, had spent the evening patiently explaining his famous 1958 essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, over ‘supper’ at the somewhat grand family home in, of course, Islington. I’d obviously been thinking about something more pressing all those times we’d discussed the classic text in GCSE Sociology — probably about which order I’d ‘do’ Pan’s People in, should the opportunity arrive in suburban 1970s Bristol — but of course I’d presumed that ‘Lord’ Young (dead giveaway) would have favoured the rise of a meritocracy, being a man

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The Spectator podcast: David Cameron’s purge of the posh | 4 June 2016

To subscribe to The Spectator’s weekly podcast, for free, visit the iTunes store or click here for our RSS feed. Alternatively, you can follow us on SoundCloud. Naming the best columnist in Britain is like naming you’re the best Beatles song: it varies, depending on what kind of mood you’re in. But who would deny that Matthew Parris is in the top three? The quality of his writing is, itself, enough to put him into the premier league but that’s just part of the art. What sets Matthew apart is his sheer range, and his originality. You never know what he’ll be writing about, whether you’ll agree with him, or

Thursday

Claire Fox

The snowflake factory

Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper–sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them. First, it is important to note that young people who cry offence are not feigning hurt