Education

Every year without fail, as the trees start thinking about losing their leaves, the papers are full of the same photographs and the same stories. The pictures are of groups of teenagers grinning triumphantly — hugging one another or throwing their exam results in the air in joy. What we have just experienced is exam results week; or, to be precise, results fortnight: first A-levels and then, one week later, GCSEs. GCSEs lead to A-levels, A-levels to university (and yet more exams) — and then at the end of it all? Well, that’s the next obstacle. But for parents, as well as children, the endless tests can be incredibly confusing.

A black head teacher told me a story of his early days at a failing inner-city school. The job was a thankless one and everybody was waiting anxiously for the arrival of the new ‘super-head’ (the school had gone through three leaders in two years). In the playground it was leaked that the new head was an old-school type from Jamaica. During his first encounter with the students, they asked him how many children he had. He told them he had one and that she lived with him and his wife. ‘No sir, how many do you have in Jamaica?’ they asked. He replied: ‘None.’ They jeered, ‘Oh sir you’re

‘Rude, bone idle… and cosseted by the welfare state! Chinese teachers’ damning verdict on British children after spending a month in UK classrooms. Yes – just about right, I reckon. Except, of course, the English head teacher at the school thinks the Chinese are completely wrong and that their teaching methods are boring. And that we need to show the kids respect, m’kay? My suspicion is that we show the kids too much respect and that teachers are not there to be clownish entertainer, to pander.

Nicky Morgan is taking the fight against radicalisation into the classroom. On the Today programme, the Education Secretary outlined what her department is doing to support schools in tackling, what she called, this ‘very real threat’. The DfE will release new guidance for teachers today, offering ‘examples and support in how they might look for young people who are risk at radicalisation – perhaps changes of behaviour or things they might say’. But Morgan admitted there is a unclear line between what constitutes a ‘healthy debate’ and upholding ‘British values’: ‘Schools should be a safe space for young people to explore all sorts of ideas, but we have since last year been very clear that schools should also be teaching British

In today’s Observer, Will Hutton unwittingly highlights the poverty of the inequality debate in Britain. Gifted writers like him bang on about private schools the whole time rather than look at the far greater problem: inequality within the state system. He devotes a column moaning about the schools which, I suspect, will supply a good chunk of the students he’ll meet in his role as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. “Social apartheid,” he says: a lazy analogy, suggesting a binary divide between state and private. In fact, the truth is far worse. Britain doesn’t have a two-tier system: we have a multi-tier system where educational attainment is directly linked to parental wealth.

University towns are already awash with fur-trimmed gowns and proud parents, but behind the smiles there’s a glimmer of resentment: four in 10 of those graduating this year think they’ve been ripped-off. According to a survey of 1000 final-year students by ComRes, students are split over whether they think their degree was good value for money. One factor determining their verdict was their subject, with two-thirds of those studying science, technology, engineering and maths saying their course was worth the fees. Just 44 per cent of humanities and social science students agreed. An obvious reason for this discrepancy is contact time: medics get at least 20 contact hours a week

It took Oxford 40 years to catch up with Cambridge in appointing a woman vice-chancellor, but Louise Richardson — ex-St Andrews, Irish, Catholic, terrorism expert — is to take over from the chemist Andrew Hamilton. He is leaving early to head New York University for an eye-watering £950,000 a year. His successor will inherit a more modest but still whopping £442,000 a year. That’s what happens when a university is run like a biggish corporation — the head is paid like a chief executive. (A professor gets around £65,000 a year: once, Louise Richardson would have been on something similar.) Chief of the problems Richardson has to get to grips