Education

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Michael Gove attacks Tristram Hunt for not knowing difference between education and health

Education questions is always interesting in the sense that the main players are quite energetic and keen for debate and there is a genuine divide now between the two main parties (and indeed within the Coalition). But today’s session was interesting in the sense that a grandmother describes a Christmas present they don’t quite understand as ‘interesting’ because Tristram Hunt used his slot to grill the Education Secretary about a health issue. ‘More and more research shows the importance of early years development in a child’s education. The Labour party Sure Start programme was focused on supporting those vital infant years, a policy of prevention rather than cure. We know

Thursday

Peter Jones

On teaching, St Jerome is with Daisy Christodoulou

Last week in The Spectator, Daisy Christodoulou argued that, contrary to current educational theory, children learned best via direct instruction and drills under the guidance of a good teacher, which might be hard work but was satisfying and good for pupil self-esteem. Romans would have seconded that. In ad 403 St Jerome wrote a letter to Laeta, telling her how to teach her daughter Paula to read and write: make ivory or wooden letters; teach Paula a song to learn them and their sounds and their correct order, but also mix them up and encourage Paula to recognise them without such artificial aid; guide her first writing by hand, or

Saturday

Carola Binney

What I’d like in the Budget: more support for teachers

To start on a glamorous note: subsidised bus fares for those in full-time education outside London. I turned 16 in the same year my dad turned 60, and just as I had to pay full (and, in Oxford, whopping) bus fares, he got a free bus pass. At 16 you’re now obliged by law to be in full-time education, so it’s not possible to be earning as much as an adult – why should you pay as much? Public transport is a great thing for young people, enabling them to be independent in an environmentally and traffic-friendly way: let’s make it affordable. Then there’s the shortage of good teachers for

Thursday

James Forsyth

Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the return of Tory wars

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth discusses Gove vs Boris” startat=722] Listen [/audioplayer]From the moment he took his job, Michael Gove knew that he would make energetic and determined enemies. The teachers’ unions, local councillors and even his own department all stood to lose from his reforms — and all could be expected to resist them. What the Education Secretary did not expect was hostile fire from those who should be his friends. At the start of the coalition, Gove and Nick Clegg were allies. With a moral passion rarely seen in British politics, they used to argue that social mobility should be the centrepiece of the government’s reform agenda. Two years ago,

Roger Scruton

Schools need freeing from the right as well as the left

Knowledge can be successfully transmitted and received only by those who recognise its value. If our governments have regarded education as valuable, however, it is usually as a means to some political goal unconnected with knowledge. As a result, our school system, once the best in the world, is now no better than the average developed country for numeracy and literacy. Many on the left see schooling as a form of social engineering, the purpose of which is to produce a classless society. Equality is the real value, and when knowledge gets in the way (as it often does) it must be downgraded or set aside. Many on the right

Daisy Christodoulou

Teacher training’s war on science

When I trained as a teacher, seven years ago, these are some of the things I was taught: it’s better for pupils to discover a fact than to be told it. Children learn best working on authentic, real-world projects. Schools and traditional subject boundaries are silos which stifle the natural creativity we all have within us. And this last fact especially: there is no point teaching a body of knowledge, because within a few years it will be outdated and useless. Don’t teach the what, teach the how. ‘Drill and kill’ and ‘chalk and talk’ will lead to passive and unhappy pupils. This, to a large degree, is still what

James Forsyth James Forsyth

It’s time for the Tories to rally to the aspiration agenda

School reform is economically essential for Britain’s future success, morally necessary for a fairer, more socially mobile society and politically essential for a centre-right party that wants to show that it is about spreading privilege not defending it. This is why Michael Gove’s agenda is so important to the Tories and their future success. Gove was always going to face opposition. Members of the National Union of Teachers hustled David Blunkett and his guide dog into a room and then screamed at him for merely condemning school strikes from opposition in 1995. They were, obviously, going to do far worse to a radical Tory Education Secretary. Then, there was the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tristram Hunt should worry about failure in council schools, not free schools

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Fraser Nelson discuss the last stand of Michael Gove”] Listen [/audioplayer]Tristram Hunt seems delighted today that Britain’s first profit-seeking school has been deemed ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted. The scores of council-run failing schools, several in his Stoke constituency, don’t seem to be worthy of his ire. But when a free school stumbles, in Suffolk, he declares this to be… ‘…more evidence of the damage David Cameron’s Free School policy is doing to school standards. The lack of local oversight and a policy that allows unqualified teachers into classrooms on a permanent basis is the wrong approach. We know that this is not an isolated case. That’s

Anthony Horowitz

I always defended Michael Gove. Then I met him

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Fraser Nelson discuss Michael Gove’s personality and the attacks from all sides”] Listen [/audioplayer]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

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Gove, Cameron and the myth of ‘state vs private’ schools

Will David Cameron send his kids to a state secondary school, as Michael Gove is doing? Today’s papers are following up James Forsyth’s suggestion that Cameron will slum it as well. But this story takes, as its premise, the ludicrous notion of a binary divide between private and public. In fact, anyone lucky (and, let’s face it, rich) enough to get into a good state secondary in London has no need of going private. And this is arguably the greater scandal. I can offer an example. I’m house-hunting the moment, and last weekend viewed this cramped wee house, with poky rooms, listed for an outrageous price. But the estate agent

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Don’t reduce class sizes: the OECD’s lessons for education in the UK

So much of the education debate is about how UK schools perform relative to those in other countries – this week Liz Truss reported back from her visit to Shanghai – so when MPs on the Education Select Committee grilled Andreas Schleicher, the Deputy Director of the OECD which ranks education systems worldwide, they were keen to find out what his data suggests is causing the gap in performance between children in UK schools and those in cities such as Shanghai and countries such as Singapore. Schleicher made a number of interesting points about our education system which are worth mulling: 1. Even the vast improvements in London schools haven’t

Constance Watson

Should you take a degree to earn money – or to learn how to live?

The motion ‘An Arts Degree is a Waste of Time and Money’ was roundly defeated at last night’s Spectator debate, after a lively debate in which Will Self took on Katie Hopkins. Self, opposing the motion, was supported by Wellington College headmaster Anthony Seldon and Doug Richard, entrepreneur and former Dragon from BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Katie Hopkins, supporting the motion, was backed by The Spectator’s contributing editor Harry Cole and by Julia Hobsbawm, founder of Editorial Intelligence. Hopkins kicked off asserting that the type of degree studied is linked to the name of the student. After losing herself somewhat in this opening flourish, she then returned to the argument about

Tuesday

Elizabeth Truss

The coalition has stabilised childcare costs – so why do headlines suggest they’re rising?

You may have heard about the Family and Childcare Trust’s survey today, about the costs of childcare. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines but it actually found that in England, costs have fallen for the first time since the survey started 12 years ago. The figures in the report show that, after inflation, the cost of nurseries fell by two per cent, the cost of after-school clubs fell by five per cent, and the cost of a child-minder’s after-school pickup fell by a full 13 per cent. There is now mounting evidence that childcare costs have at last stabilised after more than a decade of rising prices. The health

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

History of Art shouldn’t just be a subject for posh girls

There’s a campaign running at the moment to rebrand History of Art and clear up some of the myths surrounding the subject. It’s seen as a posh subject, studied by posh girls, and with good reason too: A-level History of Art is offered at only 17 state secondary schools out of more than 3,000, plus a further 15 sixth–form colleges. By contrast, over 90 fee-paying schools offer the subject. I not only studied it at school, but went on to read it at university. And yes, the majority of the people I met while studying it were posh girls from privileged backgrounds. At university, the course was read by a

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Does Tristram Hunt think that choice in education should be only for the rich?

At last – Labour has made its intentions over education clear. Throughout his interview on the Sunday Politics today, Tristram Hunt showed that Labour has switched allegiances to adults, not the pupils. On the side of institutions, not those who use them. Although the shadow education secretary stated he ‘doesn’t want to waste political energy on undoing reforms that, in certain situations, build rather successfully on Labour party policy’, he confirmed his party would not sanction any more free schools: ‘I was in Stroud on Thursday and plans there for a big new style of school in an area where you’ve got surplus places threatened to destroy the viability of

Friday

Lara Prendergast

An arts degree isn’t a waste of time. But neither is an apprenticeship

A friend and I joke that there are two types of jobs: fun ones, and school fees ones. We (penurious journalists) say this to our friends (pecunious lawyers, bankers, consultants), and find immense comfort in it. Perhaps I should have sacked off my History of Art degree, and done something vocational – ergo ‘worthwhile’ as Katie Hopkins will no doubt argue at the Spectator’s debate on Tuesday, ‘An arts degree is a waste of time and money’. I’d be raking it in by now. But then I apply the intellectual faculties developed while studying my degree, and realise that this is, of course, poppycock. After all, most of my friends

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

How to repair a free school – the next stage of Michael Gove’s reforms

Any government can set out on a journey of reform – the question is whether they can stay on course upon hitting turbulence. The coalition is entering this phase now. Its flagship reforms, universal credit and free schools, are encountering difficulty. We all know about the welfare problems, but not much attention has yet fallen on the nature of Michael Gove’s impending headache. I looked at this in my Telegraph column. There are now 174 free schools in England, and by this time next year it’ll be almost 300. Statistically, some of these are going to have problems – and this is the test for the government. If you were a

Thursday

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson’s diary: Brazil is overtaking us – but it no longer feels like that

 São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’, short for Brazil, Russia, India, China. These were the emerging markets that were going to surpass the developed economies. And so they have. Well, nearly. I, too, am partial to a good acronym and it has always seemed to me very unfortunate that there isn’t a matching one for the four biggest established economies. According to the International Monetary Fund, these are currently the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom (based on last year’s GDP figures). I therefore propose ‘Juugs’. The rise of the Brics and the fall

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Whatever happened to Scotland’s timid posh folk?

Whatever happened to Scotland’s upper-middle class? That’s one of the questions asked by Hugo Rifkind in his characteristically interesting column this week. Why, more to the point, are they so reluctant to play a part in the independence stushie? When did they become so bashful? It is time, Hugo says, for the timid posh folk to speak out. Perhaps. But the alumni of Scotland’s private schools are hugely unrepresentative of Scottish life and, in many cases, far removed from the Scottish mainstream. Privately-educated Scotland is a tiny place. Everyone knows everyone (though the saddest people in Scotland are those who know only privately-schooled people). Even in Edinburgh. True, 25% or

Thursday

Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger

Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than academic rigour. This has changed, thanks to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras when he is not presiding. This semester, I am teaching a class in literary journalism. I asked my students to write a short essay about their favourite writer of non-fiction. This proved to be difficult for some, since they had no favourite writers of non-fiction; indeed they had never read any literary non-fiction at all for pleasure, certainly not at book length. But several did come up with