Education

In the aftermath of the riots, the idea of withholding child benefit from mothers whose kids played truant was floated by Number 10. The aim was to link child benefit payments to getting your child to attend schools. This was meant to be part of a broader effort to end the something for nothing culture. Now, 8 months on from the riots — and after months of coalition wrangling — we have some flesh on the bones of this idea. Charlie Taylor, the government’s impressive adviser on behaviour, has proposed (£) that fines for children being persistently truant should be deducted from child benefit payments. At the moment, head teachers

The opposition of the National Union of Teachers to the government’s plans to make it easier to fire bad teachers is entirely predictable. The NUT has long placed the interests of the worst of its members above those of the children being educated in the state system. Given what we know about just how crucial good teaching is to a child’s educational achievement then it is absolutely vital that the coalition does push these changes through. One of the most important parts of these changes is ending the process by which bad teachers are simply shuffled around the system. Academy schools already have the power to vary pay. But, sadly,

JEET. That, according to Andrew Grice in the Independent, is the new ‘buzzword’ circling around Libdemville (population: 57 MPs, and a few others). And it stands for the issues that they want to keep mentioning whenever they can: jobs, education, environment and tax. Fair enough. Although it is striking that only one of these issues is unlikely to put them in close combat with the Tories. Both parties of the coalition support free schools and academies, and the Lib Dems are getting their pupil premium too, so education is relatively uncontroversial territory. But as for the others… Jobs. The conflict here focuses on the role of the state. As George

Today’s ONS release will make pretty grim reading for students and recent graduates. It shows that the unemployment rate among recent graduates — those who graduated in the last six years — stands at 9.1 per cent, higher than the overall unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent. It’s even worse for those who graduated in the last two years — the unemployment rate among them is 18.9 per cent, up from 10 per cent before the recession. But there’s an even more worrying trend among those recent graduates who do find employment. In 2001, three-quarters of them were in ‘higher skill’ jobs — those requiring more than GCSEs. Now, less

Siphoning the contents of two brains through one mouth and on to a single page will generally produce eclectic results. And that’s certainly the case with David Willetts’ interview with the Times (£) this morning. The universities minister manages to range across subjects that include Robert Falcon Scott, climate change, the Falklands and universities access. He even reheats one of his old theories about Feminism and social mobility in a way that (coupled with the interview’s headline: ‘Moving on and up is very hard — and feminism is partly to blame’) makes it sound far more provocative than I think it’s meant to be, and much weaker for it. The

Profit and education are still two words that should only be put together with caution. The coalition has long-accepted this is a toxic area, as typified by Nick Clegg in September when he proclaimed: ‘Yes to greater diversity; yes to more choice for parents. But no to running schools for a profit; not in our state-funded education sector.’ But as Fraser argued last year, we need profit-making schools to spread the benefits of Michael Gove’s reforms to the most deprived children. To straddle this divide, Policy Exchange has proposed a halfway solution today: social enterprise schools. Similar to a private company, the proposed model has full financial transparency and a duty to reinvest

Michael Gove’s latest prognosis for schools was delivered at a lunch in Westminster yesterday, but it’s important enough to repeat the morning after. The Independent has a full report here, but the key quotation is this: ’Education is like trying to run up a down escalator. There are some uncomfortable decisions that will have to be taken. There will be years when, because we are going to make exams tougher, the number of people passing will fall. There are headteachers who have been peddling the wrong sort of approach to teaching for too long, who are going to lose their jobs.’ Just read that bit again: ‘the number of people

It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they’ve got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they’re too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions