Schools

Wonderfully useless Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world. Across the river, many millions more are spent on small armies of people coming together to bang, scrape and blow bits of wood, metal and brass for hours

Strength of service Sir: Matthew Lynn and Steven Bailey (Letters, 1 February) are quite wrong to deplore the decline of Britain as a manufacturing nation. Manufacturing – especially of the heavy sort – is best suited to a country with plenty of space, little regulation, cheap energy and cheap non-unionised labour. That was once the case for Britain but it is no longer; nor is it so for the majority of European countries. Germany epitomises the folly of mindlessly adhering to manufacturing, as is well explained in Wolfgang Munchau’s excellent book Kaput. Britain, on the other hand, has successfully diversified into services and is now the world’s second-largest exporter of

Dear Secretary of State, thank you for meeting me and one of my deputies on Monday. You will have noticed in our meeting how disappointed we were with your responses to the questions teachers have about the government’s proposals. I assure you, we are not alone in that feeling. As teachers, we often hear politicians say how much they care about education. One of two things follows: either they turn out to be that rare politician who is truly interested in schools; or they are that all too common politician who simply wants to appear that way. Our meeting confirmed that you are firmly in the latter category. Politicians who

One does not like to disagree with one’s editor, but while the image of Rome salting the earth of its bitter rival Carthage is a striking way of describing Labour’s plan to wreck our current system of education, Rome was not in the habit of destroying the advantages that its conquests produced. The salting story is a 19th-century invention, endorsed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Ancient History (1930), but now rescinded. As Mr Gove made clear in last week’s magazine, the universal imposition of a national curriculum, among other measures, will remove the freedom and choice – the two words you will find nowhere in discussion of

The headmaster of one of the best comprehensives in the country was once asked the following question by Tony Blair: ‘If you could do one thing to improve state education in this country, what would it be?’ ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said. ‘I’d line up every civil servant in the education department and machine gun the lot of ’em.’ No prime minister has ever asked me that question, but my answer would be more diplomatic. It would be to insist that every incoming education secretary memorise the serenity prayer. This is the prayer that members of Alcoholics Anonymous recite at the end of their meetings: ‘God, grant me the serenity

Being Cambridge, I thank God that we have no nonsense about electing our chancellor. We have had a blameless, unchallenged succession of eminent persons. Since 1900, three prime ministers (Balfour, Baldwin and Smuts), two military commanders, one royal Duke (Prince Philip), two great scientists (Lords Rayleigh and Adrian) and now that prince of commerce and philanthropy, Lord Sainsbury of Turville. Their presence has passed almost unnoticed, rightly so: a chancellor’s role is to be, not to do. Poor Oxford, however, has a form of democracy to choose its chancellor, and now has insanely extended its effective franchise by online voting. So there are 38 candidates, and pressure that they should

I thought the Spectator dinner for Michael Gove hosted by Fraser Nelson would be cancelled. To be clear, this wasn’t a dinner where the Ming vase would be passed from one custodian to another, witnessed by the magazine’s general staff. Rather, this was a dinner to celebrate Michael’s legacy as education secretary organised weeks earlier by Rachel Wolf, founder of the New Schools Network, and which Fraser had kindly agreed to host. But – talk about bad timing! – at 1.30 p.m. on the day it was due to take place it was announced that Michael would be succeeding Fraser as editor. That was a bit like Theresa May having agreed

The welfare state was designed to serve everyone’s needs. But those needs were defined by the state. So schools teach fronted adverbials (but what about hindmost ones, eh?) and trigonometry, and may (absurdly) have to teach maths to all up to 18. Do these really fulfil the needs of all our children, far too many of whom are not (apparently) leading happy, useful lives? In the ancient world education was for the sons of the elite, to prepare them to run the country. But some elite Romans did without it. When Marius, who early on made his mark in battle and was picked out as a likely leader of men,