Schools

Thursday

Peter Oborne

Diary – 4 June 2015

For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side has visited Pakistan. The Zimbabwe tourists, playing at the same Lahore stadium where the attack was mounted, were greeted with wild enthusiasm. Less well reported has been the fact that a team of English cricketers (including myself and Alex Massie of this parish) has been touring the Hindu Kush. We played in Chitral, Drosh, Ayun, Kalash and Booni. In these mountain areas many of our opponents were using pads, gloves and a hard ball for the first time. Still, we were overwhelmed, rarely losing by fewer than 200 runs in

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 28 May 2015

Q. I felt uncomfortable during a dinner for 20 in a private house. The young man on my left had failed to turn to the woman on his left when it was time to do so and instead stared vaguely down the table with his back slightly turned to her. She looked devastated. I wonder what I could have said, without sounding nanny-like, to remind this youth of his manners and his special duty, as one of those staying in the house, to make those locals who had been invited in feel particularly welcome. I know the man’s parents vaguely and they know how to behave, but I had never

Thursday

Toby Young

Freedom for free schools

I was disappointed to hear Andy Burnham on Marr last Sunday declare his opposition to free schools. He put plenty of distance between himself and Ed Miliband, even admitting Labour spent too much in the run-up to the recession, which is quite something given that he was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time. But Miliband was spot on, apparently, when it came to free schools. He then reeled off all the usual guff about ‘experimenting with children’s education’, ‘surplus places’, ‘unqualified teachers’, etc. It’s tempting to take Burnham to task over this, since he’s the favourite to become the next Labour leader. What could be clearer evidence

Thursday

James Forsyth

Tristram Hunt: Education Secretaries can send their kids private

In the Daily Politics education debate just now on the BBC, Tristram Hunt declared that it was acceptable for an Education Secretary to send their own child to private school. Under questioning from Andrew Neil, Hunt said that it was fine in ‘certain circumstances.’ The other members of the panel—including Nicky Morgan and David Laws—then agreed with Hunt’s statement. Is it acceptable for an education secretary to send their child to a private school @afneil asks his #bbcdp panel? https://t.co/A5VI9mnHlz — DailySunday Politics (@daily_politics) April 23, 2015 Hunt’s remarks are politically brave. Those on the hard left will take issue with his statement as they did with Ruth Kelly, who

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Did Radio 4 have to deal with the Germanwings disaster as it did?

‘You can hear pretty clearly the sound of one of the helicopters and you can see it in the darkness,’ yelled James Reynolds over the noise of helicopters, police sirens, vehicles on the move. It was 8.10 a.m., the Today programme on the morning after the fatal Airbus A320 crash in southern France last week. Reynolds, a fine reporter, had been sent off to the crash site for an on-the-spot report, ‘live’ action, high-octane drama, tension so taut it’s almost visible. ‘I can see a convoy of police vehicles coming up the road with blue sirens,’ he continued. ‘There goes the police helicopter…’ Huge noise of rotors whirring. ‘It’s almost

Thursday

Eric Anderson

A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life

The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided education of a rapidly improving quality for nothing or next to nothing’, seemed to herald, as the headmaster of Winchester cautioned, the end of fee-paying. Two decades later Roy Hattersley warned the Headmasters’ Conference to have ‘no doubts about our serious intention to reduce and eventually to abolish private education in this country’.Yet David Turner is able to conclude in this well-researched, impeccably fair and refreshingly undogmatic history, that this is their golden age. He takes the unfashionable line that they are now vital contributors to the country’s economic, political

Thursday

Toby Young

I’m working to make education fairer. But I’m still not sure what ‘fairer’ means

Civitas has just published an interesting book called The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools. Edited by Anastasia de Waal, it’s a collection of essays by the usual suspects in the never-ending argument about grammar schools. De Waal points out that the two sides have more in common than you’d think. In particular, they share a common goal, which is to sever the link between a child’s socio-economic status and attainment. In 2009, according to the OECD, the variance in the scores of British children in the Pisa international tests in maths, reading and science that could be explained by their backgrounds was 13.8 per cent. By this measure,

The Spectator

The Conservatives should be the party of immigrants — and here’s how they can be

For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative party should be the natural home of new voters who are ambitious, entrepreneurial, hard-working and family-orientated. The immigrant vote — to the extent it can be considered a coherent block at all — ought to be fertile Tory territory. By and large, these are families who have moved to Britain to get ahead and to avail themselves of what Michael Howard called ‘the British dream’. Yet at the last election fewer than one in five ethnic minority voters endorsed Conservative candidates and the party is unlikely to fare much better

James Tooley

A lesson in bias on private schools

What’s wrong with low-cost education in poor countries? Quite a lot, you might think, if you read a new report from the Department for International Development. Low-cost private schools serve around 70 per cent of children in poor urban areas and nearly a third of rural children too. But the issue raises controversy among academics and experts, not least because it goes against 65 years of development dogma that the only way to help the poor is through government education, with big dollops of aid thrown in. Every aid agency and government has gone along with that. The only fly in the ointment is that poor parents disagree, which is

Thursday

The Spectator

James McAvoy is wrong – the arts are better off without subsidy

The season of cringe-making acceptance speeches at arts awards ceremonies is nearly over, thank heavens. But it hasn’t passed without a most fatuous contribution from James McAvoy as he accepted a nomination for best actor at the Olivier Awards this week. He should have stuck to sobbing and thanking his agent. Instead, he launched a feeble and trite attack on the government for supposedly thwarting social mobility by failing to fund the arts. According to McAvoy’s thesis, ‘Art is one the first things you take away from society if you want to keep [people] down.’ It’s true that several of the British stars in prominent recent films attended private schools

Melanie Phillips

The end of childhood – what we lost when we dropped the age of consent

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-death-of-childhood/media.mp3″ title=”Melanie Philips and Sarah Green discuss the end of childhood” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]In all the sound and fury about historic sex crimes against children, one crucial factor has been generally ignored. Last week, a review of the agencies dealing with the phenomenon of ‘grooming gangs’ in England said that more than 370 young girls in Oxfordshire had fallen victim to them over the past 15 years, and called for an urgent national debate into these ‘indescribably awful’ sex crimes. But the most shocking and overlooked aspect of the review was that, in Oxford, police and care workers dismissed evidence that girls as young as 11, 12 or 13

Emily Hill Emily Hill

The teachers who (quietly) miss Michael Gove

‘Michael Gove,’ the joke goes, ‘you either loathe him or hate him.’ According to one poll (by Ipsos Mori) the former education secretary is by far the most unpopular politician in Parliament, with a net likeability rating of minus 32. A video of him falling over has been watched 487,000 times on YouTube, you can buy crocheted pin cushions of his head for £25 and teaching groups loudly accuse him of ‘doing to children what Thatcher did to the miners’. So why does my mother love him? It’s pretty simple. She’s been a primary school teacher for more than 20 years, and she says her pupils are producing better work than

Sebastian Payne

Seb Payne’s schooldays

The 17th of December 1999, nothing more than an ordinary school day close to the Christmas break. But to my family, it was a devastating moment. That morning a letter dropped on to the doormat informing us that I would not be attending Emmanuel College for my secondary education. Places at Emmanuel, one of the original city technology colleges, were the most coveted in Gateshead. It’s easy to see why: a school with no fees offering a top-notch education. It was such a successful venture that it inspired Andrew Adonis to start the academies programme during his time as schools minister. Five years later, the Paynes were waiting for another

Will Heaven

Britain’s educational empire

Late last year Britain’s independent schools received a wake-up call. Andrew Halls, headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, delivered it. Far too many of them, he said, have become the ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs’ because of an ‘apparently endless queue’ of wealthy foreigners who have pushed fees sky-high; there’s a ‘fees time bomb ticking away’ and one day, when it explodes, a lot of these schools are going to be screwed. It really was that blunt. Cue cheers from struggling parents all over the country, and squeals from school governors, who’d rather no one asked too many questions about the £30,000 price tag on a child’s yearly education.

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Why choirgirls are a bad idea

Boys, by Edward Bell Boy or girl, it isn’t easy being a full-time chorister, but the rewards are vast. For me, it was a good two years before the homesickness fully dissipated, and I was a veteran nine-year-old before I started really having fun. A year later the school became co-ed and our elite band had to adjust to the sudden arrival of girls. For a brief moment I thought they were even going to infiltrate the ranks of the choir. I couldn’t articulate why, but I remember thinking that would have been a bad thing. Very aware of the limitations of my own voice, I developed an obsession with

Sophia Waugh

State schools are ‘character building’ too

In tough times, we have to be persuaded to buy the non-essentials in life. While no one would deny an education is essential, many parents are beginning to question whether paying tens of thousands of pounds for a clutch of GCSEs is really worth it. Therefore public schools are having to come up with ever more selling points to draw in the punters. Anthony Seldon, the never willingly underquoted Master of Wellington College, has a new reason to encourage you to send your children to his school. He claims that his establishment, and others like it, can offer to teach your children ‘character’ in a way that no state school

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Why Scottish public schools are in a field of their own

In 1919 the literary critic G. Gregory Smith coined the term ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’, by which he meant the ‘zigzag of contradictions’ that so dominated the national literature that it might be reckoned a useful summation of the Scottish character itself. ‘Oxymoron,’ Smith observed, ‘was ever the bravest figure, and we must not forget that disorderly order is order after all.’ Perhaps so. Certainly, the Scottish public schools endure an often ambivalent, even awkward, relationship with their native land. The most prestigious are outposts of England in Scotland, custodians of an idea of Britishness that’s increasingly out of favour north of the border. Schools such as Fettes, Loretto, Glenalmond and Merchiston

Friday

Molly Guinness

The tragedy of these sex education plans is that five year olds might miss the joke

Most people look back fondly at their sex education classes, remembering the stammering, red faced teachers, the very silly jokes and the endless, irrepressible giggles. The real tragedy about this week’s proposals to teach five-year-olds about sex is that children that small may not see the funny side of it. Generations of policy makers, teachers and journalists have spent years agonising over the question, while generations of schoolchildren have spent the happy hours of the PSHE classes passing notes, thinking up absurd innuendoes and flirting outrageously, eyes shining with laughter. But perhaps the privilege of having whole lessons given over to such cheerful pastimes was only ever to be a

Thursday

The Spectator

Proof that the schools revolution isn’t over

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_Feb_2015_v4.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman and Fraser Nelson discuss the plans for 50+ new free schools” startat=1694] Listen [/audioplayer]For those who assumed that the removal of Michael Gove as Education Secretary marked the end of the Conservatives’ scholastic reforms, this month may hold a surprise. More free schools are coming, The Spectator understands: at least 50 of them. Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan, is due to announce the first of three waves this year. If the Tories win the election, Britain might have 150 more free schools by the end of the year. That means thousands more pupils enjoying independent education within the state system. This — together with the 4,400 academies

Friday

Dennis Sewell

The Conservatives will lose votes if they fail to defend their school reforms

We can be sure that between now and May there will be an endless barrage of lies and disinformation aimed at belittling this government’s achievements in improving schools. The real danger is not that these arguments will be persuasive, but that they will not be rebutted. It sometimes seems as if the government has lost faith in its own successful reforms. Where Tristram Hunt was poised ready to pounce, misrepresenting the committee’s report the moment it was published (in fact, he was at it the day before it was published!), Nicky Morgan has been recorded as absent once again. It may be that the new Education Secretary has orders from