Schools

Thursday

Toby Young

Spare a thought for next year’s A-level students

Three years ago I was contacted by an official at the Department for Education to see if I was interested in becoming a non-executive director of Ofqual, the exams regulator. There have been times since when I’ve regretted turning down that offer, but this week was not one of them. Ofqual was given the unenviable task of awarding A-level and GCSE grades to students in England who, thanks to the lockdown, had not sat their exams; and it was inevitably criticised by those children and their parents who felt they should have done better, not to mention various enemies of the government who treated Ofqual as a proxy for Gavin

Thursday

The Spectator

Inflated exam grades let the government ignore its own failures

It was obvious that closing schools would hit the poorest hardest, inflicting permanent damage and deepening inequality. While many private schools and the best state schools maintained a full timetable of lessons throughout lockdown, a study by UCL in June found that 2.3 million pupils — one in five of the total — did virtually no schoolwork at all during the weeks of lockdown. The official response has been to turn a blind eye, and imagine that the damage can be covered up by simply awarding decent exam results. This year’s students are right to protest about the injustice of the system. From the moment the decision was taken to

Thursday

Lara King

Home advantage: not going to school was the making of me

At last, school’s out for summer — although this might be a strange concept for children who have not set foot in a classroom for months. If social media is anything to go by, home-schooling is hell. Since March, the internet has been awash with panicked parents sharing mock timetables with slots for ‘mum quits’ and ‘dad starts drinking’. And who’s to say the madness will end after the summer? A recent survey showed that a quarter of parents don’t intend to send their children back to the classroom in September, and one in ten of those plans to home-school permanently — which at least offers certainty. It can also

Thursday

Toby Young

Does the curriculum really need ‘decolonising’?

Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ education spokesman, has written to Gavin Williamson urging him to do something about ‘systemic racism’ in schools. ‘Changes to the history curriculum, such as learning about non-white historical figures and addressing the darker sides of British history honestly, are a vital first step to tackling racism in our education system,’ she wrote. ‘This chasm in information only serves to present students with a one-sided view of the events in history.’ I’m not sure Moran knows very much about how the education system works. For one thing, Williamson cannot dictate how history is taught in free schools and academies — they don’t have to follow the

Thursday

Alicia Munckton

The private school advantage has never been greater than in lockdown

When Boris Johnson announced the easing of lockdown this week, there was nothing for schools. Pubs, yes. Theme parks, even. But the education of children? There is no great rush for that, it seems. First things first. I have a 14-year-old daughter at a state grammar and like so many parents, I am in despair. The two-metre rule, which had presented such problems for schools, is finally being relaxed. But far from cheering the move as a crucial step towards getting children into the classroom, the teaching unions are still cavilling — advising headteachers to ensure they have contingency plans for bringing only half of pupils back, on a rotating

The Spectator

Letters: Churches have risen to the challenge of lockdown

Back to schools Sir: I share Lucy Kellaway’s enthusiasm for seeing school-life return and inequality gaps closed (‘A class apart’, 20 June). I was also glad that she debunked the myth that teachers have been on holiday during lockdown. It doesn’t feel like a holiday to me, as I sit contemplating a set of essays, the second set of predicted grades of the year and my annual Ucas references, not to mention daily work postings, live sessions on Microsoft Teams, Zoom staff meetings and a long list of emails. Where we depart is at Lucy’s call for a return to school at all costs, rather than the ‘blended learning’ approach

Thursday

The Spectator

Britain must begin its recovery – before more damage is done

The discovery in Britain that a £5 steroid, dexamethasone, can be effective in treating Covid marks a potential breakthrough in our understanding of the virus. Much remains to be learned about the wider potential of the drug but the claims made about its success are striking: that it reduces deaths by a third in patients on ventilators and by a fifth in patients receiving oxygen only. It has not been shown to benefit Covid patients who do not require oxygen. But this can still, in a global pandemic, mean thousands of lives saved. There are two further points to be made. With Covid-19, there is a better chance of finding

The Spectator

Made to measure: where did the metre come from?

Made to measure The government started reviewing whether we should stay two metres apart while social distancing or whether one metre would do. What is a metre? — Since 1960 it has been defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. — But it was originally defined by the post-revolution French government as one ten-millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole, on a meridian through Paris. — The signing of the Metre Convention on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations officially established the metre as an international unit of measurement. — If everyone in Britain joined the

Lucy Kellaway

School’s out: the true cost of classroom closures

It’s Monday at 9 a.m. and secondary schools in England have just re-opened their gates to students in Years 10 and 12. I have been looking forward to this moment for 13 long weeks, since that frightening afternoon in March when my colleagues and I gathered around a computer in the staff room and saw a healthier-looking Boris Johnson declare he was shutting schools. But today I’m not at the comprehensive in Hackney where I teach economics welcoming back my students with a rousing lesson on the financial devastation caused by the crisis. I’m surplus to requirements and am still marooned at home. What ‘re-opening’ means is that a mere

Tuesday

Oliver Johnson

Is it really necessary for schools to be closed?

With Primark open, parents can once again buy cut-price school uniforms for their children. Whether those children will get to wear them before they grow out of them is an open question. The government has abandoned plans to get all primary school children back into the classroom before the end of term, and Matt Hancock has questioned whether secondary school children will even be back in September. But was it necessary to close schools at all? The Imperial College Report 9 of 16 March is credited with changing the government’s coronavirus policy and sending the country into lockdown. Yet the report did not really press for closing schools. Its data

Thursday

James Forsyth

Why it’s vital that schools are fully open by September

Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, was explicit at Wednesday’s press conference about how concerned he was about a second Covid-19 spike in the winter months. This would coincide with the flu season, placing maximum pressure on the NHS. One consequence of this is that if something is not open by the beginning of October, it isn’t going to be open until the end of February next year. As one of those at the heart of coronavirus policy-making warns: ‘If Sage are this cautious going into summer, then they are not going to want to be playing fast and loose with the R number heading into winter.’ This shows why

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Normality won’t return until schools do

From Monday, you will be required by law to wear a face covering on public transport. Paradoxically, this is a sign that the government wants life to return to being as normal as possible. Ever since the start of the pandemic, there has been debate about whether the government should tell people to wear masks in public. The argument in favour was that it would help stop the spread of the virus by making it harder for people to pass on the disease. There were two main arguments against it. The first was that urging people to wear one could lead to a shortage of the medical-grade masks that health

Monday

Kate Andrews

The evidence on school re-openings is being ignored

One of the benefits of the UK exiting lockdown so slowly is supposedly that evidence from other countries can help mould our decisions. If liberalising parts of society in other countries doesn’t cause a Covid-19 flare-up, the UK can proceed with cautious optimism. If lockdown easing leads to a spike in infection rates, the UK can row back its plans before its too late, or put off making changes for a while longer. Around 50 per cent of people polled oppose the partial re-opening Based on this logic, the return of Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 to school today should be warmly embraced, as reports from Denmark over the

Thursday

Fiona Mountford

As the primary schools go back, it’s the older kids who suffer

It now appears that school’s out till after the summer for pretty much all secondary pupils. The loudest cries, an equal mix of exaltation and despair, come from those who were due to sit GCSE and A-l-evel exams this term: groups now split between delight at unstructured months of leisure time and anxiety that lackadaisical efforts in mock exams won’t prove enough to secure them the required grades. Yet my sympathies in this stalemate lie with those in Year 12, or the lower-sixth, the sandwich year between the two public exam groups. The Prime Minister has said that from 15 June, these 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed ‘some contact’

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: When is a sport not a sport?

Save the children Sir: Your leading article is correct that the government should have evaluated the detriment caused by shutting schools, against the risk posed by Covid-19 (‘Class divide’, 16 May). This is not a glib trade-off between protecting lives and allowing children to go to school: the predicament foisted on young people will affect their future for decades. Exams were abruptly cancelled in March. This has left many schools dealing with apathetic individuals. The disparity between disadvantaged and affluent students is widening: middle-class schoolchildren are twice as likely to receive online tuition, and only 8 per cent of teachers in low-income communities report more than three-quarters of work being

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why schools should stay shut

Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti? As the leader of Liberty, and an almost weekly performer on the BBC’s Question Time, she was a respected purveyor of leftish sanctimony to the masses, a humourless voice of conscience and, I think, self-regard. The battles she fought then were at least, in the main, on the side of decency — and while we might have found her a little trying and even bumptious, there seemed no doubt that here was a young woman motivated by principle. That notion was swiftly expunged when she accepted a brief from Jeremy

Peter Jones

Plato knew that home-schooling can have benefits

Education is cumulative. The idea that it will be lost on a generation because, for one out of 42 terms of schooling, pupils will have to take more responsibility for their own learning, is obvious tosh. Indeed that term may yield considerable benefits for all, especially older, pupils, whatever their future plans. Let Plato explain. Plato’s Seventh Letter (its authenticity has been doubted) deals with his failed efforts to turn Sicily into a Platonic state. Greeks had settled there from about 750 bc, and in the 4th century bc Plato was invited to help turn the apparently willing tyrant Dionysius II into a philosopher king. Plato went over there, but

Thursday

The Spectator

Reopening schools must be our first priority

It would be a tragedy if one of the legacies of Covid-19 — a disease which hardly affects children physically — was a widening of the already broad gap in educational attainment between rich and poor. But sadly, the damage is already well under way. Back in March, Britain was the European country most keen to keep its schools open in the face of the then-burgeoning number of Covid-19 cases. Now it is the other way around. In Denmark, primary schools have been open for a month. This week, children began to return to class in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Next week, schools will start to reopen in Belgium.

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Should Muslim parents be allowed to challenge LGBT lessons?

We saw two different worlds, or at least two different value systems, collide in the High Court in Birmingham this week. On one side there was Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, the headmistress of Anderton Park, a little primary school in Sparkhill, a largely Pakistani bit of the city; on the other, two men who represent Muslim parents there. You may well have heard about the case. It has turned into one of those totemic issues: tolerant Britain vs backward religious people. At issue is the question of whether and how children should be taught about gay relationships — and whether and how parents who don’t like it should be allowed to protest

Thursday

Toby Young

Abolish private schools? Bring it on!

I cannot recall a week in which Britain’s private schools have received better PR. The Labour party has pledged to scrap them because of the huge advantages they confer on their pupils — including ‘lifelong networks for the powerful’, according to Owen Jones. Presumably that’s a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who, thanks to his private school background, has risen to the top of the Labour party in spite of getting two Es at A-level. Laura Parker, the national coordinator for Momentum, welcomed Labour’s new policy on the grounds that ‘every child deserves a world-class education, not only those who are able to pay for it’. In other words, only private