Harry's Place

“I’m not normally a Daily Mail person but happened across a sad story in it …”

Love it. We should start a poll for best excuses for happening across Daily Mail stories…

“I found it on the train”
“My dog chewed up my Guardian and The Mail was all that they had left”

The school places issue is a serious one although the problems with our schools started way before Thatcher (I never liked the milk anyway, especially on hot days).

Private schools are contributing to the demise of state education in the UK. In formulating policy the government adapts its position to reflect middle class concerns, particularly the issues that affect the one million or so crucial voters in marginal constituencies. By withdrawing their children from the comprehensive school system middle class parents are therefore diminishing the resources that Downing Street will allocate to state education. It is often claimed that the opponents of private education are engaging in a form of class warfare. This may be true, but it is a class-based conflict initiated by a Right whose representatives seem determined to maintain a rigid and economically counter-productive segregation in the UK. It is difficult to see why the fee-paying sector exists, if it is not maintained with the implicit intention of maintaining anti-egalitarian hereditary privilege. I would prefer to live in something approaching a meritocracy myself.

“middle class parents are therefore diminishing the resources”

No – middle class parents are excercising their freedom to choose how t educate their children.

If we actually allowed good schools to flourish and grow in size, and [shocked gasp] bad schools to be closed, none of this would be an issue. What is required to sort out education is less socialist dogma and a dose of market forces – so that parent choice determines the number of places at schools – not some arbitrary rule that says we must continue to fund schools that don’t make the grade.

Do you not understand why public schools are so good – it is because the bad ones go bust and close.

Need it be said, that the solution is school choice, so the less advantaged can do what middle class families already do: http://www.civitas.org.uk/education/choice.php

Sorry to troll, but this father entered my dreams last night.

”Good” schools are transaparently measurable by league tables and SATs results these days which didn’t exist when I was at school and were once opposed by Labour.

Debatable – highly debatable. Most people know naff-all about how stats are compiled and interpreted, and so don’t realise that, ultimately, the vast majority of schools are both bad and good. Only outliers – i.e. great schools and complete dumps – are easily identifiable.

Moreover, league tables aren’t about the pupils, who are simply coached into giving the right answers – problematic in schools with limited resources, where education becomes reduced to tests and exams: what about the wider picture? – but rather about determining resource allocation. Teachers become coaches.

Bring back grammar schools! And permit selection by academic ability! And permit interviews of potential pupils! (although not their parents)

The envy-filled policy of the current government is just a surrender to the market, and a severe case of pulling up the ladder after one has ascended it. It’s contemptible.

My sprog was rejected from 3 schools in walkable distance and offered an underperforming one five times further than our catchment primary across town which we rejected. The Council should provide extra places when demand is there even if the school is NIMBY enough to resist. Does anyone know how to take on the Town Hall and win?

Has anyone met any homeschoolers who didn’t strike them as being a bit odd? I reckon the ‘private sector school’ boom is mostly concerned with giving the increasingly affluent something to spend money on, the latest fashionable status symbol esp primary

It suits the Government to have people opt out of State Education, it means they don’t have to spend so much money on it and can, therefore, lower taxes. Let’s not forget that we don’t need an educated poupulation, they might get ideas above their station. We do however need expensive school and college buildings to keep the PFI as a nice little earner for all those construction companies and their shareholders.

By the way, do you also teach your grandmother to suck eggs?

League tables render education worthless as a measure of anything other than students’ ability to master rote memorization of exam answers. Managerial obsessing over weights & measures is really screwing up education (school, further and adult) in the UK.

Growing a school in size is a different challenge from maintaining quality. Marketarian lobotomites should read up on perverse incentives a bit more or stick to waving vouchers.

So, cutting through a very confused article, you seem to be in favour of education vouchers?

Excellent.

dirigible – do the Swedes count as “marketarian lobotomites”?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3717744.stm

”Good” schools are transaparently measurable by league tables and SATs results these days which didn’t exist when I was at school and were once opposed by Labour.

Nonsense. Only part of what schools do is measurable- whether students can read, write, add up recall some facts within the context of an exam. These are all important skills of course, but not the main reason parents send their kids to private schools.

The parents (mostly embassy staff) of students at the Swiss private school where I work like the warm and safe atmosphere of a school where everyone is comfortably off and has a positive orientation to education. Students actually like going to school and miss it when they are on holiday. Really.

The contrast with the daily fights and tense atmosphere at the London comprehensive where I used to work are immense. The teaching at the comprehensive was generally better and the teachers harder-working and more committed, but a private education buys parents better peers for their children, and hence a nicer school environment and better learning.

It is jaw dropping that, even on today of all days, here is a left-wing commentator still carping on about Thatcher.

We’ve had the same sort of stuff from Brown at the despatch box lately, dredging up Lamont-era economics from the bottom of the barrel he has spent the last 10 years sullying.

If Labour couldn’t fix schools with 10 years at that level of public support, it is delusional to lay blame at the feet of a woman who was unseated from power before most of this year’s uni freshers were born.

Just swallow hard and take your medicine, Dr Huq.

Im a parent and also a deeply simple person.

Parents are naturally protective of their children but the Government believes this, in their educational choices exhibit, a ‘false consciousness’ of the world. To counteract this they seek to restrict their choices which invariably are for public/grammar/good performing schools, while keeping just enough good schools open to prevent an uprising from the governing classes (ask T Blair and Diane Abbott if you dont believe me)

We all know what makes a good school. We all know what it takes to create a good school. We all know the Govt wont allow this.

We all know what makes a good school. We all know what it takes to create a good school. We all know the Govt wont allow this.

Really? What is it then and why do you think the Government won’t allow it?

Good lord. I don’t believe it but I’m actually agree with Vernichka on this one.

Of course parents should be allowed a choice of school as far as possible but choice is not the panacea for the problems of our education system that many on the right seem to think. The fact is that in the cities and towns with a number of schools the best ones will always be oversubscribed. Telling parents they have the “right” to send their children to the best school is not going to magically make more places available there and forcing them to increase their intake against their will can only be damaging to the school. Certainly to increase the choice which parents have you would need excess capacity in the system overall, with all of the extra cost that entails. Meanwhile for parents in rural areas where there is only one or possible two schools to choose from the notion of “choice” is not really meaningful.

Ok carping on about the past might not to be everyone’s taste but while we’re on the subject I actually went to a state primary then independent secondary school under Thatcher when the private sector was exempt from the national curriculum. It made it look like they didn’t trust it for their own kids but it was ok to inflict it on the masses. Anyway just to bring things into the present:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080502/tuk-education-minister-s-school-failing-6323e80.html

All credit to the Balls for sending their offspring to the local school, unlike their Tory counterparts eg Gideon George Osborne:

http://www.recessmonkey.com/2008/02/01/osborne-declares-state-schools-unfit-for-purpose/

Bring back grammar schools! And permit selection by academic ability! And permit interviews of potential pupils! (although not their parents)

Don’t!

Bringing back grammar schools is a bad enough idea. It will just give an advantage to a lucky few and do nothing for the majority who won’t get to go to them – in fact they will probably be worse off than they are at the moment. Allowing interviews will just increase the advantage to the middle classes which grammar schools will tend to create anyway.

The envy-filled policy of the current government is just a surrender to the market

What is this “envy filled policy”. Trying to create a level playing field for admissions? I disagree with many of the govt’s policies but they are dead right on this. The flack that Ed Balls got recently for telling schools to obey the law on this was ludicrous.

“Bring back grammar schools! And permit selection by academic ability! And permit interviews of potential pupils!”

Because of course education was so great until the 60s and 70s when it all went wrong with progressive ideas in education and the end of educational selection…. Except that this just isn’t correct. Our children are better educated than we are, and we are better educated than our parents.

“inflatedly priced property”

Did you even go to school?

The problem with schools is not the teachers, or even the pupils. It’s the parents. Folks who pay for a service tend to be more demanding than those who don’t.

Not all folks who send their kids to school pay much in tax, and those who do probably don’t associate their PAYE with their kids education quite as closely as those who have to stump up a school fees bill.

So…how about vouchers? Then schools which are good can expand as more and more folks wish to spend their vouchers there and those that aren’t good enough lose their pupils and their funding. And if enough parents club together and pool their vouchers they can build their own school.

“The flack that Ed Balls got recently for telling schools to obey the law on this was ludicrous.”

He got flack because it turned out that there were hardly any that were not doing so, but he was trying to divert attention from some bad news (I forget what exactly – so it worked!)

96 out of 570 checked were found to be breaching the admissions code. That’s not “hardly any”.

I think you’ll find that those schools were ‘faith schools’ who not unreasonably wanted some sort of religious commitment from prospective pupils. Part of the problem is that, it seems to me, is that we are moving from a ‘knowledged-based’ educational system to one based on training people to have flexible skills. Anyway, I think that as Dr Haq didn’t actually go to a state school, she/he may be wearing rose-coloured spectacles. Of-course teachers are very committed in the state sector, but my experience in looking for a secondary school for my child was that most of the teachers are barely out of teacher-training college themselves, and those that are older are very jaded. Probably because of the number of changes that are always being forced upon them. Why don’t other countries have these problems? Also, although it was not codified in tables in the past, everyone knew what to expect at various schools. That’s one of the beauties of having a class system; it makes it very easy to read society.

I’m not normally a Daily Mail person
This sounds like the lament of a dyslexic lesbian!

Bring back grammar schools! And permit selection by academic ability!

So how is that meant to improve the educational opportunities for the vast majority of people. 80 percent didn’t go the grammar schools so how the flying fuck is bringing them back going to make any difference?

XofTheX, you assume that the figure you quote vindicates your obvious dislike of grammar schools. On the contrary; grammar schools are intended to be highly selective and the preserve of the academically minded. Therefore, I have to say the 20% acceptance rate looks fairly accurate to me.

What are you talking about Xombie? I am challenging the idea that the educational opportunities of the majority will be improved by reinstituting grammar schools. The fact that so few benefitted from them is why they are an irrelevance. In fact they are worse than an irrelevance, for every grammar schools created, creates in its wake several secondary moderns. This is something that the proponents of grammar schools are very slow to acknowledge. Not exactly a populist message is it – ‘let’s bring back the secondary modern’ – but it is exactly the message that grammar school advocates are advancing but lack the honesty to make clear.

Time to revive my idea:

Parents should be able to select the school their children attend.

Yes, this will mean some schools will be oversubscribed. But if they cannot expand on their current site they will have to lease space from undersubscribed schools or find new premises. The legal obligation will be on the popular school to expand. Unpopular schools will close.

It would be a more egalitarian system but would also have the advantage of relieving parents and children of the strain of wondering if they will be successful in their choice.

How exactly did throwing himself under a train do anything for the future education of his daughter?

Was he perhaps expecting her to do Anna Karenina for A level?

Having met some of the Ealing massive and their rising 4s I understand the problem described here by school governor and former PPC “Rubina” Huq.

It just struck me as I listened to their plaints that getting together and piling into the so-called “sink” schools you were allocated under a transparently fair and fully advanced system would “turn them round” or at least raise their statistical performance.

When I asked whether these anxious parents had looked at the Ofsted reports for the allocated schools I found that they had not done so.

When I asked whether these anxious parents had checked the applicable distances last year for their target schools and chosen accordingly I found that they had not.

When I asked these anxious parents whether they had even used all three of their choices, never mind wisely, I found that some of them had not even done that. OMG! FGS!

When I asked these anxious parents whether they had chosen their addresses very carefully I found that some had moved very recently but ended up 200 metres too far away – 500 instead of 300 metres. Which is missing by a mile if you’re that serious about such things.

And while some of the parents had actively sought work-rounds e.g. nan’s addresses they were willing to start a campaign of outing parents who had found rellies willing to play along, or temporary rented accommodation or whatever it was.

We were right to oppose SATs – particularly when young kids are coached to within an inch of their young lives to keep the school economy healthy.

We should also make sure parents understand the purpose of value-added measurements and their superiority to absolutes for measuring schools.

And also the sheer stupidity of using the numbers of free school meals or statemented kids as measures of school genius levels.

In Finland they don’t even go to “big school” until they are about 7 years old and they stay in the same school to 16 and they do very very well indeed.

No faith schools AFAIK, mixed education, no publically announced intermediate exam grades, every school a good school.

Parental choice IS a bit of a sham really. Other means of allocation need to be used unless they are LOADS of school places perceived as good enough for little dears and there have to be loads of surplus spaces or infinitely flexible intakes for this counsel of perfection to become reality.

This is ridiculous! This is unnecessary anxiety to the point of suicide! Kids are very durable and find their own level almost wherever they go to school.

There are some appalling instances of mistakes at my kids’ schools but by and large they are winning more than they’re losing and will do just fine. One of mine was put in completely the wrong science set for example and may miss doing two extra GCSEs as a result. One child was just moved UP into the A or A* set, having got an E, to make room for some B kids to move down.

The head of science should be taken to one side and taught Newton’s laws. What goes up must come down being perhaps the best one for her case.

But I digress.

My kids are also I think more likely to make the subject choices they want in the NEAREST STATE SCHOOLS that they have always gone to than they would have done under some brain grading centre of excellence, independent, or vestigial state selective with less vocational options. Nonetheless they will have enough and good enough academics to change tack if they wish to.

We all know what makes a good school. We all know what it takes to create a good school. We all know the Govt wont allow this.

Really? What is it then and why do you think the Government won’t allow it?

A good school is one where truth is not a relative concept. Where children are not patronised and ‘understood’ into mediocrity. Where they are pressured, tested and sometimes (heaven forfend) endure boredom to stretch them and where ‘relevance’ doesnt mean being spoonfed ephemera.

I think you know only too well why this Government will not allow this.