Spectator Life

Sometimes, on slow days, I picture Sir Keir Starmer and our Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, doing the can-can while sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘la la la I can’t hear you’, to a backdrop of mounting concerns about VAT on school fees. It recently emerged that Tony Blair (for it is he) was firmly against it back in the 1990s, on the sound basis that taxing parents for sending their children to school is a bit stupid. But Starmer is no Blair, more’s the pity. It is abundantly clear, now, that this is an education tax, pure and simple, and that it has some decidedly problematic consequences, foreseen or not.

‘There is absolutely no need for any child applying to our school to be tutored,’ said the headmistress of a prestigious London day school during the Q&A session. Relieved, I left the hall to wander around the booths in a nearby room. I was struck by the many tutoring agencies, offering advice, courses and books on how to boost your child’s chances of securing a place at an elite school. In light of the headmistress’s earlier comment, I couldn’t help but recall the famous words attributed to P.T. Barnum. ‘A sucker is born every minute.’ The majority of applicants are tutored to the hilt Not long after, I found myself on a tour of a reputable school for possible 7+ entry for my son.

English is in crisis. And no, not the sort of crisis caused by signs in supermarkets saying ‘ten items or less’. It’s caused by students hating their GCSE English Language lessons and refusing to continue the subject at A-level. A-level take-up has dropped by 40 per cent since 2012. You might giggle that this just throttles the supply of mournful Yeats-quoting burger-flippers but I think it’s a concern. There are all sorts of reasons that it’s worth studying English and only some of them are being able to quote Yeats. A very large number of young gamers engage voluntarily with text related to the games they love In response to this crisis, there seems to be consensus among teachers that GCSEs need to change.

It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t subject to VAT), the head apologised for lengthy queues to register, get coffee, join a tour. Another 200 people had turned up in addition to the 600 booked in. Among them, I spotted several families whose children are currently at local prep schools. Labour starts charging VAT on school fees from January. But an estimated 10,000 children have already been taken out of independent schools, mine among them.

In the weeks since the Labour government came to power, we’ve gone from debating compulsory teaching of maths until age 18 to entertaining the idea that the times tables may be too stressful for children to memorise. My resilience, my determination and my empathy are largely products of being bad at maths When I was at school in Poland in the 2000s and 2010s, the response to such a suggestion would have been an eye-roll, or the blowing of a loud raspberry. The comment that ‘if you can’t have what you like, then you must learn to like what you have’ was commonplace, and maths was taken by everyone until age 18. I was at the top of my class until, at age 15, I began to fall behind in maths.

Up and down they go, criss-crossing the country, cars packed full of stuff. Duvets, pillows, vapes, cuddly toys, packs of cheap pasta and rice, Aldi-brand vodka, clothes horses and apprehension. There are around 1.7 million undergraduates and a third of them, the freshers, are most probably leaving home for the first time.  Some are already at university, including my youngest, who I dropped off at the University of York last week after playing ‘spot the student car’ on the A1. She’ll be studying to become an educational psychologist over the next three years, getting an education herself and a high degree of debt – plus expertise in Pot Noodles.

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2023 Ucas application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have increased the proportion of acceptances from state schools: 72 per cent, up from 52 per cent in 2000. Of the 80 schools, 29 are independent, 29 grammar or partially selective, 17 sixth-form colleges and five are comprehensives or academies. (Schools are ranked by offers received, then by offer-to-application ratio. If schools received fewer than three offers from one university, this number has been discounted due to Ucas’s disclosure control.

At long last, the day has come. After nearly two months of summer holidays, institutions beckon their children back for another school year. The television will resume its status as a post-school treat rather than an indispensable tool to fill the dead hours between events. The kitchen will no longer resemble an all-day canteen, and the house will take on the solemn quiet of the middle of the day. But this kind of peace is only won after a great deal of preparation. First up, school shoes. Unfortunately, children grow at a disproportionate rate to your bank balance. This means that the start of the new school year heralds the annual cash haemorrhage in Charles Clinkard shoe shop or similar.

Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind of deprivation or anguish or obstacle was a key factor; they’d been motivated by a determination to overcome adversity. My days were a little less happy. My mother didn’t believe in the permissive child-rearing policy of liberal American moms For boxing champ Henry Cooper, it was extreme, ‘bread-and-dripping’ poverty in South London.

This is a complex tale involving an American murder, the popular British TV series Flipper, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – but bear with me. Next month sees the centenary of the conviction of two spoiled Chicago boys – Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18 – who admitted carrying out what the press at the time dubbed the ‘crime of the century’.  I had always sensed that my friend had a dark side and that he kept parts of his life secret from me The two student friends were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, plus 99 years in jail for abduction, after admitting kidnapping and killing a 14-year-old boy, Bobby Franks, before mutilating his body with acid to disguise his identity.

The Guild Chapel in Stratford-upon-Avon presents its congregation with a vision of terror: a medieval Doom painting depicting the Day of Judgment. On the left are those who have behaved themselves – the Saved – who joyously bound towards the gates of Paradise. On the right, sinners pay the price for falling short of the moral mark: they are tortured by demons and fed into the Mouth of Hell, to be swallowed by a fanged serpent. This summer, another Day of Judgment looms. Yesterday, thousands of UK 18-year-olds will receive their A-Level exam results. In one nervous scroll, years of schoolwork was validated, university places confirmed or denied, and future careers seemingly mapped out.

Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you are about late medieval poetry. Instead, it has decreed that wannabe grads must now answer three dour questions. This move is designed to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who do not, in the eyes of a Ucas spokesperson, have access to teachers and family members able to help: and who could argue with that? Well, I think it’s not only a shame, but another sign of the creeping hand of cold and normalising bureaucracy.