Education

Q. Around this time of year a friend, who gets hold of tickets through an agency, usually asks me last-minute to Wimbledon. The trouble is it’s hard to know whether she has good seats. One year was perfection as we had shaded middle-tier seats, but last year we had an obstructed (pillar) view and I would rather have watched at home. I am sure there are those among her friends who would love to be there in any kind of seat so how, without sounding ungrateful or spoilt, can I ascertain what’s on offer before accepting? – H.S., London SW6 A. First familiarize yourself with the court layouts and seat numbers. Then, if she invites you, say: “What an incredible coincidence. I have just been speaking to X (a fictional friend). X has also managed to get last-minute seats.

My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home. This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame ‘systemic racism’ for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors, particularly class, geography and family background, were more important. This analysis – supported by lots of data – did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices. Exhibit A in the report’s argument was the poor educational performance of white working-class boys.

About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamt of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those on the left, it was about equal access, fairness, ‘pupil-centred learning’.

Out of line Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor may be removed from the line of succession. When was the last time this happened? — The Abdication Act of 1936 not only removed Edward VIII from the throne; it also removed his heirs from the line of succession. In the event, however, he didn’t have any. The last alteration to the line of succession came as a result of the Perth Agreement of 2011, when the prime ministers of the 16 Commonwealth realms agreed that in future females would be treated the same as males, and that the latter would not leap over the former as the then Prince Andrew had done when, on his birth in 1960, he pushed Princess Anne down the line of succession.  — The birth of Prince George in 2013 made the change academic, for now.

It was only recently that I fully appreciated how the books I read as a child formed me. A pregnant friend asked me about my parenting philosophy and I realised it amounted to ensuring my son would survive a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I never had the money of Veruca Salt’s daddy to indulge his every desire, but I came down hard on chewing gum, gorging on chocolate and, above all, staring at a screen.  Despite my son’s complaints that I was acting like a father from Victorian times, it seemed to have worked, and, as the Oompa--Loompas predicted, not being glued to a screen encouraged him to become a reader, out of boredom if nothing else. If the house was quiet, too quiet, I would usually find him reading a book in a corner.