Education

Why has the government changed its mind and asked children to wear masks in school? When Plan B was announced last month, there was no requirement. But that has changed. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, was asked why on Monday. He replied that ‘we conducted a small observational study with 123 schools who had followed mask-wearing in classrooms before and saw that they made a difference'. He suggested it was quite a significant study. 'If you just think it through, with a respiratory disease that is aerosol-transmitted, if you are asymptomatic but wearing a mask, you're much, much less likely to infect other people.' The government has now published an ‘Evidence Summary' for the use of face coverings in education settings.

In January, just a few days after Glenn Youngkin had launched his first ever campaign, and as parents were struggling with the possibility that their children might not be able to return to school full-time, one father stood up and told the Loudoun County School Board to do their jobs and “figure it out.” Within 24 hours, Brandon Michon’s earnest cry was heard around the country, and Youngkin was asking for Brandon’s phone number. He called Brandon and let him know that if he was elected Virginia governor, there would be someone fighting for him, and for parents across Virginia. In a moment when some would have let a simple tweet suffice, Youngkin took action. I witnessed much of this first-hand.

What news network did you watch on election night? Thankfully we all had plenty of options. There was CNN, where John King's magic wall grows ever more granular: "we're moving the Kelleher household into the leans-Republican column, Wolf, though their dog remains undecided. Now next door to the Smiths..." There was Fox News, where loud people shout at each other until Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum finally pull over the car and tell everyone to knock it off. And then there was MSNBC. Oh, Lord, was there MSNBC. There did we find Nicolle Wallace, one of the network's fastidiously objective anchors, declaring that Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin "worshipped at the altar of Donald Trump.

Which departments will fare the worst from this week's Budget? It won't be the Department for Health and Social Care. Over the past few days, new funding announcements have appeared in the papers meaning the NHS will be handed another £5.9 billion. That's in addition to the £12 billion a year investment it will receive as a result of the health and social care levy. Meanwhile, Whitehall sources suggest that Michael Gove has had some luck in his push for more funds for the levelling up agenda. Where the mood music is less positive is education.

The University of St Andrews has been keen on American imports for some time. Americans make up 16 per cent of undergraduates, by far a larger proportion than any other British higher education institution. The university, hungry for foreign money (international students pay £25,100 a year, compared to £9,250 a year for English, Welsh and Northern Irish students) sends recruiters to high schools in the States to woo potential students. When I was at St Andrews a decade ago, I knew more Americans than Scots. Mostly, the university’s connections with the US have been good. Yet there is one American import St Andrews could do without: campus culture wars.

Having written here at least once before that Boris Johnson is the heir to Blair, my first thought on the Prime Minister's tax-to-spend announcement on the NHS and social care is a petty one: I told you so. The striking thing about making the Boris-Blair comparison is how resistant some people are to it. Among Bozza fans on the Leave-voting right, there is often fury at the suggestion that their man, the hero of Brexit, is anything like the Europhile they used to call ‘Bliar’. On the left, there is an almost pathological determination to believe that a Tory PM must, by definition, be a small-state free-marketeer intent on starving and privatising public services. That latter point is why Labour people sometimes struggle to respond to Johnson.

While some in Britain are understandably anxious about the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan and the prospect of the Central Asian country becoming an international jihadist training ground, long-standing domestic problems concerning religious radicalism continue to persist. The issue of unregistered private schools in British Muslim communities is one of them. This has been thrust into the limelight yet again after a headteacher was warned that she faces a prison term after continuing to run an illegal Islamic private school – in defiance of a previous conviction. Nadia Ali, 40, ran the Ambassadors High School in Streatham, South London, for over half a year after being sentenced to community service for operating the unregistered school.

The Tories regard a return to rigorously marked exams as one of their big achievements in education. In 2010, the year they took office, more than a third of A-level entries received an A or A* grade. By 2019, following an overhaul of the curriculum, only a quarter did. Despite the havoc wreaked by Covid on education, the government was determined to carry on this trend. That’s why last year, after exams were scrapped, the Department for Education tried to further control grade inflation by using an algorithm. It worked, in part, by assessing the past results of schools — but a consequence was that exceptional pupils from historically underperforming schools were marked down. This seemed very unfair and the backlash was swift.

Today’s A level results are unprecedented, but not unexpected. On Friday, Professor Alan Smithers  of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham said, ‘The early signs are that it will be another bumper year for grades.’ He went on to suggest that this might be, ‘justified as compensation for all the disruption suffered’. The impact of Covid-19 on the education of children cannot be dismissed as mere disruption. While adults might now be returning to the office after 18 months working from home, children struggled through two terms of lockdown learning and two more cocooned in bubbles. Grades will be high but they have been earned. Teachers held it all together too.