Education

Thursday

Eleanor Doughty

Talking heads: Roedean’s Oliver Blond on etiquette lessons and luxury boarding houses

It’s hard to open a newspaper without spotting a headline about Roedean. One week it’s lessons in Brexit etiquette; the next, phone-free retreats. Days after I meet 51-year-old headmaster Oliver Blond, the Times trumpets: ‘Let homeless eat steak, says Roedean.’ It’s a blustery walk up the drive to the 134-year-old girls’ boarding school, perched on the South Downs overlooking Brighton Marina. Girls stream through the corridors excitedly. There’s a whoop here, a cheer there — not long to go until the end of term. In his office I find Blond in an armchair. He took up teaching following a degree in English and philosophy from the University of Essex, having

The Spectator

School report: a round-up of recent stories from the front line in education

      Unconditional Offers   In the last Spectator Schools, Ross Clark wrote about the dangers of ‘unconditional offers’, whereby a university offers a student a place irrespective of their exam results. The topic has come back into the news following this year’s A-level results, with headmasters bemoaning the apathy among students that unconditional offers can create. A number of heads blamed unconditional offers for the drop in top A-level results, with Universities Minister Jo Johnson writing that unconditional offers risk ‘undermining the faith which rests in our education system’. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, confirmed that it was concerned over the rise in such

Monday

Steven Fielding

Is this misunderstanding behind the rise of populism?

The latest stage in a series of arcane gambits and cunning plans designed to frustrate Britain’s exit from the EU came in the form of Jeremy Corbyn’s recent letter to leading opponents of a no-deal Brexit, inviting them to discuss the joint coordination efforts. In his letter, Corbyn rightly predicts that during the next few weeks the country will enter a ‘constitutional and political storm’. Up to now, however, the response of our political elite to this impending crisis has been confused. Radical Leavers claim Parliament can be prorogued to allow a no-deal Brexit to pass without further intervention from MPs. Lib Dems and Labour have argued over who should

Thursday

James Delingpole

When did English A-level become a science?

Now that my youngest has got her A-level grades, I’m finally free to say just how much I have loathed the past 20 or so years I have spent helping my children with their English homework. This is a sad admission. After all, I studied English at university and still love reading classic literature and learning poetry by heart. But when I read that the number of 18-year-olds taking English A-level has plummeted to its lowest level since 2001 I wasn’t at all surprised. If I were that age, I’m not sure I’d choose to do English either. The first taste I had of just how grisly English has become

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 15 August 2019

God Sir: In his defence of Christianity (‘Losing our religion’, 10 August), Greg Sheridan writes as if Christianity and religion are interchangeable terms. His claim that the vast majority of people who have ever lived have believed in God may be true, but most of them were or are not Christians. And when he mentions that Christianity is the most persecuted religion, he fails to observe that much of this persecution is from adherents of other religions. As a non-believer, I look at the harm done by followers of different religions fighting each other — and at the years of sexual and emotional abuse of children by religious orders. I

Ross Clark

Do unconditional offers really help A-level students?

I know what it is like to receive an unconditional offer for university. In 1984, when I took the Cambridge entrance exam, if you passed, you then only had to meet the matriculation requirements of the university, which were two Es at A-level. For someone predicted straight As (virtually all Oxbridge candidates), that wasn’t asking a lot. It was hard not to slacken off a little, to take a mental gap year, or six months at any rate, for the last two terms of the sixth form. I slipped to a B in further maths, which seemed an embarrassment at the time, though I know others who took a bigger

Wednesday

James Kirkup

A-levels vs BTECs is the story of British politics

Exam question: what percentage of 17 and 18-year-olds sit A-levels? The answer – I’ll come to it in a bit – might just be the most important fact in British politics that most people in British politics don’t know. I ask because this is A-level results week, the annual festival of photogenic teenagers jumping joyously to mark their results and annoying celebrities sharing think-positive truisms about failing your exams not being the end of the world. It’s all lovely and familiar and predictable and utterly missing the big picture. That big picture is this: A-level day caused Brexit, makes Britain a divided and unfair country, entrenches inequality, celebrates unfairness and

Thursday

James Delingpole

Girl’s gone to Magaluf and it’s hard not to worry

At the Leavers’ Ball held to mark our daughter’s last day at boarding school, there were only two topics of conversation among the anxious parents. How early could we decently slope off without being rebuked by our girls? And the dreaded Leavers’ trip to Magaluf. Magaluf — Shagaluf as the kids all call it — is the post-A-levels destination of choice for what seems like every school leaver in the country. If you’ve seen The Inbetweeners Movie you’ll know what it’s like: charmless, garish avenues of overpriced bars and clubs with pushy greeters, expensive party cruises, grotesque drunkenness, epic hangovers, sunburn, STDs and gallons of vomit. Quite how much Shagaluf

Thursday

Toby Young

The fanatical thinking that’s on its way to Britain

For anyone who isn’t following the long march of racial self-flagellation through America’s institutions, last week’s revelations about the excesses of New York City’s education tsar will come as a shock. Schools chancellor Richard Carranza has introduced mandatory ‘anti-bias and equity training’ for the city’s 75,000 teachers at a cost of $23 million a year. During these ‘workshops’ the teachers are told that ‘worship of the written word’, ‘individualism’ and ‘objectivity’ are all hallmarks of ‘white supremacy culture’ and that it is better to focus on middle class black students than poor white ones. To give you an idea of what these struggle sessions are like, take the experience of

Thursday

Sophia Waugh

Out in the cold

Children have a right to an education. This has been written into English law since the Forster Education Act of 1870, which began the process of making education compulsory for children aged between five and 13, and no one in their right mind would oppose that statement. So when the number of permanent exclusions from schools is on the rise, the reasons behind this should be examined carefully. A child excluded from school is not accessing education, and therefore their rights have been violated. But is it really that simple? A breakdown of the groups most often excluded does not bring up many surprises. In nearly half the cases, exclusions

The Spectator

School portraits | 14 March 2019

  Merchant Taylors’ School One of the country’s ‘great nine’ schools, Merchant Taylors’ School, near Rickmansworth, was founded in 1561 by the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Catering for boys from the ages of three to 18, it is highly academic but also well known for its extracurricular provision and pastoral care. Activities range from Combined Cadet Force and the Duke of Edinburgh Award to Greek and Mythology Club. It has a tutorial system, with each boy assigned a tutor who looks after him throughout his time at the school. Merchant Taylors’ also has a campus of 285 acres of parkland, and there is easy access from the Metropolitan line. More recently

Harry Mount

A nervous traveller

My 1982 photo album is full of pictures of a well-travelled, privileged 11-year-old boy. I was at North Bridge House prep school, a cream stucco Nash villa on the north-eastern corner of Regent’s Park, north London. That photo album shows me, unsmiling, in a ski-pass picture on a family holiday in the Tyrol in January. In April, I went on a school trip to Normandy: there’s a picture of me sitting on the turret of an Allied tank overlooking the D-Day beaches. But the holiday that really sticks in my mind from that year was a school trip to Amsterdam in October. There are only a few blurred pictures in

Cristina Odone

A class of their own

I never meant to conduct a social experiment. I never intended to undermine anyone’s confidence in their judgement. And I certainly never meant to arouse so much hostility. Yet by choosing to home-school my six-year-old this is precisely what I seemed to be doing. Like many other desperate parents, I hadn’t got our first choice of primary state school (this year, just 68 per cent of parents in our Local Education Authority, Kensington and Chelsea, did). In fact, the only place for Izzy was at a primary across the river, which would take over an hour of travelling to get to. So I decided to teach Izzy at home. To

William Cook

Opting for God

‘It’s the same old story — pay or pray,’ said my oldest friend, sardonically, when I told him I was sending my children to a Church of England school. I could hardly blame him for being cynical. He’d known me since we were teenagers, when we were both devout and pious atheists. Yet now I was educating my kids for free, while he was forking out a small fortune to go private. No wonder he felt a bit put out. Since I started going to church again, our friendship has not been quite the same. For cash-strapped parents, the C of E system is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it solution to an age-old

The Spectator

School report | 14 March 2019

Should we scrap GCSEs? A senior MP has suggested getting rid of GCSEs and reshaping A-levels altogether; but not everyone agrees. Robert Halfon, chairman of the Education Select Committee, wants to rewrite the exam system so that A-levels include a mixture of vocational, academic and arts subjects, arguing that ‘all the concentration should be on the final exam before you leave’. ‘All young people should have access to the technical and creative subjects that will give them the skills that employers are looking for,’ says Halfon. ‘We must move from knowledge-rich to knowledge-engaged.’ The Department for Education, on the other hand, shows no sign of dropping GCSEs, describing them as

Camilla Swift

Editor's Letter | 14 March 2019

What should we do with difficult students? The ones who distract everyone else in the class, and don’t care how they are punished? Some schools exclude struggling pupils because they are worried that their exams performance might drag down the class’s grades. But children have a right to an education, says Sophia Waugh, so we need to find a solution. Former teacher Hannah Glickstein agrees, but argues that new Ofsted rules have been put in place by bureaucrats with no experience of teaching. It might not be the sexiest of subjects, but it’s certainly an important one. Talking of exams, Ross Clark takes a look at the rise in unconditional

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Save your children – take them out of school

A good decade or so ago I wrote a fairly vituperative article in response to a piece by the writer James Bartholomew in this magazine, who had announced that he intended to home-school his daughter Alex, aged nine. James had explained in great detail how he would inculcate his charge in the liberal arts: ‘I don’t want to give the impression that I will be a Gradgrind. We will have some fun, too. Alex loves to paint. We will go to the major Cézanne exhibition in Aix and see his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Then we will see the mountain itself from the same viewpoint that he used. I hope

Thursday

Toby Young

The problem with measuring progress

The Department for Education (DfE) published its finalised data on the 2018 GCSE results last week, revealing that, for the second year running, white pupils are doing worse in English secondary schools than any other ethnic group. According to the new Progress 8 measure, which assigns a score to GCSE entrants based on how much progress they’ve made between the ages of 11 and 16 relative to children of similar abilities, Chinese pupils do the best, with a score of 1.08, Asians are second (0.45), then blacks (0.12), mixed race (-0.02) and, bringing up the rear, whites (-0.10). What that score means is that on average white children are behind

Thursday

James Walton

The man who would be king

Last year on Who Do You Think You Are?, Danny Dyer — EastEnders actor and very possibly Britain’s most cockney man — discovered that he was a direct descendant of Edward III. Luckily, nobody had the heart to tell him that for somebody of English stock the chances of not being are estimated at 0.0000000000000000000000000001 per cent, and Dyer reacted with a memorable mix of excitement, delight and overwhelming pride. Now, in the two-part Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family, both he and BBC1 are milking his regal lineage for all it’s worth in what might well be the oddest TV show of recent times. The first stop in Wednesday’s opening

Thursday

Robert Tombs

Beyond Brexit | 13 December 2018

None of us can predict the potential fallout from Brexit, good and bad. What began as a vote of confidence in our institutions has shown them to be dangerously fallible. A country where people usually rub along together is now marked by a cultural and emotional rift. If Brexit does continue to dominate our politics for years, will it mean a reform of our institutions, or a battening down of the hatches by a beleaguered elite? Will the House of Lords, having alienated its natural defenders, at last be seriously reformed? Shall we try to restrain the dangerously capricious powers of prime ministers? Shall we empower local government? Both Brexiteers