Education

The summer ritual of A-level results day is so well known it's easy to forget the thousands of students receiving their BTec National results. That’s the intro to a BBC News item on vocational qualification results issued today. It’s also the story of British culture and economics, told in a single, unwittingly revealing, sentence. Around 250,000 kids will get BTEC results today – that’s almost as many as the 300,000 or so who get A-level results. But of course, media and political attention paid to the latter group is vastly greater than the former. Why?

About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s College London, vigorously denied that any such problem existed. Various people pointed to examples of right-of-centre academics being no-platformed — Charles Murray, Amy Wax, Linda Gottfredson — but that was scarcely conclusive. It was anecdotal evidence, not hard data. The same cannot be said any more. This week, Policy Exchange published a paper by three academics — Remi Adekoya, Eric Kaufmann and Tom Simpson — which proves beyond reasonable doubt that free speech is in trouble in the higher-education sector.

A study has shown that protestors who took part in Extinction Rebellion’s demonstrations last year were overwhelmingly middle-class, highly educated and southern. Well, there’s a surprise. It turns out some 85 per cent of the London protestors had a degree, a third had a postgraduate qualification and two thirds described themselves as middle-class. Three quarters of those charged with offences lived in the south. And, if the accents I heard from the protestors as I biked through the throng on my way to work were anything to go on, a high percentage were public school--educated, too. I’d never seen so many Econians — the public school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world.

This week would normally be the time when state and private schools go their separate ways, when privately educated children go off on their holidays while the state school lot carry on for another couple of weeks of term. Except this time, the divergence happened in March, when lockdown started and the educational apartheid began, between rich and poor – or at least, between those who can afford fees and the not so well off. At that point, private school pupils went online for their education with school days running pretty well as normal; state school pupils ceased to have any education at all apart from homework set online, which might be marked, or might not, depending on whether the teachers felt like it.

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.

When Boris Johnson announced the easing of lockdown this week, there was nothing for schools. Pubs, yes. Theme parks, even. But the education of children? There is no great rush for that, it seems. First things first. I have a 14-year-old daughter at a state grammar and like so many parents, I am in despair. The two-metre rule, which had presented such problems for schools, is finally being relaxed. But far from cheering the move as a crucial step towards getting children into the classroom, the teaching unions are still cavilling — advising headteachers to ensure they have contingency plans for bringing only half of pupils back, on a rotating basis. The Prime Minister has said all pupils should return in September.

It would be a tragedy if one of the legacies of Covid-19 — a disease which hardly affects children physically — was a widening of the already broad gap in educational attainment between rich and poor. But sadly, the damage is already well under way. Back in March, Britain was the European country most keen to keep its schools open in the face of the then-burgeoning number of Covid-19 cases. Now it is the other way around. In Denmark, primary schools have been open for a month. This week, children began to return to class in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Next week, schools will start to reopen in Belgium. Yet in Britain, the earliest date we have been given for reopening schools is 1 June, and then only for some children in primary schools.

Here are some numbers that too many people who work in and around politics don’t know. In any given year, around 700,000 young people turn 18 and leave school. A little under half of them go on to higher education (HE). The other half, around 360,000, do something else. Roughly half of these non-HE school leavers would normally get a job. Another 60,000 or so would become apprentices. And quite a lot – more than 100,000 – would go down in the stats as ‘not sustained’ or ‘activity not captured’ meaning that whatever they did, it didn’t last, or that they have dropped out of the view of educational statisticians. In other words, life has not gone well for them.

‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, labouring over their times tables and number bonds. It was my complaint as I struggled to tell median from mean, or sine from cosine. Well. Now we have a nation and a world bewitched and terrified in equal measure by a ground-level demonstration of what an exponential function does. Our entire society is being shaped for a generation by that elegant, predictable, horrifyingly steepening curve. One shred of comfort in this catastrophe is the thought that no journalist will ever again write ‘increasing exponentially’ as a fancy-sounding way of saying ‘increasing a lot’.