Education

Thursday

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sink or swim | 15 June 2017

I used to worry that I would never be a good writer because my childhood wasn’t interesting enough. I now think there must be some other explanation. Because the truth is that, when I was still pretty young, my parents banished me to an isolated community where for years on end I was compelled to dress in heritage costume, endure the uncanny absence of women and participate in ritualistic group activities, often of a physical or religious nature. That’s right. I am an Old Harrovian. On the face of it, this seems like an odd choice for my parents to have made for me — although it isn’t as bat-cave

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mad matrons and horrid housemistresses

It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than make me smile, or emit a sharp soundless puff of breath from the nostrils. But this book made me guffaw. Normally, only P. G. Wodehouse has that effect. It’s tragicomedy, really. Julie Welch’s subject is a ripe one for tragicomedy, as I should know, having written on it myself: life inside girls’ boarding schools — or in this case, life inside Felixstowe College (founded 1929, closed down 1994) to which Welch went in the early 1960s, and which shaped her whole being to such an extent that she’s convinced her

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 1 June 2017

Ignoring the hadith Sir: Douglas Murray and Jenny McCartney (‘The known wolf’ and ‘A war on joy’, 27 May) are correct to cite hatred of women and young girls and fear of their independence as a trigger for terrorist violence — witness Malala Yousafzai. But it is of course not the only trigger since, denial notwithstanding, it is against the generic and non-gender-specific ‘infidel’ that the Koran fulminates. The prohibition said to exist against killing women and children in war is not found in the Koran (of divine infallibility) but in the hadith (of debatable provenance on a case-by-case basis). The alleged prohibition thus forms a secondary and ultimately dispensable

Thursday

James Tooley

First class

On the Today programme a month ago, Education Secretary Justine Greening was asked whether she could name any ‘respected figure or institution’ in favour of more grammar schools. She declined to answer, which was taken to mean that she couldn’t, and that there wasn’t. I’ve been travelling a lot this year, so wasn’t around to offer my support. I’m back now. Assuming that a professor of education at a Russell Group university is respectable enough, let me wade into the debate: yes, I’m in favour of more grammar schools. Educational experts against more grammar schools — of which there are plenty — point to the current evidence from England and

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The SNP’s muddled education policy is failing Scottish kids

I am afraid that whenever a politician asks to be judged on their record, it is sensible to assume this reflects a confidence they won’t be. At the very least such promises are hostages to future headlines. Take, for instance, Nicola Sturgeon’s boast that education  – and specifically closing the gap between the best and worst schools in Scotland – is her top priority. Judge me on this, she said. Well, OK.  Today the SNP government published the results of the latest Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy and, as has become annually predictable, they make for depressing reading. While standards of reading have remained relatively constant amongst both primary and

Tuesday

Rebecca O'Connor

We should teach infants about the value of money

On the one hand, perhaps he should only be thinking about football, Minecraft, his Lego Millennium Falcon and whether he is actually capable of magic. On the other, I can’t let this window of opportunity go by. Being five-years-old is a prime time for learning about the world and how things work. It might seem a bit too young to be dulling his imagination with compound interest, but it’s a lesson he probably won’t get at school (unfortunately) and is one he would do well to get sooner rather than later. That’s why I’ve started giving my five-year-old son £2 pocket money every week for the completion of very minor

Saturday

David Butterfield

Like them or not, Theresa May’s grammar school plans will end the postcode lottery of education

Grammar Schools. Now there’s a potent pair of words. Mention them, and genial conversation will instantly shift into awkward silence or seething torrents of passion. In either case, reasoned argument is in short supply. Yet now that Theresa May seems committed to overturning Labour’s ban on opening new grammar schools, discussion is vital. But instead of rehashing the same arguments in favour of academically selective schools, or raking over the same problems they can cause, it’s important instead to look carefully at the evidence about whether grammar schools really do promote ‘social mobility’. One of the major themes of anti-grammar salvos is that they don’t. And to make this point, the crudest approach is typically

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 6 April 2017

All-round education Sir: While much of Ross Clark’s analysis of the direction that independent education has taken is spot on (‘A hard lesson is coming’, 1 April), he could not be more wrong on one issue. Many (or even most) parents who choose a private education for their children do not do so simply to achieve top academic outcomes: one look at the results league tables would disabuse him of this notion. What the average independent school does deliver is a rounded education (drama, sport, singing, D of E, CCF, debating and so on) with an emphasis on self-reliance, character and values, and competitive reward systems which acknowledge success rather

Ross Clark

VAT on fees? Our greedy private schools have it coming

The standard conservative response to Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal to impose VAT on private schools would be to attack it as as a policy motivated by class envy and dreamed up to please his party’s levellers — except that Michael Gove, too, questioned private schools’ charitable status a few weeks ago. Private schools might moan and groan, yet they have invited an attack on their charitable status by shamelessly pitching their product at the children of very wealthy parents – an increasing number of them from abroad. By jacking up their fees relentlessly they have priced many middle-class parents out of the market Where 40 years’ ago private schooling was an

Thursday

Ross Clark

A hard lesson is coming

It is one of the great mysteries of modern British politics: how public schools managed to survive three periods of Labour government with their tax breaks intact. How was it that an education secretary, Anthony Crosland, could say: ‘If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England, and Wales and Northern Ireland’, and yet do nothing to make life difficult for independent schools? Suzi Leather, Tony Blair’s appointment as head of the Charity Commission, demanded private schools do more to justify their charitable status. They upped their bursaries a bit and invited state schools to use their swimming pools every so often,

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The Government is doing nothing to tackle GCSE grade inflation

The whole purpose of changing the grading structure for GCSE exams was supposed to be to guard against the curse of grade inflation – whereby, over time, it becomes easier and easier to gain a good grade. How unfortunate, then, that the government has inflated the grades before the first exam results using the new system are published in August. The new scheme replaces the existing A – G grades. In future, candidates will be awarded a grade from 1 to 9, with 1 being the highest level of attainment and 9 being the lowest. The bottom of grade 1 is to be aligned with the bottom of old grade

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 March 2017

My joints were aching suddenly and unaccountably — fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, toes — so I cried off the dinner invitation, volunteering instead to pick up Catriona and her lovely daughter, who was staying for a week, at around 11 p.m. At ten, Catriona rang. Had I forgotten? She sounded a bit squiffy. No, I hadn’t forgotten, I said. We’d said 11, hadn’t we? Well, they were ready to be picked up now, she said. When I arrived, the front door was open and I let myself in. The four of them were still seated at the dining table, chatting and drinking over the remains of the meal. I accepted

James Delingpole

For a real Oxbridge education, go to Durham

‘Should I just have done with it and tell them they’re a bunch of tossers?’ I was on my way to speak at the Durham Union. The motion was ‘This House believes the NHS is out of date’. And, as usual, I was on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate — so why should I even bother? You know beforehand which way the vote is going to go at any university debate these days: the one which enables the snowflakes most easily to signal their virtue. But, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give Durham the benefit of the doubt. ‘I was going to be incredibly rude

Thursday

Will Brown

Put him down for Doon

A near-perfect rendition of Schubert’s ‘Impromptus’ rings out of the music room’s colonial-era windows, the sound carrying all through the school’s pristine grounds. Even in India, a country famed for its sharp inequalities, there are few places where privilege is so obvious. Set in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Doon School, a private boarding school for boys aged 12 to 18, is probably India’s most elite institution. A short walk away from the school’s main gate, children live in slums plagued by dengue fever. But here you’ll find a campus which last year won a Unesco award for cultural heritage conservation, one equipped with its very own hospital. Although

Robert Peal

Our island story is for everyone

Iam a teacher in a state secondary school in west London where the ethnic diversity of the pupils is remarkable. My current Year 9 class, for example, includes pupils with parents from Trinidad, Ireland, Turkey, French Guina, Algeria, Yemen, Italy, France, Bosnia, Albania, India, Germany, Iceland, Portugal, Zanzibar, Lebanon, America, and Spain. Over the past few decades, this ethnic diversity has been used as an argument against the teaching of national history. ‘What relevance do Boudicca and Benjamin Disraeli have to multi-ethnic pupils in modern Britain?’ it is asked. Well, quite a lot, I answer. So far this year, those Year 9 pupils have learnt about the birth of the

Henry Jeffreys

Flunking the interview

I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the funeral oration by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral where he describes his deceased partner, played by Simon Callow, as ‘so very fat and very rude’. So I did something you should never ever do in an interview: I tried to be funny. ‘Rude — my friends would describe me as rude,’

Mark Palmer

They can’t handle the truth

Every now and again I ask my daughter, who is a primary school teacher, if she is free for a curry after work. And almost always she replies that she can’t, as she has a ‘parents’ night’. Now, either she has become lazy in her excuses for not wanting to see me, or her school organises a great number of parents’ nights. Hoping it might be the latter, I consulted a friend called Lucy, a teacher at a primary near Guildford in Surrey. She said it was quite normal to have at least one parents’ night per term, plus two or even three ‘parents’ workshops’. These workshops are dedicated to

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

You’ve got to have faith

Of all the reasons for choosing to live in a ground-floor flat rather than a first-floor one, it might not occur to you that your choice could be the game-changing clincher in your child’s educational prospects — but so it is. In the terrifying admissions criteria for Britain’s oversubscribed faith and church primary schools, you will often find these words: ‘If applicants share the same address point (for example, if they live in the same block of flats), priority will be given to those who live closest to the ground floor and then by ascending flat-number order.’ That detail gives a hint of the desperation of these schools to seem

The Spectator

School report | 16 March 2017

CHINESE SCHOOL IS A FIRST IN EUROPE   Europe’s first bilingual English-Chinese school is due to open in London this September. Professor Hugo de Burgh, a leading authority on China, will be the chairman of Kensington Wade School and has been instrumental in its founding. He says the benefits for pupils will be numerous. Yes, it’s likely that China is the future for international business. But he also believes that learning the Chinese language is of huge benefit to children — both for the general benefits of being bilingual, but also because learning a logographic language — as well as an alphabetic one — expands their mental horizons. Finally, de

Thursday

Toby Young

Victory in sight for the free schools revolution

I’m not surprised the Chancellor allocated more money for the free schools policy in the Budget. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s the most successful education policy of the last 25 years. To begin with, free schools have proved to be a cost-effective way of meeting the need for additional places. This was underlined in the National Audit Office’s recent report on school capital, which said that on a like-for-like basis, they cost 29 per cent less than new schools built under Labour’s ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme. Given that the Department for Education has estimated that we will need 420,000 additional places between 2016 and 2021, it