Education

Lacking in pep? Looking for some extra zing as winter sets in? The Spectator recommends our energy conference on 1 December. Tickets are still available, sign up here. I don't want this to become the 'Tom Tells You To Get High' blog, so this will be the last time I write about cannabis for awhile, I promise. Unless there's something interesting in the news about it again. Anyway, pass the dutchie on the left-hand side and all that. The Daily Mail, the BBC and the Telegraph report that teenagers who smoke cannabis regularly do worse in their exams. Per the Mail: 'The findings. . . add to a growing weight of evidence that suggests cannabis is more harmful than legalisation campaigners would have us believe'. They're half right.

Mr Steerpike is not really sure what is going on here, but he felt it deserved a wider audience. So the Government Chief Whip had a ramble through James Delingpole's garden and ends up having a chat about Game of Thrones. Does anyone else get the sense that Michael Gove may in some way relate to Tryion Lannister? 'My favourite character in Game of Thrones is undoubtedly Tyrion Lannister... This misshapen dwarf, reviled throughout his life, thought to be in eyes of some, a toxic figure, can at last rally a small band of loyal followers... I am reminded of the words of Winston Churchill: 'never, never, never surrender.' For gaiety's sake, it's refreshing to see those old stuffy rules about a Chief Whip being silent publicly go out the window. What could go wrong?

We’d taken off smoothly and the two-seater Cessna 152 was climbing through 1,000 feet on full power. Then my instructor, Gill, reached over and closed the throttle. As the plane’s nose began to sink, she told me calmly, ‘We’ll simulate an emergency now. Can you find a suitable field to land in?’ Hurrying panic wouldn’t look good, I felt. On the other hand, finding somewhere more or less immediately might be appreciated. An empty-looking golf course fairway below looked promising. It had two sand bunkers, probably easier to avoid with a plane than a golf club, but what if previously unseen golfers pulling buggies strolled out of the trees into my flight path on touchdown? A lush-looking green field to the right looked big, firm and long enough.

This week I wanted to tell you about my amazing dad. He hasn’t died or anything. I just thought I’d get in there with my panegyric quick while he’s still got most of his marbles and before he’s lying in a coffin quite deaf to all the nice stuff I’m about to say about him. So: my dad. What prompted this was a chance remark he made the other day about having left school at 15. Fifteen? ‘Well I wasn’t enjoying it,’ he explained. ‘And Dad said he couldn’t afford the fees. So it made much more sense for me to come and work for the family firm as a lathe operator. I loved it. It gave me independence and I was earning money.’ Now if you were to meet my Dad, you wouldn’t guess his education was so basic.

For the first time in 32 years, the overall pass rate for A-levels has dropped, and the percentage of those achieving an A* or A grade has also dipped slightly. One part of the country that has bucked the national trend is Newham. And in particular, the borough's London Academy of Excellence – a brand new sixth form free school. Just under two years ago, this sixth form opened its doors to students in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country for the first time. Set up by a coalition of eight leading independent schools – including Eton, Highgate and Brighton College amongst their number – its goal was a straightforward one: to improve the record of university entry in the borough. And it was a pretty low base.

I was pleased to read this week that my old headmistress, Judith Carlisle, has launched a campaign to root out perfectionism in girls’ schools. Her initiative, which she is calling ‘The death of Little Miss Perfect’, is designed to ‘challenge perfectionism because of how it undermines self-esteem and then performance’. After 11 years in selective all-girls education, I’ve experienced the perfectionism Ms Carlisle describes. I was, indeed, a prime example: disappointed with anything less than an A*, I felt relief rather than joy when I found out I’d been offered a place at Oxford. The pressure my classmates and I put on ourselves was immense.

Better capital makes us richer. That's uncontroversial when it comes to fixed capital like machine tools and computers, but it's also true of human capital. Better educated workers create more productive jobs, increasing the total amount of wealth in an economy. In a new Adam Smith Institute report released today, Incentive to Invest: How education affects economic growth, we found a very significant relationship between improvements in education and growth. In our model, a 10 per cent increase in TIMSS Advanced test scores generates a long-term 0.85 per cent increase in annual economic growth. We argue that getting more children into independent schools through vouchers may be the easiest way of improving outcomes, and thus growth.

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work ethic or weak parenting.’ No, we don’t, do we?

Nicky Morgan described the findings of Peter Clarke’s report into the Birmingham schools scandal as ‘disturbing’, and laid out how she plans to respond.