Education

The pace of reform in education has been stepped up again today. The model funding agreement for all new academies has now been changed by the Department for Education to remove the requirement for all teachers to have Qualified Teacher Status. Any existing academy will also be able to change its funding agreement to include this new freedom. This change might sound technical but its importance is that it means that academies will now be able to employ people who have not gone through a year of teacher training. Previously, an academy couldn’t have employed, say, James Dyson to teach design without him having done a year in a teacher training college. These new, more flexible arrangements should spur a change in the nature of teacher training.

Last night I attended a public meeting to discuss the successful bid by parents in north London to set up a free school in East Finchley. The Archer Academy is to be a non-selective, non-denominational community school. It was an extraordinary occasion, with hundreds of local parents prepared to throw their weight behind the project. Tellingly, a local Labour councillor was on the panel to answer questions about the new school which has cross-party support. This is due, in no small part, to the desperation of the community in the face of consistent refusal on the part of the local authority (Tory-controlled Barnet) to do the right thing and build a new school.

The discussion of Britain’s latest tennis nearly man has turned inevitably to the culture of a sport which, in this country at least, remains laughably exclusive. Asked on the Today programme why we fail to produce consistent numbers of good tennis players the tennis evangelist and comedian Tony Hawks (who knows a thing or two about what is laughable) made a good suggestion about opening up our ridiculously expensive (and often empty) courts to the public. But the debate about tennis reveals a deeper malaise. In this country we are prepared to accept mediocrity because the last thing we would dare tamper with is the class system. There is a difference between elitism and exclusivity.

The self-styled enfant terrible of the new radical left, Ms Laurie Penny, has taken her one-woman revolution to the heart of the establishment. Yesterday, she caused quite the ruckus at the Sunday Times Education Festival, hosted at Wellington College on a panel with David Starkey. As well as being banned from the speakers dinner at the behest of the Sunday Times, Penny later alerted her Twitter followers to the fact that 'violent old thug' David Starkey had 'attacked' her 'on stage'. 'That's what racists do when you call them out on their bigotry' she Tweeted. 'Bit shaken but I'll be ok.

Primary school children studying subordinate clauses and foreign languages? What an outlandish but suddenly very real idea. Michael Gove announced earlier this week a curriculum reshuffle to restore rigour and aptitude to primary education. But why is liberalising Gove instigating a top-down approach, prescribing what teachers teach?   It’s not the first time that Gove’s policies have become contradictory. Earlier this year, Tristram Hunt MP wrote a magazine article about the Tory divide over forcing secondary schools to teach British history while also increasing their freedom.   The Times’ Alice Thompson (£) provides an answer for these dilemmas in her column this week.

Matthew Parris has launched a critique on the charitable status of public schools in this morning’s Times. Matthew is not opposed to private education, just to the arrogance of the bastions of privilege that sell a lifestyle and connections as well as an education. Echoing the government’s social mobility Tsar, Alan Milburn, Matthew argues that these schools should earn their breaks by doing more for the communities that surround them, the vast darkness outside their hallowed walls.   He then urges the government to take the fight to the public schools, and, by extension, the legal system that protects their special position. He also backs publicly funded scholarships, a proposal of the Sutton Trust’s Sir Peter Lampl which was unveiled in the Spectator in March.