Education

Should state schools be able to make a profit? We asked this of you on our Coffee House poll this week. 71 per cent of you said yes, and with good reason. Profit-seeking companies expand when demand is strong: that’s what you want good schools to do. But successful schools not seeking profit have no incentive to expand: it’s an easier life just to let the waiting list grow and jack up the fees. This month, 24 new ‘free schools’ will open – eventually able to educate 10,000 pupils. But to keep pace with the boom in primary school pupils, we’d need an extra 400 primaries alone. Will the ‘free

The Department of Education is remarkably unbothered by yesterday’s Guardian splash about free schools. Why? Because they have known for months that the emails on which it was based had gone missing. Indeed, the only thing that surprised them about the story was that it did not appear three months ago in the Financial Times. Email security in Whitehall is notoriously bad. Ministers and special advisers often don’t realise that civil servants have access to their email accounts. This access provides ample opportunity for those hostile to the government’s political agenda to leak out stories. (Most ministers in both this and the last government use secret squirrel email addresses to

Tony Blair has dropped in to write an article on the social context to the recent riots. It’s insightful, especially as a testament of his failings in government. At the close of his premiership, he says, he’d realised that the acute social problems in Britain’s inner cities were “specific” and could not be solved with “conventional policy”. So much for ‘education, education, education’, Blair’s favoured solution was a mixture of early intervention on a family by family basis to militate against the “profoundly dysfunctional” upbringings these young people endure and a draconian response to antisocial behaviour. Alas, he was forced from office for before implementing the plan. The present government

Today we learnt that David Cameron is looking at the experience of Los Angeles’ recovery from the 1992 riots. The first lesson he should learn is the value of an inquiry, as Ed Miliband suggests. Californian policymakers held an inquiry, and it taught them plenty about the nature of modern poverty, urban unrest — and how to tackle it. Part of the reason that poverty in Britain is so ingrained is because so few politicians look at it in any detail, and even mentioning the word ‘underclass’ solicits squeals of disapproval. We remain aloof. As I argued in the magazine last month, we like harmless sketches about British poverty (Rab

This afternoon’s parliamentary debate touched on the sociological issues that may have inspired the recent looting. Naturally, there are plenty of competing views on the subject, but I bring your attention to Harriet Sergeant’s, which she has expressed in the latest issue of the Spectator. Sergeant has conducted extensive investigations into the teenage gangs in London, acquainting herself with gang members and their way of life. Her observations are intriguing, albeit terrifying. An extended version of her magazine article is available online and I urge you to read it. But here is a short extract: ‘The young men I interviewed had very obviously failed to make the transition to manhood and

For years, teachers have been increasingly reluctant to restrain unruly pupils — for fear of being slapped with a lawsuit. But now, it seems, the government is trying to ease those concerns. Its guidance today may not change any laws, but it does encourage schools to change their approach. Among the directions is that “schools should not have a ‘no touch’ policy”: teachers can use reasonable force to restrain pupils, remove disruptive children from the classroom or prevent them from leaving the classroom when they shouldn’t. However, the guidance does stress that there are limits on the use of force, making it clear that “it is always unlawful to use

The judges are judging the judges, or at least judging by the cover of this morning’s Times (£) they are. “Radical reform of the selection of judges,” some leading figures tell the paper, “is needed to break the stranglehold of white Oxbridge males at the top of the judiciary.” The story continues inside the paper, with a tranche of statistics on just how white, Oxbridge and male the judiciary actually is (i.e. very). It all reminded me of a table we put together for Coffee House some months ago, and which I thought I’d excavate this morning. Here it is, with judges sitting firmly at the bottom: Of course, some

When I visited the US recently, I got talking to some American teenagers about university. They (like me) had just left school and were trying to decide where to go next. I explained that in the UK, the Government’s plan to raise tuition fees to £9,000 a year had led to riots. Their jaws dropped. They couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. In the US, fees can reach $40 000 a year for the private Ivy League colleges. The reaction in the UK seemed ridiculous to them. They felt we should be grateful that we didn’t have to pay $40,000. [Although, to be fair, some state universities only charge

As any CoffeeHouser knows, the Spectator enthusiastically supports Michael Gove’s education reforms. But it’s always important to listen to opposing views – so we stepped outside our offices in Westminster to talk to some of the striking teachers. Some of their points, it must be said, were a little peculiar. “It was wonderful under Balls, a golden age,” said one “we’d like to get back to that.” But others were more realistic in their concerns. For example, they criticised Michael Gove’s inconsistency: the official government policy is that modular exams will remain, but he appeared on television this weekend saying that he intended to remove modular exams by 2012. This