Education

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The grade inflation scam

Today’s OECD Economic Survey of the UK (download the complete pdf here ) contains some devastating passages about our education system. As it’s 148 pages in size, we thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate some highlights. Here’s your starter for ten: “Despite sharply rising school spending per pupil during the last ten years, improvements in schooling outcomes have been limited in the United Kingdom.” This is rather a staggering indictment of Tony Blair’s “education, education, education” policy. But what about the ever improving exam results that we hear about each summer? Again, the OECD:   “Official test scores and grades in England show systematically and significantly better performance than international and independent

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The pace of the schools revolution

What a difference a year makes. When Michael Gove spoke at a Spectator conference on schools reform twelve months ago, his policy ideas were just that: ideas, to be deployed should the Tories reach government. Today, at a follow-up conference, they are being put into practice in the fiery crucible of state — and doing quite well, at that. As tweeted by Andrew Neil, Gove has announced that the number of academies — existing state schools that have seized on the independence being offered to them — now stands at 465. That’s some way up on the 203 academies there were last year. And it’s even a significant rise on

Sunday

James Forsyth

Clegg’s cure for the tuition fee trauma

The Liberal Democrats are still traumatised by what happened over tuition fees. Nearly every fringe meeting contained a long discussion of the issue and how the party could have handled it better. Clegg’s plan to heal the wound is to show that the new system will go hand in hand with a broadening of access to the best universities. The deputy prime minister seems to be straining for a fight on this issue. In his speech, he laid into those at Oxbridge ‘who shrug their shoulders and say: That’s just the way things are’ about how dominated these institutions are by the children of the well-off. He demanded, ‘fair access

Thursday

Alex Massie

Who Benefits Most From School Choice?

Who benefits from school choice? Conventional wisdom claims it’s the sharp-elbowed, well-heeled middle-classes that do the best. That’s the same CW that thinks the Big Society is all very well and good for Hampstead but it can never work in Hackney. This has never seemed especially persuasive to me, not least because these ideas are really designed to release untapped social capital and, almost by definition, there may be more of that untapped potential in less-affluent areas. Rapid growth and improvement should not be thought impossible. I’m glad to see, then, that there’s at least some academic support for this thesis. Overall or on average charter schools in the United

Monday

James Forsyth

The need to address National Pay Bargaining

National Pay Bargaining is one of the major impediments to rebalancing the national economy and improving the quality of public services. But as Julian Astle, the head of the Liberal think tank Centre Forum, notes the coalition is doing little about it. It knows that the public sector unions will go to the wall for national pay bargaining and so are holding off. Gordon Brown flirted with doing something about national pay bargaining, announcing a review of it in the 2003 Budget. But he then backed away from the issue. One area where the coalition is chipping away at national pay bargaining is schools. Academies and free schools have the

Wednesday

Dale Bassett

Reforming schools: choice and autonomy

Last week Reform published its 2011 scorecard of the coalition government’s public service reform programme. Following on from articles on the health and welfare reforms, Dale Bassett, Research Director at Reform, explains why the coalition’s school reforms are not as radical as they appear.   The government is pursuing a dual agenda in education reform, altering structures (to increase decentralisation and autonomy) and centralising standards (to increase rigour and central accountability). Key government reforms include giving all schools the right to convert to academy status and allowing charities and groups of parents or teachers to establish new, independent, state-funded schools with the same freedoms as academies.  Yet key features of

Monday

James Forsyth

Labour tries to reheat the Building Schools for the Future row

It was predictable that Labour would use the outcome of the judicial review last Friday to try and re-heat the Building Schools for the Future row. Andy Burnham was in florid form in the House of Commons on the subject. He demanded that ‘Michael Gove apologise to the communities who suffered from the devastating effects of his disastrous decision making.’ Burnham is now writing to the PM to demand that Gove recuse himself from the judge required review of six BSF projects. In truth, most of Gove’s problems in cancelling BSF projects have been a result of the shambolic and wasteful way in which the programme was run. As Gove

Sunday

Andrew Neil

Why work experience matters more than ever

In my recent BBC2 documentary, Posh & Posher, I explained how networking and contacts played a crucial role in giving those with the right connections an early leg up in their careers. Internships and work experience are proving increasingly crucial to opening doors and opportunities in later life. Many have expressed the view that the best intern and work experience opportunities in fields like politics, finance and the media are going disproportionately to those who are already privileged and well-connected. From what I’ve seen myself in recent years I suspect that to be true. The Mail on Sunday gives a classic example (and a potentially embarrassing one for the Tories) of how it

Friday

James Forsyth

Overall, a win for Gove

Michael Gove has won on the substance in the judicial reviews of his decisions on Building Schools for the Future. The judge has rejected the claim that Gove acted irrationally and found that he has the authority to make the decisions he did. There will have to be reviews of six of the decisions because of a failure to consult fully and a full equalities assessment will have to be done – yet another example of one of the traps that Labour has left behind and that the coalition needs to scrap as soon as possible. But this is hardly the victory that it is being portrayed as by some.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Burnham’s slide to the left

One of the more depressing sights in politics at the moment is how Andy Burnham is leading the Labour party back to its comfort zone on education. Burnham, who The Spectator once named minister to watch, seems to have jettisoned all of his Blairite reforming instincts. He now wants to draw as many dividing lines as possible and side with the vested interests and the status quo at every turn. In last night’s education debate, Barry Sheerman, who chaired the education select committee during the Labour years, pointed out that Gove’s education plans are building on the last government’s incomplete reforms. As Sheerman put it, “I am going to be

Friday

James Forsyth

Levelling higher education’s playing field

Last summer I was showing some 17 year olds around the House of Commons. They were bright and engaged and all wanted to go to university. But as they told me what they were doing for A-Levels my heart sank. They were all doing subjects that were going to put them at a massive disadvantage in applying to a top-rank university. The most worrying thing was that they were completely unaware of this. So it is welcome news that the Russell Group, made up of the 20 best universities in the country, has now published a guide advising students on which A-Level subjects are held in the highest regard by

Thursday

Toby Young

Forget Mandarin. Latin is the key to success

As promised, here is an extended version of an article from the skills supplement in this week’s issue of the Spectator. On the face of it, encouraging children to learn Latin doesn’t seem like the solution to our current skills crisis. Why waste valuable curriculum time on a dead language when children could be learning one that’s actually spoken? The prominence of Latin in public schools is a manifestation of the gentleman amateur tradition whereby esoteric subjects are preferred to anything that’s of any practical use. Surely, that’s one of the causes of the crisis in the first place? But dig a little deeper and you’ll find plenty of evidence that this particular

Peter Hoskin

Introducing Britain’s skills crisis

Did you know: Britain trails well behind other countries such as the US, Germany and Poland when it comes to educating its workforce? Did you know: the number of young people not in employment, education or training has risen by around 40 per cent over the last decade? Did you know … oh, you get the idea. All the statistics, and more, are in the booklet on Britain’s Skills Crisis that is included in this week’s Spectator. For CoffeeHousers who don’t buy the magazine (although you should, etc – purchasing options here), you can read the supplement for free via this snazzy, page-turning whatsit. We’ll also put one or two

Friday

James Forsyth

Gove entrenches his reforms

In another sign of how the pace of Gove’s reforms is quickening, the education secretary has told local authorities that all new schools should be free schools or academies. This is a big step towards changing the default nature of the system from state-funded and state-run to state-funded but independent.   Local authorities will not be able to open a bureaucrat-controlled school unless they can satisfy the Secretary of State that there is no free school or academy provider willing to step in.   Gove has always argued that once free schools and academies become a significant part of the system it’ll be no more politically possible to abolish them

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Brutal Bigotry of Low Expectations

Bagehot has a properly righteous post lambasting teachers who complain that it’s too difficult to teach their charges to read and write and count properly. A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history. Such history is never going to be relevant to many

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Gove raises the spectre of an electoral pact

Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there in Sarah Teather, tellingly the only Lib Dem minister not to moan to the Telegraph’s undercover reporters about her colleagues. But there is also David Laws, who is acting as an unofficial adviser to Gove. Anthony Wells’ thorough analysis of an electoral pact suggests that it could do well in the seats where it matters. 

Melanie McDonagh

There is a lot more to immigration than simply totting up the net migration figures

The good news is that most people in Britain think that people in their local area mix pretty well  regardless of differences in race, religion and the rest of it. According to the latest Citizenship Survey from the Department for Communities and Local Government for April-September last year, about 85 percent of people think that their neighbourhood is cohesive, community-speak for the absence of overt ethnic and religious tension. But when it comes to attitudes to immigration a slightly different view emerges. About 78 percent of Brits would like to see immigration reduced; well over half, or 54 percent, want to see it reduced a lot. That’s roughly the same

Peter Hoskin

Is it worth paying young people to stay on at school?

Today’s political news is brought to you by the letters E, M and A. Eeeema. While the political establishment debates the abolition of EMA – the Educational Maintenance Allowance – inside Parliament, campaigners will be protesting against it on the streets outside. The police, who are used to these things by now, have already set up the barricades. Behind all the fuss and froth, the argument is really this: is EMA good value? The coalition claim that paying 16-18 year-olds up to £30 a week to stay on at school is not only expensive, but also wasteful. Labour – who introduced this allowance in the first place – claim that

Monday

David Blackburn

Cameron’s public service reforms are still stuck in New Labour’s intellectual territory

The man known to the Cameroons as ‘The Master’ casts a long shadow. David Cameron has re-launched his public service reform agenda and there was more of a whiff of Blair in the air. His speech was understated. He eschewed references to radicalism and appealed to continuity instead. The favoured phrase of the moment is ‘evolution not revolution’, and Cameron traced the lineage of his reforms to those of the thwarted Blair administration (and the market reforms of the Thatcher and Major years). He was so deep in New Labour’s intellectual territory that he was at pains to stress that the ‘spending taps have not been turned off’. As a

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Exclusive – Adonis: I back Gove

Is Michael Gove’s school reform a hideous distortion of the Labour Academies programme, as Ed Balls put it, or the fulfillment of that agenda? Until now Lord Adonis, the architect of the Academies programme, has kept silent on the issue. But he’s interviewed in The Spectator tomorrow by Matthew Smith, editor of Attain magazine. Here is a brief extract: ‘Ed Balls has declared Gove’s plans for academies as ‘a total perversion of Labour’s policy, which was about turning round under-performing schools in disadvantaged areas’. Adonis’s response is rather different.  ‘Neither I nor Tony Blair believed that academies should be restricted to areas with failing schools. We wanted all schools to