Schools

Wednesday

Corey DeAngelis

Inside Arizona’s battle for school choice

From our US edition

Arizona families won big this week. The teachers union and Save Our Schools fell short (again) in their latest attempt to roll back the universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program that helps more than 100,000 students there. The groups needed 255,949 valid signatures to place their Protect Education Act on the November ballot. They submitted 421,451, but after legal challenges and county reviews, so many proved invalid that the initiative appears to have fallen well short of the minimum number. School-choice opponents will continue to organize and spend Nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified. The Arizona Free Enterprise Club noted that the initiative is projected to be more than 10,000 signatures short.

Tuesday

Philip Womack

It’s madness to sit exams on screens

There is, says Colin Hughes, who is the head of the exam board AQA, no downside to switching pupils from written exams into a gleaming modern utopia of computerised tests. Students, he says, are baffled by the fact that exams don’t take place on screens. He also seems to think the poor dears won’t be able to type if they don’t take exams on computers, as if they weren’t competent enough to learn how to use a keyboard without them. What’s more, boring old exam papers, it seems, have been causing delays in providing results for schools: doing them on a screen would solve that problem instantly, and, shazaam, Johnny and Jemima can get their C minuses in Raffia Work almost instantly. Sometimes I do wonder why certain people are so bedazzled by technology.

Wednesday

Rupert Christiansen

Three cheers for Britain’s most unabashedly elitist school

As we ponder the ups and downs of our sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting our unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: The British Empire was a force for good

Unjust William Sir: It is a bad idea for schools to be recommending their pupils listen to William Dalrymple’s podcast Empire (‘Striking back’, 4 July), without also suggesting they listen to, for example, Niall Ferguson on the same subject. Dalrymple does not prize the British Empire, but many of us who have studied it in detail admire the many benefits it conferred on its subjects. Balance is essential in educating children and from Dalrymple they will get an unduly pejorative view. Hearing his analysis, one might wonder how such an inefficient and corrupt entity succeeded in governing about a third of the world for a long period. There were two main failures.

Wednesday

Max Jeffery

The truth about how the British Empire is taught in schools

William Dalrymple says that children ‘don’t learn’ about the British Empire at school. It is an ‘elephant in the room’, he claimed on the Green party leader Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast last week. This isn’t true. I learnt about the Empire at school. Studying A-level history a decade ago, we spent a year covering the Raj. The Indian Mutiny, 1857. The Amritsar Massacre, 1919. On viciously cold mornings, my teacher, Ms Pearmain, would open the windows and say that boys’ brains were slowed by comfort. It kept her lessons in my head. It would have taken Dalrymple a few seconds to do some research and realise his error. In schools which follow the national curriculum, lessons about the British Empire are prescribed by the government.

Wednesday

Toby Young

Farewell to the school I founded

My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home. This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Which racecourses have seen the most deaths?

Hero worship Peter Magyar, the new PM of Hungary, has the unique distinction among world leaders of bearing the name of the country he leads. Why do we call the country Hungary when the natives call it the ‘land of the Magyars’? – ‘Hungary’ is literally, the land of the Huns. However, Middle English didn’t distinguish between them and the Magyars, a tribe which, in the 9th century, invaded and settled in what had been known as Pannonia. The Magyars themselves spoke a Uralic language related to Finnish, in which ‘Magyar’ is believed to mean ‘hero man’. Any relationship to the acronym ‘MAGA’ is purely coincidental. School starters The Scottish Green party wants to raise the age at which children start school to seven. How does this vary around the world?

Wednesday

Toby Young

White working-class boys are being left behind

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame ‘systemic racism’ for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors, particularly class, geography and family background, were more important. This analysis – supported by lots of data – did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices. Exhibit A in the report’s argument was the poor educational performance of white working-class boys.

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator Schools: spring 2026

In this week’s Spectator Schools supplement, the Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie writes about the undervalued beauty of school chapels. ‘They are so often architectural gems,’ he says, ‘masterpieces that stand alongside some of the nation’s finest buildings.’ You can judge a private school by how it cares for its chapel – those that still do should be commended and celebrated. Philip Womack would no doubt agree. He writes that his time as a school chorister was the making of him.

Rupert Hawksley

The invaluable lessons of school mock elections

The 2005 election campaign was brutal. All the major parties succumbed to infighting, the hustings were hostile and the drip-drip of poisonous briefings reached a nadir when a Ukip candidate was compared to Hitler. One special adviser was found crying in the loos. More than two decades may have passed, but the Sherborne School mock election certainly left its mark on those who witnessed it first-hand. I remember it well. In fact, I was that tearful special adviser. I was working for the Labour party (sadly not endorsed by Tony Blair) and during one hustings managed to persuade the crowd to walk away when the Ukip candidate – a close friend of mine in the same boarding house – stood up to speak. I stayed back to watch him deliver his carefully crafted speech to an empty courtyard.

Matthew Wilson

History of art is not a ‘soft’ subject

I may be biased because I teach it, but history of art A-level often feels like the greatest, yet most dismally undervalued, subject in the curriculum. It explores history’s most innovative thinkers, enhances visual literacy, teaches history through the prism of creativity and emotion, sharpens critical thinking, and fosters empathy and open-mindedness. Yet it languishes as a minority character in the pantheon of school subjects. It has always been chronically underappreciated by students, teachers, school heads and governments. I worry that its disparagement tells us something rather depressing about our own cultural values and even our sense of what education is for. Just to scotch a popular misconception from the outset – history of art is not a ‘soft’ subject.

Sophie Winkleman and David James

Textbooks will always beat screens

Is the page finally beginning to turn on children and screens? For the first time since the advent of social media, we are seeing a burgeoning alliance across all political divides to protect children from digital harm. In 2024 Jonathan Haidt delivered an urgent manifesto for change in The Anxious Generation, and at the beginning of this year Australia responded with a ban on social media for under-16s. Now even Britain is finally recognising the scale of the problem. Despite this week's decision by MPs to consult rather than enforce, the fight will rage on. Deliberation doesn’t work in the arena of addictive substances. However, the war on classroom screentime has yet to be properly waged, let alone won.

Kristina Murkett

The rise of the Oxbridge AI admissions cheat

‘This is the future, my wife says./ We are already there, and it’s the same/ as the present.’ So begins Ciaran O’Driscoll’s poem ‘Please Hold’, about a husband talking to a telephone robot and becoming ever more frustrated at the mind-numbing automation of modern-day life. There’s a lot of ‘Your call is important to us’ and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and ‘We appreciate your patience’, until eventually the speaker resigns himself to the fate of growing old while on hold. This same reluctant acquiescence can be seen with AI: this is the future, and we are already there. Except instead of asking us to hold, it’s always asking us how it can help, how it can further infiltrate our lives. AI has already transformed how students learn and schools evaluate.

Minoo Dinshaw

The cut-throat world of school magazines

In my mind, there was always a sense of hubris in the air of our tucked-away offices at the Chronicle, Eton’s main student magazine. As in many other domains of our school’s life, we idly assumed ours was the first, as well as the only really consequential, example of a public-school magazine. The early 2000s, when I was a boy there, were a particularly suitable time in which to indulge in such a view; we were all acutely aware of the rise of Boris Johnson. If you were devoid of athletic, dramatic or musical talent, editing the Chronicle was the obvious crown The record for first school magazine does belong to Eton, but it is in fact for a much earlier and odder production, puckishly called the Microcosm, which ran for 40 issues in 1786-7, published as a book the next year.

Lara Brown

How to beat Oxbridge’s positive discrimination

As university admissions have become increasingly obsessed with equal outcomes, many parents fear a kind of reverse discrimination. They worry that a Ucas form bearing the name of an independent school may be bad news for an Oxbridge application. There’s evidence to suggest they’re right. Private-school pupils who transfer to state education after their GCSEs are up to a third more likely to be admitted to Cambridge. Children who remained at private school for A-levels had an acceptance rate of 19 per cent, compared with 25 per cent for those who moved to a grammar school or state sixth form college. Given the assumed prejudice against private school applicants, a recent move by one Cambridge college has surprised many.

Flora Watkins

I’m a Screen Grinch – and proud

He’s 12 next month, my eldest son, but he’s rejected the ‘movie night’ party I’ve suggested, and he doesn’t want any of his new friends from senior school to come for a sleepover. And I know why. Our television is a modest one, not the size of one of the screens flanking the main stage at Glastonbury. I recently went to pick up my son, who was at a new friend’s house. They were playing Mario Kart on a screen that took up about half a wall of the living room. Neither looked up when his mum let me in, so I stood in front of them. ‘Hello? Hel-LO?’ ‘It’s so hard when they’re on screens, isn’t it?’ exclaimed the other mum, as her son manoeuvred Luigi around Brain Rot circuit on Bilge Island with slack-jawed expertise.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘If you’re inspired by music, you’ll do better in exams’: Conductor Ralph Allwood on why music matters for children

Here’s some life advice Ralph Allwood gives to the teenagers who attend his week-long residential Rodolfus Choral Courses, held all through the summer at various schools and colleges across the country. Some of the singers are being pressured by their parents to take just maths and sciences, or other lucrative career-oriented subjects, for A-level or at university, and to give up music. ‘Right,’ he says, as the teenagers assemble for a final rehearsal, ‘this is how you decide what you’re going to do next. Get advice from everyone you can: from your teachers, your parents, the universities, that aunt who wants you to do a sensible subject. Say thank you, then go into your own room and close the door. There, make up your own mind about what you want to do.

Philip Womack

School choir music is in peril

You’d be hard pressed to find a more continuous strand in British culture than the chorister. They’ve been warbling in Westminster Abbey since the 1380s. Every national occasion is marked by choirs, the choristers dazzling in their splendidly anachronistic ruffs and robes, present at moments of collective joy or sadness. Funerals, memorial services, royal weddings, carols from King’s College, Cambridge. They are ornaments to our culture. Oodles of composers, musicians and singers, professional or not, have, over hundreds of years, stood in the choir stalls at dawn, at midnight, and lifted their voices to the vaulting roofs. Some of the most beautiful music in the canon was written for choirs: Gregorian chants, Thomas Tallis.

Lloyd Evans

My burning ambition for my old school

Every boy longs to see his school burn down and for me the dream came true twice. In February 1977, I was walking to Sunday Mass when I spotted a cluster of teachers at the school gates. The old Victorian hall had caught fire overnight and collapsed. I couldn’t believe it. This was my personal Towering Inferno and I’d missed the whole thing. In my mind’s eye I could see it all: the leaping flames, the burning joists, the black columns of ash rising over south London, and the thunderous roar as the roof crashed to the ground. Nothing was left but a few pathetic wisps of smoke rising from a pile of charred beams. The teachers were standing around looking shocked and miserable – as if mourning the death of a pet rabbit. Why so glum?

Wednesday

Mary Wakefield

Screens in schools have been a catastrophic failure

About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamt of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those on the left, it was about equal access, fairness, ‘pupil-centred learning’.