Schools

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Solid state

From our UK edition

Our schools have long been held up as an example to the world – and the ever-increasing number of international students shows that a British education is still very desirable. What has been less emphasised is that while our independent schools certainly have a lot to offer, so too do our state schools. In this supplement, kindly sponsored by Brewin Dolphin, we take a look at the changing worlds of state and independent education. Sophia Waugh explains why she sent her children to a comprehensive, while Ysenda Maxtone Graham argues that most homework should be abolished. Or is the British system relaxed enough already? Cindy Yu explores the strict Chinese education system – and is glad she moved to the UK aged nine.

Lauren Nicholson-Ward

Saints preserve us

From our UK edition

Teaching is, and always has been, challenging. As society changes, so do the demands on educators. Every new generation at the chalkface likes to grumble that they have it worse than their predecessors and that their working lives are tougher than those of people in other professions. In response to this, friends working in, say, the City tend to mention the school holidays. The long summer break is a source of smugness for teachers, but the truth is that most of us love our jobs, and not just because of the glorious ‘six weeks’. One thing that I keep coming back to, though, is the very real difficulty of teaching religious education. Teachers of RE are expected by their colleagues to be paragons of piety and virtue — and I am not being facetious here.

Edward Webster

Tutoring: a weapon against the blob

From our UK edition

The tuition industry is growing rapidly in Britain, doing great work in improving numeracy and literacy and also aiding social mobility and aspiration. As former Marlborough headmaster Edward Gould said, the bigger the fence, the more ladders parents will use to get their children over the top. At the expensive end of the spectrum, oligarchs prep their children to within an inch of their lives over the three months before they take the Common Entrance. Consultants such as Bonas MacFarlane make it their business to shoehorn these children into schools the parents had never heard of 12 months before.

Katherine Whitbourn

The horror of exams

From our UK edition

My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking and there’s a leaden feeling in the pit of my stomach. My pupils are dilated and my digestive process has ground to a halt. My sympathetic nervous system is kicking in and activating its ‘fight or flight’ response. And how do I know all this? Because the subject of ‘Stress, and the Body’s Reaction to It’ is one of the topics on the AQA AS-level psychology syllabus — an exam I’m just about to sit. Stress? I don’t just know about it. I’m living it.

Constance Watson

Customs of the country

From our UK edition

There are some things that will always be in competition. The Capulets and the Montagues; William Brown and Hubert Lane; the NHS and Bupa. They thrive on the tension, and there is always a story to be told. Such is the case with schooling in this country. The education system, and the battle between private and state education, receives vast amounts of media attention. We often hear about why the state system is ‘failing’ — or conversely, more recently, triumphing. Then there’s the perennial university conundrum: last year the Department for Education predicted that privately educated applicants would be five times more likely to gain admission to Oxbridge than students from state schools. Add to that our social attitudes. We in Britain obsess over schooling.

Sophia Waugh

State secrets

From our UK edition

So much of the divide between state and private schools is a matter of mere perception — the perceptions of the teachers, the parents and the children. When, years ago, I announced that I would be sending my children to state schools, my colleagues (journalists on a national newspaper) turned on me as a pack of hounds, baying their disgust at what they called my willingness to ‘experiment’ on my own children. Move over Mengele, here comes Waugh. There are of course differences between the two types of education — but how many of them really matter? For my (yes, state-educated) children, many of the differences they saw between their various friends were nothing to do with education at all.

Muriel Gray

The complete picture

From our UK edition

Everything in the 21st-century developed world is something the 21st-century developed world believes it can monetise. Children, and their education, are most certainly not exempt from this paradigm. Educationalists rarely tire of worrying about how the next generation are falling behind in just about everything compared with their equivalents in those pesky developing nations. Somewhere else in the world, countries are churning out prodigies, geniuses and work--ethically driven automatons who would rather kick in their own heads than kick a football if it meant missing an hour of maths tuition. Naturally this is a concern when we rely on the next generation to invent, discover, build and deliver the things that will make us rich, secure and powerful.

Tony Little

Inside the teenage brain

From our UK edition

Why on earth did you do it?’ must be one of the most frequently posed questions to teenagers. The bright, ambitious boy standing before me is perplexed: prompted by a video clip online, he has liberally sprayed aerosol on his torso and then set fire to himself. There is a pause, then, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ In matters trivial, dramatic or, in this case, painful, teenagers seem to behave in bizarre ways. It is tempting for parents to believe that once our children reach adolescence somehow the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood has been bridged.

Cindy Yu

China’s battery-farm schools

From our UK edition

In the early morning light, the sleepy students of Hengshui Senior Secondary School are putting on their tracksuits in the dimly lit dormitories. It’s 5.30 a.m. By the time lessons begin at 7.45 they have already had morning exercise, an hour of self-study and a balanced breakfast. Under a strict regime that you might think belonged at a correctional centre, the youngsters are getting ready for another day in this high-achieving school in China. As one of the country’s ‘exam factories’, Hengshui has perfected the art of battery-farming children to produce exceptional results. A day in the life of the Hengshui student consists of a constant loop of work, rest, exercise, feed. In each day a student has ten 40-minute lessons.

Stuart Dalley

Do your own thing

From our UK edition

Since its launch in September 2008, the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) has proved enormously -popular across the country. While all types of school have entered candidates, independent schools have been particularly enthusiastic. In its first year, just 27 independent schools offered this course of study — which is a sort of mini-thesis on a subject of the pupil’s choice — and they entered only 125 candidates. By last summer, 242 independent schools were offering it, with 2,423 of their pupils submitting work.

James Wardrobe

The new A-levels: a user’s guide

From our UK edition

This September’s sixth-form students are the first to start courses involving the new A-levels. New A-levels are not ‘modular’. Each involves taking several exam papers, but they must be done all together, at the end of the course. New A-levels have same A*–E pass marks, but exams will include a wider range of question types, and course work will be examined only if it is essential. Another major change is that AS exams will continue as a stand-alone qualification, but will not count towards new A-level marks.

Mary Anne Hansell

Lessons in dyslexia

From our UK edition

The term ‘dyslexia’ has always been emotive, and it remains so. Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko’s book The Dyslexia Debate (2014) has done nothing to dispel the controversy. In a recent paper, ‘Why Children Fail To Read’, Sir Jim Rose, an apologist for dyslexia, said, ‘Dyslexia continues to come under fire as a myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an expensive invention to ease the pain of largely, but not only, middle-class parents who cannot bear to have their child thought of as incapable of learning to read for reasons of low intelligence, idleness, or both.

Toby Young

Cameron’s crusade (and mine)

From our UK edition

Even I was taken aback when, during the election campaign, David Cameron pledged to create 500 new free schools if the Conservatives won a majority. Was he being serious? Five hundred is twice the number that opened during the last parliament and, to be frank, some of those probably shouldn’t have done. Two have closed already — the Discovery New School and the Durham Free School — and a few more will probably shut before 2020. Was this just intended as another negotiating chip for use in the coalition talks in the event of a hung parliament? I don’t think so. I bumped into Cameron at a party in July and the first thing he said to me was that he wanted to keep the momentum of the free schools programme going. He’s in deadly earnest about it.

Laura Freeman

Animal magic | 17 September 2015

From our UK edition

‘Yee-ha!’ is the triumphant shout from a riding school in south London, where Hamza, a teenage boy, has just completed a gymkhana exercise in a faultless rising trot. He takes a hand off the reins and makes lassoing motions in the air to emphasise his point. Hamza is wearing his school shirt and jumper (tie neatly rolled in a cubby hole in the tack room) above tracksuit trousers and borrowed riding boots. The sand-covered riding school has been built between the tower blocks of the Barrington Road estate and the railway line between Brixton and Loughborough Junction. Lambeth is one of the poorest boroughs in London: 32 per cent of pupils qualify for free school meals, against a national average of 16.3 per cent. The borough has 103 schools and not a lot of space to spare.

Ross Clark

What do they do in there?

From our UK edition

The idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but there was always a suspicion — at least among grammar-school pupils like me — that private schools had more than their fair share of duffers who gained a leg up in life through friendships made on the rugger field rather than hard study. Yet since the Department for Education started to publish school exam results two decades ago, the results have been there for all to see.

Camilla Swift

School portraits

From our UK edition

  Benenden   Founded in 1923, Benenden school in Kent began life as one of many all-girls boarding schools. But as other similar schools gradually introduced day pupils, Benenden stuck to its guns, and is now the only all-boarding girls’ school in the country. It argues that the boarding ethos means that it can ‘treat education as a seven-day experience’, allowing girls to learn both inside and outside the classroom. As well as achieving consistent exam results, with 61 per cent of this year’s A-levels awarded an A* or A, Benenden offers a wide range of extracurricular activities, ranging from EPQ to lacrosse, a chamber choir and a model UN.

Thursday

Andrew Watts

The cruellest month

From our UK edition

In six months’ time, my son is due to attend an assessment day for a nursery. The details on the nursery’s website are deliberately sketchy — presumably to avoid parents coaching their children — but it seems to involve my son being observed while he plays and graded on the results of his burbling: it sounds very much like an interview. He is going to be two and a half. It is easy to be satirical about a child going for an interview at the age of two and a half — his PowerPoint skills are not up to it; we haven’t arranged a single internship for him; he doesn’t have any particularly insightful questions to ask. But my wife and I thought we had better put him forward for it.

Thursday

Alison Wolf

How to build a school

From our UK edition

King’s College London Mathematics School is precisely one year old. And on 13 August it woke up to AS-level results that make it one of the ten best state schools in the country. 97 per cent of students got an A in mathematics. 90 per cent of grades in maths and further maths were As. Students’ grades were, on average, two grades higher, across all their subjects, than would be expected from their GCSE results. As a governor, I bask in reflected glory. Ours is a ‘free school’ sponsored by King’s, and it teaches talented, committed 16- to 18-year-olds. We select for potential, using our own test. But we also select by the education, and especially the quality of the A-level maths, that applicants could expect at their current school.

Thursday

Steerpike

Labour asks school pupils to act as informants ahead of vote

From our UK edition

Although Buzzfeed managed to successfully register a cat to vote in the Labour leadership election, the party remains insistent that they are successfully weeding out 'supporters' who are not genuine. However, in a sign that they may not have quite as good a grasp on these checks as claimed, it turns out that they are asking school children to help by acting as whistleblowers on fellow pupils.

Camilla Swift

The lessons of exam results season

From our UK edition

Every year without fail, as the trees start thinking about losing their leaves, the papers are full of the same photographs and the same stories. The pictures are of groups of teenagers grinning triumphantly — hugging one another or throwing their exam results in the air in joy. What we have just experienced is exam results week; or, to be precise, results fortnight: first A-levels and then, one week later, GCSEs. GCSEs lead to A-levels, A-levels to university (and yet more exams) — and then at the end of it all? Well, that’s the next obstacle. But for parents, as well as children, the endless tests can be incredibly confusing. A colleague recently told me about her son, who is due to start school in September.