Schools

Call it the Big Society, decentralisation, people power, whatever – but David Cameron’s vision for society just became a good deal more concrete. In an article for the Telegraph this morning, the Prime Minister makes a quite momentous proposal: that there ought to be a new presumption towards diversity in public services, whereby the private, voluntary and charitable sectors are as privileged as the state is now. Or as he puts it: “We will create a new presumption – backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer

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

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

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

Today marks something of a milestone for Michael Gove’s school reform agenda. Free schools – i.e. ‘Academies’ which are independently run, yet within the state sector – now account for more than 10 percent of British secondaries. This is what I have always thought of as a tipping point – where independent schools offer real competition to council schools (i.e. those run by their local authority). One hesitates to sound too confident, but the genie of choice seems to have been yanked out of the bottle, and a few facts are worth nothing: 1. There are now 407 Academies open, twice the amount in May 2010. The 400 mark was,

Comparing GCSE or A-Level results to previous years is a meaningless exercise. Leaving aside all the arguments about whether or not these exams are getting easier, it doesn’t much matter if children today are doing better academically than their peers a generation ago. What does matter is how they are doing in comparison to children in other countries, the people they’ll be competing with in the global marketplace.   Today’s PISA rankings, the OECD’s comparison of education standards, makes for depressing reading on this front. England has fallen from 7th in reading in 2000 to 25th today, from 8th to 27th in maths and 4th to 16th in science. Admittedly,

Local authorities are already doing their utmost to block the coalition’s schools reforms, so just how will they respond to this story on the front of today’s FT? It reveals how Michael Gove is planning to sideline local authorities from the funding of all state schools – not just free schools and academies. The idea is that state schools will get cash directly from the state, without any need for the council middlemen that currently control the system. Here’s an FT graphic that captures the change: The money would be allocated to schools in proportion to the number of pupils they have, and headmasters would have much more freedom in

A few weeks ago, I wrote a cover story about how teachers’ unions are trying to strangle the Gove schools agenda at birth. But I fear it is facing an even greater, more immediate threat: basic bungling by government departments. The FT today says that the Department of Transport wants to make sure that local authorities keep the right to veto a new school. Armed with such a weapon, it is a sure way of crushing any competition. The DoT’s argument is staggeringly banal: that a new school may play havoc with the traffic. If you’re a local authority, wanting to use any means possible to stop a new school