Schools

Iain Martin has flagged upan article from the latest Times Educational Supplement, in which a Norfolk sixth-form teacher bemoans overenthusiastic pupils. Yes — you read that right. In the article, Jonny Griffiths highlights the ‘other aggravation’ in a teachers’ life: ‘Sometimes ambitious children need to slow down. It is 4pm. My weary colleagues and I are slowly unwinding in the maths office, when there is a knock on the door. Could I have a quick word with Jonny, please?” says Michael in a bright, nervous voice. I don’t sigh, but inwardly I think, “Is that my ‘quick’ or yours?”’ And that's just a fraction of it.

It seems most of the public agrees with the need to improve our schools. A YouGov poll out this morning shows that 53 per cent think education standards have deteriorated over the past 10 years, while only 12 per cent think they've got better. 48 per cent think exams are too easy; just 28 per cent say they’re ‘about right’ and a mere 3 per cent think they're too hard. And when it comes to discipline, the consensus of inadequacy is especially strong: 83 per cent say schools are ‘not strict enough’, while 0 per cent say they’re ‘too strict’. You don’t see 0 per cent in response to questions like this very often.

It has been quite a few days for transparency in Westminster. First, Ben Gummer's ten minute rule bill for tax transparency — which would see every taxpayer in the country receive a statement detailing what they owe and what the money's being spent on — earned itself a second reading in the House. And now, today, the Department for Education releases its new ‘performance tables’ for secondary schools. You can sift through them here, and I'd recommend you spend at least a couple of minutes doing just that.

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more schools rapidly.

Speaking on the new Sunday Politics Show, Michael Gove said that it would take a decade for his reforms to change education in this country. Pressed by Andrew Neil on whether he would be able to reverse England’s fall in the PISA rankings, Gove remarked that it would take ten years before we can see whether his reforms have worked in reversing England’s educational decline in comparison to other OECD economies. Interestingly, Gove suggested that one of the measures of the success of his reforms was whether private schools started entering the state sector. He also defended his decision to force some schools to become academies.

Michael Gove’s giving a robust defence of his plans to make it quicker and easier for schools to sack bad teachers. ‘You wouldn’t tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or an underperforming midwife at your child’s birth,’ he says in the Mail. ‘Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?’ And he was similarly forceful in an interview on the Today programme, the full transcript of which we’ve got here. Gove is emphatic about how important this is. ‘The evidence is quite clear,’ he says. ‘If you’re with a bad teacher, you can go back a year; if you’re with a good teacher you can leap ahead a year.

‘Anyone here from the Spectator?’ Last night a packed meeting at Downhills Primary in Haringey began with this ominous query from the chairman, Clive Boutle, who leads a local campaign against academies. Seated at the side of the hall I kept quiet. ‘No one?’ said Boutle, ‘Great, we’re safe.’ The meeting had attracted about 800 protesters and activists who oppose Michael Gove’s decision to force Downhills – a failing multi-ethnic school – to become an academy. ‘Michael Gove really hates us,’ continued Boutle, his manner urbane rather than menacing. ‘The government doesn’t like Haringey. There hasn’t been a Tory here since Noah was in short trousers. So we’re no risk.

My Daily Telegraph column today is about how poverty is a greater problem in Britain than racism, which I describe as an ‘almost-vanquished evil’. This has drawn some criticism, not least from those asking (understandably) what a white guy like me can know about racism. Not much, but plenty of academics have done a hell of a lot of work into racism in Britain (including two brilliant, young academics, Matt Goodwin and Robert Ford). And their studies present a far brighter picture than we're used to. The abject failure of the BNP is not just down to Nick Griffin being a plumb — it’s because he tried to hawk a racist message to the most tolerant country on earth. CoffeeHousers may be interested on why I think this is so. Here are five points: 1.

Earlier this year I went as a reporter to cover Julie Walters’ return to her hometown of Smethwick, where she was talking to schoolchildren as part of the FILMCLUB charity’s Close Encounters programme. The town where Oswald Mosley was MP, and where Malcolm X once came to challenge racist election campaigning, remains a place struggling with deprivation and poverty. However what I saw in that room, organised by teachers and pupils in their spare time, was the power of a simple idea: to use film to improve aspiration and educational achievement. Walters shared experiences of her difficult grammar school days, her career change (from nursing) and most importantly the idea of ambition and hard work.

Not many folk are aware of it, but there is an official riots inquiry and it has delivered its interim report today. Its conclusions are pretty clichéd and not really worth studying; David Lammy’s book is infinitely more instructive and readable. But it does produce a few figures about the rioters — or, I should say, those arrested mainly because they didn’t think to cover their face. I looked at this for my Telegraph column last week. Here’s my summary of today's report:   1. Broken Britain. Some 46 per cent of those arrested live in the lowest ‘decile’. These guys are not working class, but welfare class.

Today's unemployment figures do not make for cheery reading. Youth unemployment is up to over a million and unemployment overall has reached 2.62 million, meaning that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been for 15 years. Laura Kuenssberg tweets one particularly striking statistic: 'Number of UK Nationals in work fell 280k compared to this time last year, number of non-UK Nationals in work increased 147k over same time' This suggests that it's a touch too simple just to say that there are no jobs out there. It also means that we really should think about why non-UK nationals are proving so much more adept at finding work than their British counterparts.

More money, better services? You might have thought that Gordon Brown had already tested that theory to destruction, but here it is again in the coverage of today's Institute for Fiscal Studies report on education and schools spending. The IFS highlights that education is facing the biggest cuts over a four year period since the 1950s. And the coalition's opponents are gleefully seizing on this as a problem in and of itself. But it isn't, really. As CoffeeHousers will know, education funding increased massively during the past decade. The IFS admit this themselves: “Over the decade between 1999–2000 and 2009–10, it grew by 5.1% per year in real terms, the fastest growth over any decade since the mid-1970s. As a result, it rose from 4.