Schools

A fortnight ago, The Spectator asked if Cameron was fit to fight? We wondered if he had the gumption to use the political moment created by the riots to push through the radical reforms the country needs.  So, it’s only fair to note that the government has today actually done something—as opposed to just talking about—the excesses of the human rights culture. The Department for Education has stopped the implementation of new regulations that would require teachers to log every incident in which they ‘use force’ with children. These new rules would have made teachers record every time they had pulled apart two kids in a corridor or intervened to break-up an over-enthusiastic game of football.

The Gap Year has been declared dead. It’s A-levels day today, and the annual scramble for university places has been intensified ahead of next year’s tuition fees rise. According to this morning’s Times (£), the last count had 669,956 pupils sprinting after 470,000 vacancies. An estimated 50,000 students with adequate grades will not enter higher education this year as many universities have raised entry requirements to manage increased demand. This means that competition during clearance will be even more stiff than usual, particularly as universities will offer many fewer clearing places according to various surveys. Needless to say, UCAS’ website appears to have collapsed under the weight of this unparalleled interest.

When I visited the US recently, I got talking to some American teenagers about university. They (like me) had just left school and were trying to decide where to go next. I explained that in the UK, the Government's plan to raise tuition fees to £9,000 a year had led to riots. Their jaws dropped. They couldn't understand what the fuss was about. In the US, fees can reach $40 000 a year for the private Ivy League colleges. The reaction in the UK seemed ridiculous to them. They felt we should be grateful that we didn't have to pay $40,000. [Although, to be fair, some state universities only charge around $5000].

After the failure of today’s meeting between union leaders and Francis Maude and Danny Alexander, Thursday’s strike now seems certain to go ahead. It’ll be the biggest test so far of the coalition’s ability to withstand industrial action. The coalition has constantly emphasised that it has contingency plans in place to deal with strikes. This Thursday will show us how good these plans are. Certainly, the more schools that are kept open, the less powerful the bargaining position of the unions will be. I understand that David Cameron will use his speech to the Local Government Association tomorrow to emphasise that the deal that the government is proposing on public sector pensions is reasonable and fair.

Invigorating, that's probably the best word for Policy Exchange's event on free schools this morning. Right from Sir Michael Wilshaw's opening address — which set out the reasons why he, as headteacher of Mossbourne Academy, is optimistic about education reform — to Michael Gove's longer, more involved speech, this was all about celebrating and promoting the new freedoms that teachers are enjoying. There were some specifics about the schools that are opening, and the numbers of them, but very little of it was new. For the first time in a week, Gove wasn't announcing policy, but instead referring back to it. Which isn't to say that this was an ornamental occasion — far from it. Sir Michael's "four reasons for optimism" were, by themselves, pretty noteworthy.

Pete rightly points to Michael Gove’s interview in The Times this morning as the story of the day.  Some producer interests are objecting to Gove dismissing the exam system as ‘discredited’ and his plans to return A-Levels to being a proper preparation for undergraduate study. But there’ll be no backing down. A Gove spokesman tells me that ‘'The system is discredited and it needs fixing. The public know it and support change. If some don't like hearing that, tough. They'll find it much more unpleasant in ten years if we don't fix the system and they're working for Chinese billionaires who did maths at Harvard.' But, perhaps, the most important development on education reform this week was George Osborne throwing his weight behind it.

Andy Burnham has caught up with Coffee House’s revelation earlier this week that the Treasury, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department of Education are going to have to review their position on academy funding because of a legal challenge.  Burnham is twittering, in typically hyperbolic terms, about the matter. But the reality of the situation is rather less dramatic. The coming changes will simply be a matter of preventing the taxpayer paying twice over for a service, once from the academy to the local authority (the new system) and once from the Department of Education to the local authority (the old system).

The most extraordinary row has broken out after the Prime Minister appeared to suggest that Oxford University has a racist admissions policy. He today said that, "I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful." But the university has since hit back, pointing out that, "the figure quoted by the Prime Minister is incorrect and highly misleading — it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds.

With all the talk about social mobility, it was inevitable that those who believe grammar schools were the doorway to opportunity would wade into the debate. The most prominent of these interventions came yesterday from David Davis, who said: “The hard data shows that the post-war improvement in social mobility, and its subsequent decline, coincided exactly with the arrival, and then the destruction, of the grammar school system. This is the clearest example of the unintended consequence of a purportedly egalitarian policy we have seen in modern times.” The “hard data” Davis refers to is this 2005 study by Jo Blanden, Paul Gregg and Stephen Machin for the LSE and the Sutton Trust.

David Davis has been relatively quiet for the past couple of months, perhaps nursing a hangover after this. But he's back making a seismic racket today, with an article on the coalition's social mobility report for PoliticsHome. He dwells on the education side of things, and his argument amounts to this: that the government's school reforms — from free schools to the pupil premium — will not do much to improve social mobility, and may actually make the situation worse. Michael Gove may be praised as "intelligent, dedicated and wholly admirable," but there is enough gelignite elsewhere in the piece to ruffle some coalition feathers.