Schools

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

The rise of the state-private pupil

From our UK edition

When is a state school pupil not a state school pupil? When he has a private tutor. That’s when he becomes a state-private hybrid. So, when parents pore over the university admissions and the A-level grades of state secondary schools, they should ask themselves whether all those results are attributable to the school or whether there may have been outside help. Not that anyone’s going to tell you. In a fee-paying school you don’t normally need to go outside; that’s why you pay those whopping fees. Granted, exams are overrated but the world being what it is – obsessed with top universities – lots of parents will do whatever it takes to get their child into one. And so they hire a private tutor.

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

From our UK edition

Elstree, Berkshire Elstree – which educates boys and girls from three to 13 – is nestled in 150 acres of stunning countryside near Newbury in Berkshire. The school, which celebrated its 175th anniversary last year, says that its aim is two-fold: ‘to find out how a child is intelligent rather than how intelligent a child is’ and to teach pupils that ‘effort is king’. From Year 4 onwards, children can choose to flexi or weekly board and from Year 5 pupils are taught by individual specialists in all subjects from Year 5, compared with the usual Year 7. Although Elstree is non-selective, school-leavers have received scholarships to – among others – Eton, Harrow, Radley, Marlborough and Winchester.

Peter Hitchens

Tried and tested by the Common Entrance Exam

From our UK edition

This is about something that did not happen to me at school, an exam I dreaded, but never had to take. It was the only examination that ever really worried me, and it was called Common Entrance. Do not confuse it with modern imitations bearing the same name. In those days, preparing for it involved (for me, anyway) translating English into Latin and French (a proper knowledge of irregular verbs and a wide vocabulary in both those languages was required). It also demanded thorny and tricky types of mathematics, an astounding grasp of largely Imperial geography – and a full knowledge of English history since the Conquest. I actually understood the jokes in 1066 and All That, for which modern children would need a decoder.

Martin Vander Weyer

Why is no one marching against VAT on school fees?

From our UK edition

How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of VAT on fees? Yet so far barely a whimper of protest, as though those affected are racked with guilt at having kept the Tories in power for so long. In response to the school-fee fait accompli, Eton with its mile-long waiting list will hit parents with a full 20 per cent VAT hike from January, taking the annual cost per pupil to £63,000.

The Spectator

What are the most ‘unsettling’ artworks to hang in 10 Downing Street?

From our UK edition

The art of politics Keir Starmer moved a portrait of Lady Thatcher from one room at 10 Downing Street to another because he found it ‘unsettling’. Some more possibly unsettling artworks that have hung at No. 10: — ‘More Passion’, by Tracey Emin, featuring the words ‘More Passion’ in neon, was installed by David Cameron in 2011. In 2022 Emin wrote on Instagram about her unhappiness that it was still there after the revelation of Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties. His ‘behaviour and lack of contrition’, she said, were ‘bizarre’. — Annabel’s – a series of lino cuts depicting Sloanes revelling at the Mayfair nightclub in the hedonistic mid-1980s – also hung in Downing Street during Johnson’s premiership.

The Spectator

The real crisis in our school system

From our UK edition

For years, each school in England has been put in one of four categories: ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ and ‘inadequate’. While undoubtedly crude, the system offered clarity to parents. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has now abolished this categorisation structure but not yet said precisely what will replace it. Children are returning to school in the middle of uncertainty. Are politicians blind to the staggering inequality within a state system that educates 93 per cent of pupils? The National Education Union has long urged schools to ignore Ofsted ratings and to stop referring to them on their gates. Phillipson’s reform seems to nod towards this.

Monday

Teresa Mull

Is there a solution to chronic absenteeism in schools?

I hated going to school so much as a kid that to this day, the sight of Back to School! signs printed in cutesy kiddy font on glowing school-bus yellow that fill stores every August strikes me with dread. I want to punch them. My elementary school years were fine; I attended a teeny-tiny Catholic school where I think most of the dedicated teachers qualified for food stamps. I knew my classmates so well that they were essentially extended siblings (and a couple of them still are). I graduated first in my class (out of ten) and was star of the pathetic basketball team. High school was a Catholic school too, but insular and snooty. I was an outsider there, from “over the mountain.” I wasn’t bullied or anything, but no matter what, I always felt like I was imprisoned.

absenteeism

Thursday

Robert Adès

In defence of strict teachers

From our UK edition

Labour have become alarmed by the strict, ‘cruel’ approach to discipline in schools and the rise in the number of pupils being excluded. Teachers will need to be more relaxed about ‘bad behaviour’. But though moving the goalposts of acceptable behaviour may reduce the exclusion figures, it is bound to increase the burden of disruptive behaviour on teachers and other pupils. My own experience of teaching tells me that the new guidelines will increase bullying and reduce special needs inclusion, undermine the most disadvantaged families and ultimately increase educational inequality. So why are they doing it?

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Why marriage matters

From our UK edition

Pretender to the crown Sir: Kate Andrews combines detail and analysis with a sprinkling of satire to devastating effect in her article on Kamala Harris (‘Trump’s new rival’, 27 July). The news anchor she describes in the first sentence (‘I’m struck just in your presence’) is more partisan than journalist, and would give Ofcom good reason to clutch its pearls if they popped up on GB News. Here is someone who identifies as, but isn’t actually, a news anchor. Rather like Harris, who identifies as a politician but hasn’t gone to the trouble of securing any actual votes. Perhaps this is why the Democrats have the overwhelming support of Hollywood, whose whole business is, after all, pretence.

Jonathan Miller

The cult of Bedales

From our UK edition

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t. Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since. Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now dominates the no longer quite so sleepy village.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why Elon Musk is right to leave California

From our UK edition

Not long before Joe Biden finally accepted defeat, Gavin Newsom, the 56-year-old governor of California, was on the stump for him in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shirt undone two daring buttons, sleeves rolled up, silver hair gelled just so. Newsom, who is now being mentioned as Kamala Harris’s running mate, models himself on Bill Clinton. People who’ve worked with him say he practises Clintonian gestures in the mirror, though the look he’s achieved is more Harley Street gynaecologist. How can Gavin Newsom sleep knowing he’s encouraged children to think of their parents as the enemy? ‘If Donald Trump succeeds, God help us, we will roll back the last half-century,’ Newsom told the Pennsylvania crowd. ‘It’s America in reverse.

Toby Young

The intersectional feminist rewriting the national curriculum

From our UK edition

The appointment of Becky Francis CBE to lead the Department for Education’s shake-up of the national curriculum is typical of Labour’s plan to embed their ideology across our institutions – or rather entrench it, since the long march is almost complete. On the face of it, Professor Francis is ‘unburdened by doctrine’, to use Sir Keir Starmer’s phrase about how Labour intends to govern. As former director of the Institute of Education and current CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, she has the outward appearance of a technocrat. But scratch the surface and, like so many Labour appointees, she emerges as a long-standing adherent of left-wing identity politics.

Thursday

Arabella Byrne

Have you had the school gate VAT chat?

From our UK edition

Another day closer to the general election and I’m at my daughter’s prep school in Oxfordshire. As has come to be the norm, I’m having a ‘VAT chat’ with a fellow mother. Of course, we’ve known about Labour’s plan for months. It will lead to a likely 20 per cent rise in private-school fees. Recently, however, these VAT chats have intensified and become louder. ‘To think that other parents would vote Labour given what’s coming enrages me,’ a friend says I begin with my usual opening gambit. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ I say, trying to convey my real sense of desperation that I will have to take my daughter out of the school that she loves, that our way of life is for the chopping block.

Thursday

Toby Young

Labour’s plans to rewrite the National Curriculum

From our UK edition

Michael Gove’s decision to stand down in this election was a reminder that the one really bright spot in the past 14 years was the education reforms he steered through between 2010 and 2014. These policies were vindicated in the most recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, which showed England climbing the OECD’s international league table and outperforming Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In maths, England rose from 17th place in 2018 to 11th in 2022, whereas Scotland, significantly above England in 2010, fell below the OECD average. I was involved in the most successful of these reforms, the free schools programme.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The triumph of Katharine Birbalsingh

From our UK edition

There are two questions that need to be asked of any society: what is it that is going wrong; and what is it that’s going right that should be done more? It’s only natural to focus on the first question – not least because it is easier. But it is the second question that should be asked more. Whenever I think of the few things that are going well in Britain, I think of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, London. I have visited the school a couple of times. It sits in one of London’s most deprived communities. Set up under the era of Michael Gove’s free schools scheme, it is the creation of Katharine Birbalsingh. Pupils are almost all from non-advantaged backgrounds.

Thursday

Hannah Moore

Stop worrying if your child is a picky eater

From our UK edition

One parent in our class WhatsApp chat raised a pressing concern: her daughter was coming home every day with a full water bottle. Were other parents faced with the same unsettling discovery? There followed a lengthy discussion of how much water was left in each child’s bottle. Some children, when confronted, testified that they had drunk water during the day and then filled up the bottle at school. Anyone who expects children to enjoy cooked courgette has forgotten what it was like to be a child This was not good enough for the concerned parent. She took the matter to the teacher. ‘I am concerned my daughter is not given enough opportunity to drink water during the school day,’ read her message. She shared it with the group – and the teacher’s response.

Thursday

The Spectator

School portraits: snapshots of four notable schools

From our UK edition

Queen Ethelburga’s, York Set in 220 acres of beautiful countryside between Harrogate and York, Queen Ethelburga’s College is an award-winning day and boarding school that welcomes girls and boys aged from three months to 19 years and boarders from Year 3. It is known for its high-ranking academic performance. College, one of its two senior schools, placed second nationally last year for A-levels and 18th for all-round academic performance. The other senior school, Faculty, which offers more ‘creative and vocational subjects’, climbed several places to third in the north for A-levels and seventh for overall performance. The college places emphasis on growing pupils into resilient, caring and confident adults.

Sam Leith

Russia lives on in my mind

From our UK edition

My kids, at our local comprehensive, go on school trips to Leigh-on-Sea. I went to a much fancier school, so I went on school trips to Leningrad and Moscow. The first time must have been in 1990. We were all going through dramatic changes; and so was Russia – not that as cossetted, self-absorbed 16-year-olds we were able to take much serious notice. We joked, nervously, gauchely, ahead of our departure about the likelihood that an Aeroflot flight could be relied upon to get us there in one piece. We practised our rudimentary GCSE Russian: ‘Chto eto? Eto GUM!’ (What’s that? That’s [the department store] – GUM.’) ‘Gdye Dom Knigi?’ (Where’s the bookshop?) ‘Chepukha! Vzdor!’ (Rubbish! Nonsense!

Monday

Marc Oestreich

Four bold but real predictions for public schools this year

Last year’s report card for public schools? A resounding “must do better.” Trans athletes ruined competitive sports, the 1619 Project rewrote American History class and non-gendered bathrooms received their first human litter boxes.  As the final school bells rang on the 2023-23 school year for many Americans, popular opinion of our public schools plummeted. One Gallup poll showed just a quarter of Americans now have either a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in public schooling. That represents a stark downward trend from around 1975 when more than 60 percent were confident in what schools were offering our youngsters. While trust tanked and academics atrophied, spending on education has climbed in direct inverse.

schools

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: A concrete crisis, Labour reshuffle and Gabon coup 

From our UK edition

Home More than 100 schools were told to close buildings before the new term because they contained the wrong kind of concrete. The Health and Safety Executive said that reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) ‘is liable to collapse with little or no notice’. In total, 156 schools are affected, of which 104 require urgent attention and 52 have already received repair works. But in Scotland, where 35 council-run schools had been found to contain Raac, none had to close.