Schools

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.

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.

The new school year is just a few weeks away, and that can only mean one thing: right on cue, school districts are once again bemoaning a “lack of funding.” It’s the same story every year. Along with notices advertising the local high school drama department’s production of Grease come headlines announcing the school district is in dire straits and schools will literally fall to pieces if they aren’t pumped full of life-saving funding, stat. Year after year, it’s the same old song and dance: school funding increases, and the next year they need even more. Why is it never enough, though, and where does all the money go?

Rockville, Maryland Hundreds of protesters rallied to protest a school board in one of America’s most liberal counties that plans to mandate the teaching of books they brand "sexualized" to public-school children as young as three years old in public schools. The rally-goers, almost all of whom were first-generation Americans or immigrants themselves, demanded that Montgomery County Public Schools restore their ability to opt out of a curriculum they say violates their First Amendment rights.

Exams start on Monday. Thousands of A-level and GCSE pupils will be swotting hard for them right now. Some will do well; others won’t. Knowledge and ability are the two obvious keys to success. But there’s another factor that’s often overlooked: exam technique. Having taught thousands of students of all abilities at several leading schools, I know this is a vital reason why some teenagers are more successful than others: they use the right exam techniques under pressure. So what are these techniques?  First and foremost, arrive early. Exams need a clear head and turning up at the last minute is certain to be stressful.

Only occasionally in American history does an issue surface that challenges not only the values of an established political party but the party’s ability to function. If any such issue has emerged in our own time, it's clearly school choice. The evolution of such a diverse educational marketplace — private schooling, homeschooling and tutoring, among other options — will severely reduce the Democratic Party’s election workforce, squeeze its finances and even discredit its basic philosophy. Consider first the workforce. If nothing else, the widespread subsidy of K-12 grade schooling in venues not run by teachers' unions would deplete the enormous army of campaign workers that Democrats have come to depend upon during every election cycle.

A public school teacher for three decades, my mother kept me out of them for nearly a third of that time. Her refusal to allow me to partake of the public education system that paid her bills echoed a memorable quote of G.K. Chesterton’s: “Everyone goes to the elementary schools except the few people who tell them to go there.”  If the recent numbers are any indication, more people have followed her example. In 2019, about 2.8 percent of US students were homeschooled. By 2020, that number had jumped to 5.4 percent. And in 2021, it was up to 11.1 percent. Research from Stanford and the Associated Press places the overall increase in enrollment since the beginning of the pandemic at 30 percent.  Around the country, red-state politicians are taking notice.

The Kraft Heinz company has developed a pair of Lunchables meals slated to be served in school cafeterias starting next fall. The initiative has reignited a worthy debate over the nutrition found — and mostly not found — in school lunches. Folks are making a big fuss over the debut of Lunchables, as if the plastic packages of cardboard coasters that pass for pizza are somehow playing sloppy seconds to the gourmet wonders our schools have been crafting up to this point. Unless things have significantly improved since I graduated, Lunchables might actually be an upgrade from what most cafeterias specialize in — mystery meat sandwiches and those limp, anemic crinkle fries that led to my lifelong loathing of ketchup.

The end of term is here and parents up and down the country will be awaiting the arrival of their child's end-of-term report. But I hope they won’t be expecting too many pearls of wisdom from the impersonal emails that will ping into their inboxes shortly.   Ten or a dozen years ago (the exact date varied, school by school), in an act of educational vandalism, handwritten school reports were abolished. Edicts were issued by school ‘senior management teams’ and grudgingly, reluctantly, teachers put their fountain pens and little bottles of Quink back into their desks, never to be taken out again.   The personal touch in the reporting process disappeared with them.

As the end of term approaches parents may be wondering what to buy their child’s teacher for Christmas. It’s the season of goodwill, after all. It’s also a golden opportunity to win a way to Sir or Miss’s heart, so they’ll continue to take good care of little Olivia or Oliver in the new year. The days of apples left on desks are long gone, so what to give teacher might cause some confusion. Money is tight this year, an added complication – although at some of the independent schools where I’ve taught gifts seem to become more extravagant each December. So what kind of presents do we teachers really want? The short answer, especially at the end of a long, tiring term is: ‘Something alcoholic, of course – preferably wine or designer gin.