Kristina Murkett

It appears that Labour is determined to ensure that choice in education is only for those who can afford it. The government has just announced that it is slashing funding for the International Baccalaureate (IB) in state schools, meaning the qualification may now only be offered in the private sector. What choice do parents of these children now really have? Just like the mid-year cancelling of the Latin Excellence Programme, this is yet another example of Labour’s utilitarian fear of excellence and difference. The IB Diploma differs from A-levels in that it is a much broader course: rather than studying three subjects post-16, pupils study six.

The English have always had a terrible reputation when it comes to learning languages. Think of the stereotype of the sunburnt Brit abroad butchering ‘una cerveza, por favor,’ or P. G. Wodehouse’s description of the ‘shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.’ It appears, however, that our monolingualism is worse than ever, at least in schools. New data has revealed that a third of state sixth-forms in England do not have a single person studying French, German or Spanish A-level – in the West Midlands the rate was as high as 47 per cent. The requirement to study a language at GCSE level was scrapped in 2004, and since then entries have plummeted: the number of pupils taking French GCSE has dropped by two thirds in two decades.

This week, we had a rare example of a family-friendly policy coming into effect: working parents of children aged 9 months or over will now have access to 30 hours of free childcare a week during term time. I should be elated by this news: I went back to work part-time after 11 months of maternity leave on Monday. My son is now at a childminder 3 days a week, and so this policy is saving me roughly £360 a week (a full-time nursery place in Oxford, where I live, will easily set you back £2,000 a month without any funding).  Yet my feelings are mixed at best. Partly this is because I know that the government has promised the moon but has in reality only paid for a small asteroid.

What’s the best thing about teaching? July and August! Or so the old joke goes. The long school holidays are an easy riposte to teachers’ complaints about the profession. Below inflation pay rises? At least you get the school holidays. Lack of flexible working opportunities? Six weeks off over summer. Disruptive behaviour? At least you don’t have to see the rugrats over Christmas and Easter. Teaching is clearly a labour of love, but it is not an inexhaustible one. Shortening the summer holidays would be a disaster No-one really wants to hear it, but most teachers still feel a knee-jerk need to justify their summer holidays: to explain how hard they work; the hidden hours of marking, planning, report-writing; the free time lost to parents’ evenings and away sports fixtures.

Imagine you are the parent of a primary-school aged boy. Outside of family, how many men do you think your son would interact with, compared to women? The answer is unlikely to be balanced. In the UK, 98 per cent of childminders and nursery workers are female - as well as 99 per cent of health visitors, 87 per cent of social workers, 79 per cent of librarians, 96 per cent of speech therapists, 89 per cent of nurses, 58 per cent of GPs, 61 per cent of paediatricians, and 63 per cent of youth club workers. Your son is unlikely to come across many men at school either.

They say that history repeats itself, but the Labour party won’t be expecting it to happen quite so quickly. Last week, a ‘Starmtrooper’ rebellion forced the government to make a series of last-minute concessions and compromises on its welfare bill for fear of a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons.  Now, Labour is facing a similar battle, but this time over special educational needs (SEND) provision. MPs are criticising ministers’ refusals to rule out cuts as part of its SEND overhaul, the details of which will be unveiled in the autumn. As one Labour MP warned, ‘if they thought taking money away from disabled adults was bad, watch what happens when they try the same with disabled kids.

In his book Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, economist Bryan Caplan notes that, due to modern conveniences and our better quality of life, parenting should be easier than ever. Plus, in theory, as society grows richer, people should have more children. Instead, we have fewer, and parenting seems harder than ever.  Why is this? Caplan argues that it is because we have placed many new requirements and expectations on parents that previous generations never had. He contends that parenting has morphed into a suite of ever-changing, high-pressure social obligations – many of which are neurotic, consumerist and status-obsessed, such as saturating your child’s timetable with extracurricular activities to ensure that they are never bored.

If relationships between Ofsted and schools are already frayed, then we may officially be about to reach the end of the rope. Headteachers are now threatening to quit as part-time inspectors unless Ofsted delays and revises its changes to how schools and colleges are graded in England. Ofsted relies on around 900 part-time inspectors, who are mostly serving headteachers and senior leaders, to assist its 300 officers in carrying out thousands of inspections each year. The new Ofsted ‘report card’, set to be brought in this September, is a rushed botch job which promises semantic tweaks rather than actual reform. Ofsted was tasked with creating a new system that would reduce the pressure on schools, but this achieves the exact opposite.

At secondary school open days, English teachers are always asked the same questions by anxious parents of year six students: How do I get my child to read more? Why has my child suddenly stopped reading? What books would you recommend to make reading less of a chore? For too many children (and adults), reading has become like swimming upstream This apprehension is not surprising. Reading enjoyment among children and young people has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to research by the National Literacy Trust. The decline is particularly pronounced in teenage boys, of whom only a quarter said they enjoyed reading in their spare time.

The National Education Union has accused private schools of exploiting staff to save money. ‘Staff working in the private education sector,’ said Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU, ‘report that workload is being increased… in response to the cost-of-living crisis and increased cost of VAT and national insurance.’  It is of course true that private schools are under more financial pressure than ever, and are making cost-cutting decisions that may add to teachers’ workload: one in five private school teachers say they have had colleagues made redundant since VAT on school fees was introduced, while 26 per cent say that their school has frozen recruitment.

Parents of young children should be happy: since September 2024, those with an income of less than £100,000 a year have been eligible for 15 hours of free childcare a week once their child is nine months old. From September this year, that will increase to 30 hours a week.  However, once again, it seems that the government has promised the moon but in realiy only paid for a small asteroid. Nurseries claim that the scheme is financially unsustainable because the funding was set before significant rises in their costs as a result of Rachel Reeves’ budget. Increases to national insurance payments and the minimum wage mean that the sector will now be paying 11 per cent more in wages and staffing costs from April, or about £2,000-2,500 per staff member.