Kristina Murkett

In the bestselling book Freakonomics, the authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt outline an experiment which involved fining parents who were late to pick up their children from daycare centres. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the financial penalty only made late pick-ups worse; the parents felt less guilty for the teachers they were delaying, and most parents were prepared to pay the price because they decided it was still worth being late. This experiment demonstrated the limit of economic incentives without other social motivations: something which seems very timely as we return to the debate around whether parents should be fined for taking their children on holiday during term-time. For Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.

This morning, students up and down across the country will anxiously open up their GCSE results, with local papers publishing photos of glowing over-achievers and other heartwarming success stories. The national media will, in all likelihood, focus on the number of top grades, and how this fits into recent trends concerning grade inflation as exam boards try to re-stabilise results post-Covid.  Yet this hyper-fixation on the number of 7s, 8s and 9s (the equivalent to an old-style A or A*) means we tend to overlook something much more important: the long tail of underachievement in England.

As part of the ongoing review into the primary and secondary school curriculum, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has announced that children in England will be taught how to spot misinformation and extremist content online, so that students can arm themselves against ‘putrid conspiracy theories’. In the wake of weeks of rioting, with children as young as 12 and 13 now in court for their involvement, this announcement seems like a sensible idea, but it is not necessarily a straightforward one. You simply cannot embed critical thinking without establishing a firm foundation of factual understanding first Children and teenagers are excellent targets for fake news, but they are notoriously bad at spotting it.

Following the announcement of Rachel Reeves' spending cuts on Monday, the Treasury confirmed that VAT will be applied to private school fees from January 2025. Although the debate on whether to charge this tax on private schools has raged for months, this is still earlier than most of the sector expected. ‘Anti-forestalling’ measures will be introduced so that any advance payments for the January term are, from this week, also taxed. This means parents can no longer avoid the extra 20 per cent by paying fees upfront. Perhaps most importantly, Treasury documents have also confirmed that ministers expect the new tax to drive some private school parents to the state sector: the first time Labour has acknowledged this in writing.

Increasingly, it feels like the Tories want to distract from their looming defeat by doing everything they can to keep everyone in a constant state of outrage. Their latest target: sex education. There has been much talk over the past couple of days about the government’s plan to ‘ban’ sex education for under nine-year-olds, as well as teaching about gender identity, in an attempt to stop students from being ‘exposed to disturbing content’. Talk of a 'ban' is misplaced. Firstly, the government isn’t actually banning anything; it is merely issuing new ‘guidance’. Secondly, any new guidance is completely unnecessary because, well, there isn’t actually any sex education on the curriculum currently for under-nines.

A new report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, has recommended that the six-week school summer holiday should be reduced to four weeks, and the two weeks redistributed so that schools have a two-week half-term in October and February. Lee Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said that spreading out the holidays more equally throughout the year would ‘improve the wellbeing of pupils and the working lives of teachers, balance out childcare costs for parents, and potentially boost academic results for many children’. I’m not convinced shortening the summer holidays would actually do any of those things.

Breaking news: schools have finally been given guidance on stopping kids from using mobile phones during the school day, three years after the government first called for a ban on phones in schools. The guidance is about as groundbreaking as announcing that loudspeakers should be banned in libraries. Less than 1 per cent of schools currently allow unrestricted phone use, and around two thirds already have rules which mean that teachers should never see students using phones. This is a non-policy for a non-problem, and yet another example of a government with no serious ideas trying to look busy. As I say to my students: activity is not the same as purpose.

Is school optional nowadays? In summer 2022, 140,000 children were classed as ‘severely absent’ from the classroom, a rise of 134 per cent on before the pandemic. Some 1.5 million pupils – one in five children – are ‘persistently absent’, which means they miss more than 10 per cent of lessons. The problem is getting worse: for secondary students, absence rates in the first half of the 2023 autumn term were higher than in the same period a year before. Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has vowed to make ‘tackling attendance’ her ‘number one priority’. Today, the government has announced £15 million of investment to expand its ‘attendance hubs’ programme to over 2,000 schools.

Teaching in the UK is in trouble. Less than half the number of secondary school teachers required this year, a record low, have been recruited, according to government figures released last week. STEM (science, engineering, technology and maths) subjects are particularly struggling: we only have 17 per cent of our target number of physics teachers and 63 per cent of maths teachers (down from 88 per cent last year). Yet this is a problem across the curriculum: the only subjects where the government met its targets were classics, PE and history. Teach First, the largest teacher training programme in the UK, announced this weekend that in order to tackle this recruitment crisis it will consider being part of a new apprenticeship scheme for trainees as young as 18.