Where education was concerned, was not the New Labour buzzword supposed to be ‘choice’?
What then is this that I hear?
Children from middle-class families may miss out on the best schools under plans to allocate places by “lottery”. New admissions rules, published yesterday by Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, suggest that head teachers in leafy suburbs should draw names from a hat to stop schools becoming monopolised by families who buy houses nearby. Schools are also banned from considering parents’ backgrounds, interviewing families or pricing poor children out by ordering families to buy uniforms from expensive suppliers.
These proposals are based on the premise that schools in bad areas tend not to do very well, for obvious reasons. In order to ensure that one’s child got a good education, people who can afford to do so will move to a good area.
Our interfering Government does not like this, so it wants to ensure that moving to a good area is no guarantee that your child will get into the nearest school. It will also no longer matter if your child already has a sibling at that school. Even if you live right next door to the best school in the borough, your child’s name could be picked out of the hat, and he may end up being bussed daily to the sink school at the other end of the borough.
Let us first ask ourselves who created the situation that these new rules are trying to address. In the past, the mere fact of growing up in a run-down part of town did not mean that you had to attend the failing local comprehensive. A bright child growing up in these circumstances had the opportunity to escape that destiny. That was the point of grammar schools. There was also the Assisted Places Scheme, whereby such children were given the opportunity to be educated in the private sector, with their fees being paid by the Government.
But what happened? New Labour came to power in 1997, and one of its first acts was to abolish the Assisted Places Scheme. This Government also has a policy of open hostility to grammar schools. So now a poor child growing up in a poor area with a run-down comprehensive is condemned to attend that establishment.
Faced with this problem of its own making, the Government has come up with this mad policy. True, grammar schools are no longer being built in this land, and the Assisted Places Scheme is gone, but there is still hope for the poor bright boy. If his name gets picked out of a hat, he gets to go to a good school. Someone tell me how this utterly random madness passes for policy.
This is a Government obsessed with social engineering. What it does not seem to grasp is that that is ultimately dangerous in the long term. The best way to ensure high academic standards is to leave the good schools alone to flourish, and to establish a system to provide the best education possible for clever but disadvantaged pupils. Plucking names out of a hat will not achieve this. By removing completely any element of selection from the process, the Government will end up destroying the few good comprehensive schools that remain. Then, as all the schools would be uniformly bad, there would be no need even for a lottery.
January 10th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
As someone who currently sells lemonade and cookies door-to-door, and crochets doilies (well not really but almost) to pay her son’s schoolfees as she can’t afford to live in an area where there is a good enough school and the school in the area where she does live looks like something one would see on The Bill, Morag understands. There is nothing more desperate than the ‘where can/shall my child go to school?’ conundrum. This new policy is just sheer lunancy, but what else is new. Grammar schools must be brought back and that’s all there is to that.
January 11th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Typical class war Labour.
Now those who have struggled to buy houses in the right catchment areas, will see their investment go south as well as their children’s education screwed up.
To say nothing of the extra congestion and CO2 emissions.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Yes, Morag. Grammar schools should should be encouraged. But what are the Tories doing? David Cameron has stated that he has no plans to build any more. He should be ashamed of himself. If he really cares about people improving their lot, he should rethink this sharpish.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:02 am
Serf, an excellent point about the environment. This is the same Government that has been bleating about the environment, using it as a pretext to raise taxes, and abusing people who are sensible enough not to be taken in by its alarmist, self-serving rhetoric. How then is it that the environment seems not to matter when drafting education policy? Bussing children from one end of a borough to another (leave alone the unpleasant associations that bussing still conjures up), did no-one think of the environmental ramifications of this policy? I know that no-one talks seriously of joined-up government these days, but this is simply laughable.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Bright kids in areas where there are only poor schools need bright parents to work the system and get them into better schools. There are ways it can be done, books have even been written about it. My eldest son is dyspraxic and I spent two years in advance planning my campaign to get him into the best school in the area instead of a much poorer one in our catchment area. This included getting a letter from a consultant paediatrician. Thankfully it worked and, as a result, my younger son goes there too.
January 11th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
I recently taught a girl to drive who came from a council estate. She is very bright and was lucky to get a grant to go to a private school in the city. She is now studying medicine at university.
The assisted places scheme worked well to help other children in a similar position to her. Grammar schools also worked well in the same way. My old school was a former grammar school and when I was there I was lucky to be taught by many staff who were former grammar school teachers. It was the local school most parents wanted their children to attend. Of course the Labour LEA tried to close the school twice in the 1980s. Unfortunately - thanks to comprehensive education - this school is bog standard now. The most popular school is a Roman Catholic comprehensive, which of course has a degree of selection.
Labour have a ‘one size, fit’s all’ attitude and this shows even more when they have run out of ideas, as they have in just about every other policy area.
PS. The schools I am talking about from my childhood are in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham; not Hull.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Hi Bel
Love the new look site - I really must learn how to use html and websites!
Link updated.
Trev
January 11th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Thanks Trev.
html and websites, yes, definitely worth learning. It’s a bit tricky at first, but it’s worth it in the end.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Hmm. One of the points that nobody seems to have made in relation to the recent revelations about the number of schools failing to meet the government’s revised GCSE standard (5 A-C grades including English and Maths) is the fact many of the worst performing schools are in Kent. There is a simple reason for this: Kent still operates the grammar school system (the county’s so-called “comprehensive schools” being, in effect, secondary moderns in all but name. Grammar schools do seem to have some benefit for those who get to go to them, but they are devastating for the vast majority who are left behind - especially those who only just fail to pass the 11+. A good comprehensive system, including streaming in most classes, can still produce the best outcome. IMHO, of course.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Could be, George, but the only member of my family who went to a Sec Mod swears by it - can’t imagine that a Comp could have done such a good job.
January 12th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Hey! I went to a comp … and it made me into the, er, “well-balanced individual I am today”. Oh dear, I think my own anecdotal evidence may have destroyed my own argument.
January 13th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
VOUCHERS.
Very egalitarian really. A transfer from the rich taxpayer, to the poor parent, so that said poor parent can afford to buy the education they choose for thier child.
Add a local element to account for differnet costs of living and a professionally assesed top-up for genuine “special needs”, then set all schools up as trusts with no restriction on how they select, what or how they teach or the exams they make their children sit.
Those of a leftish persuassion will not doubt send their children to comprehensive schools, those a bit mot to the right might happily seek out a specialism to suit their childs abilities.
Whatever the outcome, it is fairer than the current system, which requires money either to pay fees or buy houses to get to good schools - or luck. I bet the involvement of parents would go up as well as they saw “their” money being spent on their child.
Betcha it would cost less too.
January 13th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
John Moss, that is actually a very good idea. However, we know the lily-livered Tories would never dare propose such a thing ever again. Everyone instead seems to be buying into the misguided dogma that selection is bad, the comprehensive is the gold standard, and any attempt to introduce flexibility, or Heaven forbid, something resembling competition, should be resisted at all costs.