Stand on principal

by Greg McDonald

The principled stand of head teacher Kevin Harrison, in suspending an arrogant 15-year-old pupil for refusing to get up off his chair when the head enters the room, shouldn’t only have every beleaguered teacher in the land leaping to their feet in support, but every parent who values their child’s education - and every one of us who values respect for institutions on which societies are built.

Yet to the young man’s sad detriment his father, Tim Walton, begs to differ, supporting his son’s sullen rebellion on the spurious basis that Harrison, being new at the school, must first earn little Daniel’s good opinion before the seated scholar can be expected to modify his miserable arrogance.

Walton Snr’s stand may be baseless obnoxiousness, but his lack of deference to his son’s head teacher is symptomatic of a cancer eating our society: the loss of respect for institutions.

Our grandparents’ generation struggled for mass suffrage, saw fascism defeated and gave the poorest children in their society the gift of education. They understood that a nation is built on respect for those institutions like Parliament, the armed forces and school. These cornerstones gave us life - whatever we think of the individuals holding office.

Yet in today'’s classrooms a few are granted licence to delight in ruining others' education. Not only by the untouchability granted them by a catastrophically imbalanced box-ticking culture of kids’ rights and teachers’ responsibilities, but also by misguided parental opposition to a taste of the very discipline which offered them and their own parents a chance in life .

The battle for respect must be won, but government and schools can only do so much - it's time for parents like Tim Walton to stand up and be counted.

Tesco Value education

by Alan Tyers

Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy thinks UK schools are churning out young people with “woefully low” levels of education, leaving employers such as his company to “pick up the pieces”.

He fingers the surfeit of bureaucracy and admin that plagues teachers as a severe hindrance to educating children. Certainly it is hard to argue with that.

Sir Terry’s Asda counterpart, Andy Clarke, was even more scathing. He said: “No one can deny that Britain has spawned a generation of young people who struggle to read, write or do simple maths.”

While the picture these captains of industry paint of supermarket managers having to teach their new checkout staff the three Rs is undeniably a vivid one – “times tables on aisle six” etc – maybe Leahy and Clarke are laying it on a bit thick.

After all, a supermarket business relies on having a very large workforce who will work for not a lot of money. Frankly, both Tesco and Asda might not be sitting so pretty if there weren’t large numbers of uneducated (and hence cheap) workers.

Also, presumably they recruit people with a variety of educational abilities for differing jobs – graduates for management jobs, school-leavers for shelf-stacking. Not every young person is a thicko!

Still, these guys know about making money and they know what they need to do that: a workforce who can read and write, but who have sufficiently low expectations that they will work for close to minimum wage and put up with the dull, repetitive tasks at hand.

To make the Sir Terry Leahys of tomorrow happy capitalists, a few obvious but significant changes need to be made to the education system: recognising that not all children have the same ability, and teaching them accordingly, for starters.

Hey, Ofsted – leave our cops alone!

by Greg McDonald

The farcical case of two police officers ordered to stop looking after each other's children has exposed education watchdog Ofsted as a joke on child welfare - and the Childcare Act 2006 as part of a growing encroachment on our liberties.

Detective constables Leanne Shepherd and Lucy Jarrett share a job, and (used to) look after each other's children - until an Ofsted inspector came knocking.

The officers’ crime? Operating an “illegal” child-minding business. The result? £260 a month childcare fees, working hours altered to fit nursery opening times, and two parents forced to apply for benefits. And maybe worse, the kids have lost their routine and their friends.

This isn’t childcare but a disgusting waste of taxpayers’ money - heads should roll at Ofsted and the law should be thrown out.

Yet this case is part of a growing legal encroachment on our civil liberties.

Some of it is disgusting but essentially harmless - the daylight robbery committed by councils, which outsource traffic warden work to private companies interested only in slapping as many tickets on windows as possible, for example.

But some is more sinister: with four million CCTV cameras across the country, we Brits are the most watched nation on earth, while the Government can detain us for longer than ever on suspicion of "terror" offences wholly unrelated to terrorism.

Public outcry at the persecution of Shepherd and Jarrett should send out a clear message to lawmakers: our private lives are not for Government legislation or Ofsted inspectors to interfere in.

Too many students?

by Alan Tyers

Apologies if this seems a little mean-spirited in Freshers’ Week, but is it time for a radical rethink about the Government’s goal to have half of all young people at university?

For many of the students starting their university lives this week, the next three years or so will be a great chance to get away from home, discover who they are, learn some social skills and work out how to take care of themselves (a bit): all excellent and important stuff. But it’s not academia.

Are we kidding ourselves that all students are really getting a serious education? Is the grounding they get really going to help them get better jobs, and benefit the country as a whole – in an increasingly competitive global marketplace?

Business lobby organisation the CBI, cast here in its familiar role as villain of the piece, reckons not. It believes that too many people are doing too many worthless degrees, emerging from their student days ill-equipped for industry. Its solution: raise prices, thus making university less attractive.

It has questioned the fact that 25% of public money spent on higher education goes to student funding, and suggested a three-pronged attack of less favourable loan rates, smaller grants and higher fees.

The obvious response is that it is going to hit poor students, making it harder for non-wealthy people to go to university.

The President of the NUS, Wes Streeting, says: “Students are already leaving university with record levels of debt, while graduate job prospects are at an all-time low.”

But if Wes is right, and a degree doesn’t really help people to get a job but saddles them with a lot of debt, surely many people would be better off skipping tertiary education and going straight into the workplace?

The language of exam success

By Greg McDonald

In the wake of this year's A level success, the forthcoming GCSE pass marks are expected to be up on last year too, and our school system is wasting children’s time and tax payer money as more and more kids ditch difficult subjects for the soft options.

Less than a quarter of all pupils are expected to receive five or more Grade C marks in traditional core subjects including maths, a foreign language and English, and yet the overall number of pass marks continues to rise.

Some might claim that giving choice to kids is a necessity, but my priorities as a young teenager were more along the lines of building goal posts from jumpers than constructing a solid base of learning for my adult life.

In a recession-struck world the benefits of learning a foreign language are numerous – but learning another tongue is not easy, especially when the option to begin comes so late in your school career.  Besides, who’s bovvered about grammar and spelling?

If we are to avoid falling behind our global competitors, the UK's children need to be educated as highly as possible – for their own benefit, and even if they don’t know it yet.

Many kids opt to return to traditional subjects when they get to A level standard. Perhaps older and a little wiser, they realise that arming themselves with sensible academic subjects and avoiding the time fillers is really the educated move.

Finding the level

by Greg McDonald

After all the pressure and revision, congratulations (or commiserations) to the half a million nervous teens collecting their A level results today.

It’s another year of record results – but while increasing success has to be a good thing, no qualifications were needed to predict that the percentage of pass marks would increase yet again.

And with 26% of all A level students today achieving the highest grade, ever-easier exams risk making the modern A stand for “average”.

Some will claim that better pass rates are wholly testament to improvements in teaching methods and social advances. But while the Government’s record on investing in education deserves at least a C, are we really to believe that kids have consistently got smarter every year for 27 years?

A testing system that doesn’t allow kids to fail is a failure in itself. The point of a maths grade isn't to multiply our poor kids' fragile egos – it's to let bosses out in the real world divide between those who can and can't add up.

So well done to everyone who’s passed their exams today – but unless we want tomorrow’s students doing diplomas instead of A levels, it’s time the exam system was shaken up so only the highest achievers get the highest grades.

Private party

by Alan Tyers

Top professional jobs are still disproportionately dominated by the privately educated. This is the conclusion of a cross-party committee chaired by Alan Milburn; for instance, 75% of judges and 45% of senior civil servants went to private schools.

Not exactly earth-shattering news, you might say. However, I think that the problem of social immobility is deeper than whether someone’s parents paid for their education.

I don’t about the top professions, but in the media, a large proportion of youngsters get a start via unpaid work experience placements. This puts kids without the means to support themselves during an unpaid stint – in pricey and often faraway London – at a big disadvantage.

And not only does work experience culture play towards the children of wealthier people, the chance of getting one of the placements is hardly a level playing field. Disproportionately, they go to kids who are the son/niece/god-daughter of a senior-ish staff member.

Meanwhile, another traditional route into a career – leaving school at 16, starting in the post room and working your way up – is getting harder. Firstly, and this is specific to a career in journalism but can easily be applied to wider commerce, because all the local papers (and local businesses in general) are gradually being closed down.

Secondly, and this is more universal, it’s more difficult because employers can demand that their young blood have some sort of tertiary qualification: everyone’s got a degree nowadays, after all. The well-intentioned drive to get half of all youngsters into a university has arguably made starting in some careers harder for the poorest.

As long as there are rich, successful people, they’re going to give their kids a leg-up in a variety of tangible and intangible ways that go far beyond schooling. Even if it were feasible, positively discriminating against those with a private education will hardly change that.

No MMR jab, no school – no doubt

With measles back on the rise, making children’s entry to school conditional on them having an MMR jab may just be the lesser of two evils.

Of course in an ideal world parents would raise their children free of state interference, but measles has as much respect for high ideals as a playground bully has for top teeth, and standing by while an outbreak duffs up another generation’s health is nothing to tell the grandchildren about.

That’s not to say those who decry conditional jabs as the nanny state’s latest attack on our liberty don’t have a point to make about freedom.

These libertarians are right that state compulsion with regard to our bodies is nothing less than slavery, from the discredited criminalisation of recreational drugs to the wretched tragedy of 800 Britons having to travel overseas for the freedom to end their lives.

But as we face the resurgence of diseases which we could and should have eradicated decades ago, the former chairman of the British Medical Association Sir Sandy Macara is right that making school attendance conditional is a trump card which real-world pragmatism demands to see played.

Ultimately measles doesn’t care if you failed to get your shots because parents took a sceptic’s view, or because they just couldn’t be bothered to organise it – and in that kind of world, the path of conditional MMR jabs is surely worth treading.

Young knives

By Alan Tyers

Security measures might keep the weapons out, but what about the violent kids?

The news that a London borough has installed “knife arches” at its secondary schools is… good, I guess.

The boys and girls of Waltham Forest can now attend school with slightly less threat of being stabbed; and a school inspector says 12,000 pupils have been searched with no weapons found so far. These are the sorts of small victories we must now celebrate.

But given the fact that the one set of security arches will be moved from school to school at random, the chances of catching anyone with a knife are fairly slim. Each of the borough’s 22 schools will have the arches for one day a term, so the knife-carrying kids could be forgiven for thinking that these are reasonable odds against detection.

Furthermore, most of the stabbings are taking place not inside school, but outside it.

The cost to the taxpayer of erecting the airport-style security is worth it, of course, if it saves a life. The state is doing its bit: but what are the parents of these children doing for their part?

It has now got to the point where certain parts of the school system have little educational ambition and are existing just to act as a sort of day-centre for troublesome youths. Massively disruptive kids are allowed back into school again and again after violent behaviour: maybe the focus should be on keeping them out, armed or not.

Then those children who aren’t carrying knives and might want to learn something can actually do so.

Sick child Of Europe

by Alan Tyers

Britain’s kids are among the unhappiest in the continent. Across a bundle of factors including health, ability to talk to parents and low chances of being in education or training, the UK came 24th out of 29 in a new survey.

Only the unappealing prospects of a young life in Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania were worse, as was Malta, which always seems quite a nice place, but there you have it.

What does this all mean? Is it linked to our triumphant position in the binge-drinking, drug-taking and teenage pregnancy tables, where Britain is enjoying a period of continental dominance that would put our three Champions League semi-finalists to shame? Is it our pandering schools system, where teachers dare not discipline a child for fear of reprisal? Is it our celebration of yobbishness and ignorance? Is it family breakdown? Is it the PS3? Is it knives? Is it Blu WKD?

One person who most certainly does not know is Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes.

“The fact that we created a new Government department to focus solely on children, schools and families shows the increased importance being given to children in this country,” says the Minister.

If you want an example of why this Government is spending so much and achieving so little, look no further. She’s saying: “Don’t worry that the evidence suggests we are failing badly, we’ve set up a department.” The solution to any problem? More talking, more public money, more initiatives, no change.

“Our Children’s Plan is our long-term vision and it puts children and families at the centre of everything Government does,” says Hughes.

This is just an empty… I was going to say “soundbite”, but that implies some sort of rhetorical punch. It is literally meaningless. Are children and families at the forefront of policy in Afghanistan? Or pensions? Really? Hopeless.

Looks like our kids will have to sort it out for themselves.