Providing Equal Opportunities in Education

Some children start with a range of disadvantages for which they are not themselves responsible.

One of the generally accepted aims of education has been to enable any student to achieve his maximum potential. The obvious justification for this is one of simple justice. In addition any society has a long term interest in ensuring that no minority group feels frustrated and cut off by the rest of the population.

Present concerns focus on the extremes. At the bottom of society are those with minimum communication skills. The illiterate cannot participate effectively in modern society. At the top end are potentially highly intelligent individuals who cannot access the best institutions or jobs because they have not been given the necessary tools or guidance.

The main task is to remove the barriers to performance. Basic communication skills are essential and need to be learned as early as possible and then continually honed. Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are no longer enough. Those three exclude the most widely used communication medium of all - speech - and the most recently developed - IT.

Too often we ignore the need for active improvement in the use of English. Even those born into an English-speaking family need to learn how to communicate in formal and group environments. A teenager who cannot explain a complex idea verbally will not be offered the best jobs and will be unable to participate in a democratic society. Street slang and dense dialects may be fine with friends but are a barrier to communication with wider society.

Discipline in schools is essential to prevent a minority hindering the learning of their classmates. That in turn requires better provision of support units for the disruptive child so that their problems can be assessed and rectified until they are ready to reintegrate with the standard class.

Our education system assumes that each year children progress to a new level of learning. However, there is no point in sending a child to a secondary school without the basic literacy skills to cope with the curriculum. That will be bad for the child and is likely to lead to disruption for the class. Instead, such a child should either repeat a year in primary school or, better, be given individual support to catch up.

The main risk for the gifted child is that he loses motivation. The problems may come from a variety of causes: peer pressure, standard curriculum, inadequate teaching etc. Again, these problems need identifying and solving as young as possible. So long as the motivation is there, such a child can cope with most of the other barriers to learning.