Death to the Middle Classes?!

The extreme Left Wing want to abolish private education to prevent the 'unfair' social advantages it brings. What will they do now that the latest research shows that those same Middle Classes, when they actually make a positive choice in favour of their local comprehensive, still come out on top?

Those of us motivated to encourage our children to reach the highest standards will quite naturally take an active interest in the school to ensure the best results. Every parent can potentially be a school governor but a full 57% of this study group had one parent who was or had been a governor. That is a real time commitment and proof of motivation that must influence the child.

The prime factor in personal success on any measure is the degree of motivation involved. The saddest aspect of many state schools is the way that motivation is killed. The dead hand of the state can never stimulate individual motivation while at the same time imposing prescriptive solutions from above.

Minimum aims of Education

Getting agreement on measurable aims of education may be difficult. But deciding on a minimum level to be achieved by all should be easier. We know when the 'education system' or the individual child has failed.

As a democracy we need every individual to be able to take part in active discussion, understand the main issues and make a choice. As a social economy, we need them to be self-supporting economically and work and live in a community without causing disruption.

Therefore, by the age of 16 every child should:

1) Be able to communicate in English in speech and writing, personally and via IT
2) Be numerate so as to understand finance and basic concepts of engineering and society
3) Understand the structure of UK society with background knowledge of how we arrived at the present position
4) Understand where the UK fits into global society and its issues.
5) Behave lawfully and be able to prove an ability to work with others successfully

Measuring the results on these 5 scales should be the essential requirement for GCSEs. The exams should be more than pass or fail because clearly there is great scope for achieving more than the minimum level agreed. The main measure for the pupil should be the decile ranking he achieves. That way there can be no grade inflation and the top 10% are rated above the next 10%. The main measure for the schools though should be the number of their pupils failing to attain a pre-agreed minimum level.

The structure of the exams would have to change to be able to discriminate successfully between the different levels. Pupils would be motivated by a competitive result that they could use for selection for further training and employment. Schools would be motivated first to minimise the failures so likely to lead to future problems for society. At the same time they would have to raise their standards for the more able pupils to achieve results in a national competition.

Choice in Education (3)

Grammar schools should be abolished and a lottery admissions system introduced to make education in England fairer for all, says a government-funded report.

Basically this seems to say that because selection encourages differences, it should be abolished. That's a classic Stalinist approach. How about the alternative of providing extra support to those suffering from disadvantage?

Then you might level up instead of just levelling down.

Measuring Education Policy reforms

The Centre for the Economics of Education at London School of Economics published a paper on the effects of the following reforms:

1. Market reforms
2. Curriculum reform
3. Raising participation in Post-Compulsory Schooling
4. Higher Education reform

A significant conclusion was:

Of course knowing what works in education is not sufficient to inform policy. As economists, we need to inform policy-makers about what works and at what cost, relative to alternative policy options. Yet there remains a deficiency of good cost benefit evaluations in the field of education.

Yet, if you cannot effectively measure results there is no basis for planning further improvements.

UK schools slip down in science

One of the reasons for concern about our education standards is the need to keep our economy competitive with potential new rivals in a globalized future where resources may be scarce.

It is very difficult to get an objective measure of different education systems. This information suggests we are losing ground.

When compared only with other members of the OECD in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study, the UK came between 8th and 12th place