The crisis has brought many areas of education inequality to the forefront of our minds. Most of these are long-recognised and education policy has been designed and redesigned to try to tackle them. Material inequalities have been addressed through free-school meals programmes and, more recently, the pupil premium, targeting additional funding at the poorest. And schools, local authorities and central government have worked hard this year to ensure that these children and families still get additional help through the crisis.

Technological inequalities, “the digital divide”, are narrowing as relatively cheap smartphones and apps replace expensive PCs as essential tools for learning and some of those in greatest need have been provided with equipment through a central government Covid-19 scheme. We’re pretty good at building policy around education, and we’re getting nimbler at it.

I teach in a comprehensive in a grammar school county. Our cohort is varied but skewed towards white working-class. This group, we are told by a 2019 Neon (National Education Opportunities Network) study, are quite desperately under-represented at prestigious universities. My school, and all others like it, put a huge amount of energy into getting our students to positive destinations. Our sixth form has grown enormously over the last five years and we offer a fantastically diverse range of courses with a fully inclusive ethos. There is much to celebrate, but it is becoming clear to me that a section of our cohort do not achieve what they ought and that their future choices are limited by their parents.

American family therapist Ron Taffel tells parents that adolescence is “not about letting go, it’s about holding on tight through a bumpy road”. My students, as they bump through their A-level journey, need their parents to hear this message clearly.

It is unsurprising that many working-class parents are ill-equipped to prepare their children for the extra two years of education that they probably never experienced themselves. I know that some students will arrive on the first day of the new school year with a branded handbag and shining eyes but no pen and paper. Parents who don’t know what A levels entail cannot raise the appropriate sceptical eyebrow when their child says they have “no homework today”, or “a free period”. There is real, debilitating fear in the unknown. Some parents avoid answering phone calls from school. They never attend an information evening or even acknowledge an email highlighting concerns. I’m confident that, by and large, this is due to a feeling of impotence, rather than a lack of care. In general, these students underperform; in some cases they disappear from our classes completely, A levels being “not for them”. I’m especially worried this year about a cohort who’ve been left to their own devices since March, some of whom will be slipping off the radar.

There is clear consensus that most of these young people should now be in education. The multilateral policy journey which brought us to this point with 16-18 year-olds is known as RPA (Raising the Age of Participation); policy mooted under Labour, legislated for under the 2010 coalition government and delivered in full under Cameron in 2015. With an obligation to be in either education or recognised training schemes, 82 per cent of young people now elect to stay in full-time education through FE colleges and sixth form settings like mine, double the number of 10 years ago. This growth represents a huge success for RPA and its goal of delivering a higher-skilled workforce for the modern economy; it also means that more working-class children in particular are staying on to sixth form and aspiring to higher education.

What policy has failed to grapple with is that the engagement and responsibility of parents at this age-group cannot be taken for granted. The messaging is mixed and families who still need “nudging” (in the parlance of behavioural policy-speak) are left adrift at a time when parental support is no less critical a factor. Ron Taffel’s adolescent road is still bumpy, as young people
begin to deal with adult relationships and identity alongside huge changes in learning.

The “nudges” prior to 16 are given with pretty blunt instruments. Ultimately parents can be dealt with in the criminal justice system. Softer tactics include asking parents to sign (non-binding) “contracts” to support their child’s learning. School family liaison officers work tirelessly alongside families to bring them along and keep a child’s education (and other wellbeing factors) on track. But at 16, this often falls away, and there is a policy vacuum. The DfE statutory guidelines for local authorities on appropriate provisions for this age group makes not a single mention of the role of parents.

Without a legislative pathway, sixth form teams have little to work with when parents won’t engage. When a child stops attending classes regularly, there’s often nowhere to go. All too often (but not exclusively) these young people are from disadvantaged families and (geographical) areas of low participation at university. They are the target of the concerns of the Neon report. They are at grave risk of becoming Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training). They should be in our sights. 

My recommendations would be twofold; firstly, build and support education-confident parenting. Work by Cristina Odone for the Legatum Institute indicates positive outcomes for supported parent peer-groups which develop confidence and create more “school ready children” at the beginning of a child’s education. A nationwide extension of such programmes could create a foundation of confidence for parents; similar “step-up” programmes could be developed for families for secondary and sixth form phases of education.

Secondly, statutory responsibility for young people in education should reside clearly and transparently with parents. This might come with financial penalties for poor attendance (often the slippery slope to low attainment at this stage). While this is, on the surface, a punitive measure, the signal it sends to parents and students about their responsibilities in education is important and it would provide a firm basis for bringing parents in to the conversation.

Covid-19 will leave next year’s university applicants with an even greater “parent gap”.  Where remote working and independent study will be far greater and the impact of my colleagues in teaching will inevitably be watered-down, we need to start thinking urgently about building long-term policies to close this gap and help get more of our students into those prestigious universities.

The post How Covid-19 exacerbates the “parent gap” appeared first on Standpoint.

I aspire to different preparation. My experience of setting up and running an all-through school in Feltham, which has quickly built an excellent reputation, has given me some insight into the knowledge and expertise required. I hope to support others embarking on that journey to start with everything they need.

Leading schools in this country has never been so complex. No other education system in Europe gives school leaders so much autonomy: over the curriculum, recruitment and managing a school’s finances. The move to academisation has increased the accountability for headteachers around the results that pupils achieve, how funds are spent and how effectively schools discharge myriad duties: safeguarding, preventing radicalisation and promoting British values to name a few.

In 2012 a fellow teacher, Rebecca Cramer; a social entrepreneur, Jon McGoh; and I applied to the Department for Education to open what became Reach Academy Feltham. We submitted a 400-page application (the West London Free School’s application a year earlier was 19 pages) and were thrilled to be approved to open. Our school educates children aged two to 19. We were judged outstanding in 2014 and achieved the 16th-best GCSE results in the country in 2017, while educating a vulnerable cohort including significant numbers of children in care and with special educational needs. In 2018 we also set up the Reach Children’s Hub, offering cradle-to-career support for the whole community in Feltham.

We are part of a wider movement of new schools. Many of the most successful schools and leaders have set up multi-academy trusts and are often now responsible for five, 10 or even 40 schools. We are driven by a commitment to a community, appetite for responsibility and entrepreneurialism. We want to help instil these same qualities in the next generation of school heads.

Over the next five years we will be looking for leaders with entrepreneurial drive and a track record of great results to head these schools. We won’t be leaving them in the dark for hours, but we will be borrowing from the work of Tom Rees at the Ambition Institute, a new graduate school for heads and other education leaders. One goal is strengthening specific expertise. Great headteachers have a strong grasp of the curriculum and pedagogy. They need to be able to develop these skills in the teachers they lead. They need to understand other facets of education, including finance and risk management, human resources and managing staff performance, safeguarding and health and safety. We will be supporting our leaders with a set of tools and technical knowledge that sets them up to make good decisions. They must also understand the context, particularly the communities, in which their schools operate.

We intend to work with leaders with a connection to communities across the country to apply to open new schools or to prepare to lead existing ones. Through the Reach School Leadership Fellowship prospective headteachers will spend a year working alongside us in Feltham during which they will shadow experienced teachers, undergo training, do residencies at transformational schools and apply what they have learnt in schools in need of support. All of these experiences are designed to give the new leaders experience of addressing the persistent problems of school leadership—securing excellent pupil behaviour, curriculum organisation, staff development, efficient organisation and resource
allocation.

Our school has no fountains and has won no design awards. But we do have a commitment to pursuing excellence and an appetite to share with the urgently needed school leaders of tomorrow both what has worked—and the mistakes we have made along the way.

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Why? First, the pace of technological change is faster than ever. It took ten years for Thomas Newcomen to improve his engine before he showed it to the world in 1712 and its impact on the hand industries was not felt for another 60 years. Today change can come in ten months, ten weeks and even ten days. 

Second, the agents of the digital revolution are proliferating. The list is long and already includes artificial intelligence; big data; the mobile internet, cloud technology, robots in industry and the home; the internet of things; driverless cars, lorries and taxis; drones; 3D printers; nano technology; virtual reality; software-based digital therapies and machine learning.

Third, millions of people across the world have access to databases and so experimentation and innovation are not only made in research centres. Significant changes can be made by talented individuals in their homes, garages, offices and factories. It was a comparatively unknown company in Israel which cracked the security code of a terrorist’s iPhone when the FBI had failed to do so.

Fourth, very large investments amounting to billions of dollars are being made by companies in Europe, Asia and America to develop and implement these changes.

The Driverless Economy

Google’s driverless cars have captured the public’s imagination but the true revolution starts with Mercedes’ driverless lorry. There are over 3 million truck drivers in the US and 20,000 vacancies a year, but the introduction of driverless trucks and satellite controlled trains will change all that. Furthermore 8.7 million people are employed in servicing trucking, in roadside snack bars, hotels and service stations. The head of Ford has said that driving with a steering wheel is “as antiquated as wanting to ride a horse”.

The Robotic Economy

A 3D printer in the Netherlands is building a footbridge over a canal by using long robotic arms and lasers to melt the metal powder. No human hands, girders, or metal or concrete foundations are needed. The warehousing of worldwide companies like Amazon and Avon are now largely robotic controlled and the only time that a human hand may be involved in an order is when someone knocks on your door. 

How will this affect employment? 

Many jobs will be threatened and disappear, but new jobs, particularly highly skilled ones, will be created. There have been several recent studies, including two by McKinsey on “The Disruptive Technologies” which found ‘the nature of work will change and millions of people will require new skills’.  

A report for the World Economic Forum at Davos reviewed the challenges facing 15 leading economies and estimated that between 2015 and 2020, disruptive labour market changes would result in the loss of 7.1 million jobs – two-thirds of them in the administrative and office job family – and a total gain of just 2 million jobs spread across several smaller job families. 

Andrew J Haldane, Chief Economist of The Bank of England, in a speech in November 2015 estimated that up to 15 million jobs are at risk of automation here in the UK. In the last three months several large and medium sized companies have announced job losses amounting to nearly 200,000. The British Retail Consortium has forecast there could be as many as 900,000 jobs lost in retail alone by 2025. The respected Wood Review of the Petroleum industry has forecast 45,000 more job losses in the North Sea.  Since 2010 public sector employment in the UK has fallen by a million posts and a further decline is expected. 

All these reports talk about the hollowing out of the middle management. In this scenario highly qualified jobs are numerous and well paid. Low skill and low wage jobs, for example in social care, are similarly numerous but there will be a gap in the middle where skilled jobs used to be, particularly in manufacturing and general administration.  Many of these middle income, middle range jobs were filled by graduates who had taken humanities subjects at university. 

In Britain today we are experiencing a high level of graduate underemployment. Students studying non-technical subjects struggle to find a graduate-level job. The structure of employment is changing rapidly. As machines take over more and more routine work, paid work at any level will increasingly depend upon non routine tasks. Part-time working is increasingly common, and according to a Bank of England analysis around 4.5 million people – 15 per cent of the UK workforce – are now self-employed.  Growth in the rate of self-employment accounted for a third of the increase in total employment in 2010-15.  This trend will only continue. The other trend now common and expanding is part-time working.

The working lives of self-employed and part-time workers will result from a set of skills, experience and expert knowledge traded day-by-day and week-by-week working on contracts as short as an hour and in shifting teams. Your office will be wherever your laptop happens to be. You will experience a succession of brief encounters with clients, suppliers, temporary colleagues and collaborators. They are likely to be your income stream. The Baker Dearing Educational Trust, like many charities, has adopted this pattern already.  We employ 23 people but only 4 are full time employees, the others are former head teachers, former inspectors, and business people with a training background. 

Some call this portfolio working, others the “gig economy” which is now well established in Britain. The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane paints a vision of hundreds of thousands of micro businesses offering individually tailored services and products personalised to the needs of customers from health and social care, to leisure services and luxury products, all run by what he calls “a new artisan class” of self-employed people.

This ought to have a profound effect upon the nature of education in our country. The American philosopher, author and motorbike mechanic, Matthew Crawford, delivered the Edge Annual Lecture in 2014 and said, ‘If young people are making a tube framed chassis for a racing car, suddenly trigonometry becomes very interesting, they see the point of all the measurements and calculations’. 

In other words, knowledge is as necessary as ever but it is not enough. Abstract knowledge and reasoning need to be connected to the real world through practical applications. A play assumes a certain meaning when read silently; more when it is read aloud; and more again when it is performed. The same is true of maths, physics, art and design technology – all come alive when used in a meaningful way. 

This is the philosophy behind University Technical Colleges, which I have been promoting for the last seven years. Employers, universities and teachers collaborate to design real world projects undertaken by groups of students over a period of weeks.  Each project has a real connection with the world of work and leads to a tangible outcome such as a design, product or presentation and often all three. There are now 38 UTCs open and another 20 preparing to open.

The object of most secondary schools is simply three A-Levels and university. It is believed that a knowledge based curriculum keeps options open while a technical curriculum narrows it. This is simply not true. There is a bias against practical and technical subjects below the age of 16 in our schools.  Design and technology is being squeezed out of schools at GCSE and A-Level with entries falling by 20  and 30 per cent respectively. 

The Government’s White Paper has reaffirmed their commitment for students to focus on seven academic subjects at GCSE – English language, English literature, maths, two sciences, a modern or ancient language, geography or history, plus possibly a third science. This is word-for-word the curriculum laid down by the Education Act of 1904, though it added three subjects – drawing, cooking for girls, and metalwork or carpentry for boys.

We should not go back to a 19^th century diet of academic subjects for all.  All young people should make and do things as part of a broad and balanced curriculum. 

University Technical Colleges came into being because employers said conventional schools and colleges were failing to equip young people with the breadth of skills, knowledge and personal attributes they look for in new recruits. Ron Dearing and I were convinced that the solution lay in a new curriculum blending traditional academic subjects with technical specialisms and project-based learning. UTC students leave with qualifications and many go on to apprenticeships, and some to degree apprenticeships.  Our ambition is that no UTC student will join the ranks of the unemployed when they leave. Our target is 100 per cent. In July 2015 we had 2,000 leavers at 16: 99.5 stayed in education, started an apprenticeship or got a job. At 18, 97 per cent went into further education or work.

Success means more than a set of exams in a league table.  Work ready students at UTCs will also have: 

• Reasoning skills
• The ability to examine and solve problems
• Experience of working in teams
• An ability to make data-based decisions – they are “data savvy”
• Social skills – particularly the confidence to talk to and work with adults from outside school
• The skills of critical thinking, active listening, presentation and persuasion
• Practical skills: the ability to make and do things for real
• Basic business knowledge

What we have delivered with UTCs should be made available throughout the whole education system with a programme along these lines:

1. Primary schools should teach coding, but many of their teachers have no experience of this: they should be encouraged to bring in outside experts.

2. Primary schools should also have 3D printers and the design software that drives them – pupils will take to them very quickly.  The 1981 programme to get one computer into every school, launched by Margaret Thatcher personally, offered a discount of 50 per cent on just one computer.  A similar scheme could be launched for 3D printers.

3. Secondary schools should provide the computer science GCSE for at least half of all 16 year olds. Students would then be capable of following an advanced apprenticeship at 16, whereas students who have just taken academic subjects at 16 would find it difficult to locate a company to employ them.

4. Secondary schools should be able to substitute for the foreign language GCSE at 16 a GCSE in computer science, design and technology, or another practical subject. To master a computer language will be more useful in the workplace than a smattering of a foreign language. English is the language for the new technology age.

5. We should reintroduce young apprenticeships at 14 enabling young people to start an apprenticeship alongside the core curriculum. Many of the great inventors of the Industrial Revolution including James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood and Michael Faraday started their apprenticeships at 14.

6. All students should learn how businesses work – marketing, sales, design, customer services, budgetary control, cash flow, profit and loss, partnerships and companies. This will allow students, if they wish, to convert their expertise, knowledge and skills and ideas into an income stream from an early age.

7. Schools should be encouraged to develop a 14-18 technical stream for some of their students covering enterprise, health, design, and hands on skills for example robotics, electronics, graphic design, and material engineering. This would develop into a pathway of success different from the normal route of three A-Levels and university.

8. Universities should provide part-time courses for apprentices to achieve Foundation and Honour degrees – a degree apprentice would have no student debt.

The post How to Survive the Fourth Industrial Revolution appeared first on Standpoint.

On coming into office in 1979, the Tories actually started well by introducing tuition fees for international students, who had hitherto been educated at the British taxpayer’s expense. That step required courage because the new fees were universally denounced, yet after the initial hiccup of a year’s fall in rolls the numbers of international student numbers then soared, and their fees have since helped keep our universities financially as well as culturally viable.

Margaret Thatcher then cut the universities’ core income (which also translated into cutting their research income) and that too required courage as that cut, too, was violently denounced: in 1985, indeed, the University of Oxford insulted her by first offering and then withdrawing an honorary degree. But Mrs Thatcher argued that Britain was spending more per capita on higher education than almost any other OECD country yet our economy had tanked. She needed to make savings and the universities had proved a poor investment.

She was right, but as the economy recovered during the later 1980s and ’90s the Tories failed to increase the universities’ income pari passu, and when in 1992 John Major turned the former polytechnics into universities — while simultaneously imposing an unpleasant regulatory regime on the older institutions — British higher education hit a nadir of low quality, poor funding, low morale and oppressive supervision. By 1997 the UK was spending only 1 per cent of GDP on higher education (19th out of the 27 OECD member states) while over the previous five years its expenditure per student had fallen by 21 per cent, down to 12th in the OECD. And we were only 19th in the OECD for the proportion of young people enrolled in university. In short, our universities had descended to the level of continental Europe’s.

One of the great international paradoxes of higher education is the poor quality of French, German, Italian and other continental universities, many of which are little better than institutions of mass alienation where remote academics pontificate at anonymous students across impersonal lecture theatres. The British university, in contrast, has always aspired to be an alma mater where student drop-out rates are low and where staff and students engage in the joint enterprise of education, but by 1997 that aspiration was almost forgone. And then Tony Blair won.

Blair believed in universities. He increased their government funding, he increased their private funding by introducing undergraduate fees of £1,000 pa, and he reformed the regulations. Then in 2003 he proposed increasing the undergraduate fees to £3,000 p.a. His intention was not only to increase the universities’ income but also to help shift their culture into one of greater independence and entrepreneurship. That step required vast courage because those fees were opposed by, inter alia, almost every Labour and Lib Dem MP — and by  the Tories, who seemed to rejoice in the squalor to which they had reduced the sector.

Labour MPs could be whipped and the Lib Dems ignored but the Tories almost scuppered the legislation. Led by Michael Howard and David Willetts, both of whom had sent their children to private schools, the Tories argued that there was no place for a market in education, but the Bill squeezed through by five votes (famously Alan Johnson, the junior education minister, said that he and his boss Charles Clarke got the Bill through by a charm offensive, with him providing the charm and Clarke the offensive). Yet again, the doom merchants were proved wrong when, after an initial fall in rolls, student numbers soared.

Then during the 2010s the Coalition raised the fees to £9,000 pa. That decision was forced on ministers because the Treasury was demanding vast economies, and the budget of the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which, oddly, houses science and the universities) is dominated by science and higher education rather than by business. Since the science budgets are sacrosanct (they are a form of corporate welfare, and BIS values corporate welfare) the bulk of the savings had to be made by the universities. And yet again the doom-mongers were proved wrong when, after a decline in rolls for a year, student numbers (especially those of working-class students) soared. In its Education at a Glance 2012 the OECD found that England’s tuition fees had produced the world’s most “advanced” support for students without damaging social justice.

And, wondrously, before they left office, Vince Cable and a redeemed David Willetts, of the Coalition government, abolished one of the sector’s last two remaining Leninist shackles, namely the caps on student numbers. Until recently, a university wanting to open a new course (or indeed wanting to close an old one) or wanting to change the numbers of students on a course, had to ask permission of some civil servant. And that permission would be denied if the civil servant feared that such a change might intensify competition between different universities, because competition is not allowed in the corporate state. But — and with every homage to Friedrich Engels — the state is now withering away from the universities.

In 1979, some 85 per cent of the universities’ income came from the state. Today, the bulk of their income comes from student fees and research grants. And as the universities have been forced into the market, so they have excelled. The best international university league table is provided by Times Higher Education, which incorporates 13 different indicators including measurements of teaching, research and reputation; and the first 10 universities in its current rankings are:

1. Caltech
2. Harvard
3. Oxford
4. Stanford
5. Cambridge
6. MIT
7. Princeton
8. Berkeley
=9. Imperial/ Yale

That is an astonishing list. It tell us that seven of the 10 top best universities are American (six of which are private) and that the remaining three are British (and also, despite the myth, private). In a world where the majority of universities are state-owned and neither American nor British, that dominance by private Anglophones needs explaining.

Europe’s universities were born private and democratic. The first, Bologna, was founded around 1100 by students seeking an education in law. Then Padua and Montpellier were founded, also as private democratic student initiatives, teaching medicine and the sciences. Soon afterwards the northern universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were created, by scholars, and like their predecessors they were private and democratic, though run by the scholars rather than by the students. But soon thereafter universities were created by the Church (often from pre-existing cathedral schools) or by monarchs, and those were neither private nor democratic — the key appointment of the vice-chancellor or equivalent generally being in the gift of the Church or crown.

Worse, the Church then took control of the erstwhile independent universities. As Pope Boniface VIII stated in 1294:  “You Paris masters think that the world should be ruled by your reasonings but it is to us, not you, that the world is entrusted.” The authorities thus forced the oversight of the Church onto the universities, which is why so many academic titles such as Dean or Doctor are ecclesiastical. Subsequently, under inquisitions, absolutism and Napoleon, continental Europe nationalised its universities. But after 1689 England’s took an independent course.

In 1687 James II expelled the President and 25 fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford to replace them with Catholics. Protestants were outraged — Mary, wife of William of Orange, sent the fellows £200 — and the episode helped precipitate the Glorious Revolution. That in turn spawned the Bill of Rights of 1689, whose third article stated: “That the commission for erecting the late Court of Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes, and all other commissions and courts of like nature, are illegal and pernicious” which, translated, meant that in 1689 England recognised the ancient rights of its universities to independence.

Although they were thus confirmed in law as private bodies, England’s — later Britain’s — universities did not spin out of 1689 fully independent, and for a further century monarchs, politicians and bishops continued to interfere: during the 1760s, for example, the Duke of Newcastle would confer degrees on his cronies by royal mandate. But the universities were on an independent trajectory and by the late 19th century they had become fully autonomous.

The American Ivy League followed the same trajectory. North America had seen nine colonial colleges created before independence in 1776: Harvard (1636), William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), Pennsylvania (1751), Columbia (1754,) Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766) and Dartmouth (1769). The colonial colleges were, importantly, not founded by the colonial governments but, rather, by local clergymen, as theological academies. Consequently they were always private bodies, with self-governing structures modelled on the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; and to this day, in recapitulation of their Oxbridge roots, the Presidents of Harvard and Yale chair their governing bodies as executive chairs. 

By 1776, though, the colonial colleges had already embraced their first governance revolution when many of the academics on their governing bodies were replaced by politicians. In colonial days church and state were not separated, so governments readily funded the largely theological colleges, which in turn were prepared to lose some autonomy as a quid pro quo. And the loss of autonomy was real: at Yale, for example, Connecticut’s Governor, Deputy Governor and six state senators sat on the governing body.

But following the separation of church and state after 1776, the Ivy League embarked on its second governance revolution: it ejected the politicians, replacing them on its councils with private donors. Why? Because the politicians withheld their money. Whenever a dispute arose between a state government and its local university — and such disputes were perennial because the universities had learned to defend their rights — the politicians stopped giving public money to a private body. Whereupon the colleges ejected them, to survive by alumni giving and fee income alone.

The politicians tried, of course, to retain control, and in 1815 the government of New Hampshire compulsorily nationalised Dartmouth College. But the famous 1819 ruling by the Supreme Court confirmed that the former colonial colleges were private bodies that could not be nationalised against their will; so Dartmouth was re-privatised, and higher education in America was confirmed on its trajectory of independence.  

Higher education and scholarship are conventionally described as public goods that require government money, so economic theory predicts that the former colonial colleges should, on losing their public subventions, have gone bust. Instead, on breaking free from political control and government subsidies, they flourished, and thanks in part to the vast endowments they have since accumulated (Harvard: $31.7 billion; Yale: $19.3bn; Princeton: $17bn; Stanford: $16.5bn) they now dominate the international university league tables. By operating “needs blind admissions”, moreover, so no one is refused entry if they can’t pay, the Ivy League also shows how social justice can be entrusted to the private sector. Not for the first time, economic theory has been found wanting.

Ironically, though, the Americans have proved truer to Britain’s trajectory of independence than has Britain itself. Between 1689 and 1919 the British created the new, private, universities of London (1826/1836), Durham (1837), Manchester (1851), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1852), Birmingham (1900), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904) and Sheffield (1905). Typical in its foundation was Birmingham University, endowed by Josiah Mason, a local industrialist who, on laying the foundation stone in 1875, said: “I, who have never been blessed with children of my own, may yet, in these students, leave behind me an intelligent, earnest, industrious and truth-loving and truth-seeking progeny for generations to come.”

Earlier, in 1799, the Royal Institution in London was created to foster research — solely on private money. By 1800 it had raised no less than £11,047, and in 1801 it appointed Humphry Davy as a lecturer (whereupon he discovered six new elements: potassium, sodium, barium, strontium, calcium and magnesium) before he proceeded to mentor his great student Michael Faraday (who in 1831 discovered electromagnetic induction, among other things).

But this autochthonic picture in the UK changed after 1914-18 because the Great War bankrupted the universities: both of their major sources of income (fees and endowments) evaporated. The fee income disappeared as the young men abandoned their studies for the Western Front, and — more gravely in the long-term — the universities’ endowment income also collapsed: between 1815 and 1914 the value of sterling had actually risen (deflation) so, rationally, the universities had long invested in fixed-income vehicles. But between 1914 and 1918 the pound lost three-quarters of its value — and inflation continued after 1918 — so the universities’ endowment income collapsed.

By 1919 the universities were reporting vast deficits, and some may even have been trading insolvently, so in that year the government’s University Grant Committee was instituted with an annual budget of £1 million; and that committee was eventually to mutate into John Major’s Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) that, thanks to their vast budgets and power mania, were to treat the universities as subordinate branches of the civil service, until Tony Blair started the process of de facto privatisation.

But the continent of Europe has remained true to its nationalisations, and though it has always paid lip service to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas of Lernfreiheit (the right to study freely) and Lehrfreiheit (the right to teach freely), in practice their universities have been only too supine. Indeed, Spain is but one of many countries where academics really are  civil servants, while Hungary is but one country where the appointment of rectors (i.e. vice-chancellors) has to be confirmed by the minister of education.

Why does university independence translate into excellence? One answer is monopoly: when a government has nationalised the universities and — as generally happens — abolished fees, then that government enjoys a monopolistic control of higher education. Why, therefore, would it put into the universities a penny more than the absolute minimum? Yet the consequences are, as the EU Commission reported in its 2003 Role of the Universities in the Europe of Knowledge that “American universities have far more substantial means than those of European universities — on average, two to five times higher per student . . . The gap stems primarily from the low level of private funding of higher education in Europe.” Since one source of university excellence is money, free-market America beats monopolistic Europe because students and their parents will contribute more in fees than will governments.

Competition is another source of excellence and, when students pay, independent universities compete to satisfy them where state universities need not. Equally, in their search for reputation, independent universities compete for research monies in ways that state universities need not. And the more independent a university, the more it is run by the academics themselves, and — as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale confirm — academics know better than anyone else how to run a university. Government ministers and bureaucrats are menaces, and even university councils of non-executives can be obstacles to progress.

And then there’s academic freedom. In his 2008 book Academic Freedom in the Wired World, Robert O’Neil, the former president of the state-owned University of Virginia, reported how a politician, on clashing with an academic, threatened him: “Your institution will pay for this.” The professor replied: “I’ve just moved to the [independent] University of Richmond.” It is no coincidence that many of the challenging thinkers of our time, from Milton Friedman (Chicago) on the Right to Noam Chomsky (MIT) on the Left, have been based in independent universities.

We can see therefore that Britain’s recent renaissance in higher education can be attributed directly to its ever-greater independence, but one last step needs to be made: the cap of £9,000 a year on fees needs to be removed. If that cap were to go, so that British university fees could approach American levels, then the last remaining barrier to global superiority would be removed. Obviously the government should ensure that no British university would ever refuse a home application because of cost — any British university wishing to charge more than £9,000 a year should create its own student loan company to extend the necessary loans — but let us realise the full potential of our institutions by removing, Ivy League-style, any restrictions on their freedom to trade and to set their own prices.

Only 16 per cent of American students attend an independent charitable university such as Harvard or Yale. The rest attend either a state university (75 per cent) or a private-for-profit university, yet the state universities are not nearly as good as the charitable independent universities, while the private for-profits are scandalous disgraces that are universally excoriated.

In short, the American system is potentially much less independent than ours, and if we in Britain provide all our universities — which are already independent charities — with the commercial freedom of the American independent charitable sector, we will be so much better placed that not three but three times three of the top 10 universities globally will eventually be British.

Everything depends on the willingness of David Cameron, Business Secretary Sajid Javid and Jo Johnson, minister of state for universities and science, to copy Tony Blair and to take an unpopular decision. In the medium term the decision will look inspired, but those three men will have to weather a year’s criticism before the doomsters are proved wrong and the universities establish themselves on the trajectory of global dominance. But how can we stiffen those ministerial sinews?

The post Lift The Fee Cap And Set Universities Free appeared first on Standpoint.

First, then, the definition. In 1861 the Clarendon Commission identified nine old schools that were thought to qualify, including Charterhouse, Rugby, St Paul’s and the very wealthy foundation of Merchant Taylors’. The public schools, as the term betrays, came into being as schools that in some way served the nation, as the three great collegiate schools at Winchester, Eton and Westminster have done for many centuries.  David Turner lays much emphasis on the role played by the first school to have been imbued from the start with the humanist principles of the Northern Renaissance, St Paul’s, founded by John Colet in around 1509. It was national because it served the elite of the national capital (if parents could not pay the cost of wax candles to be taken to school every day, their children would not be welcome — no cheap, smelly, vulgar tallow here!); and at various points in its history it was favoured by the high-born as well as by the professional classes, without ever having large numbers of boarders.

Their patronage by professional parents is, as Turner shows, the most interesting thing about these schools, even about Eton and Harrow: far from cultivating an exclusive poshness, there has always been space for those whose less grand parents sought advancement for their children. They have been a ladder for social ascent even when the quality of education they have offered has left something to be desired. Admittedly, they have been expensive, and are becoming more so as the facilities they offer are transformed into those of five-star hotels. There have never been enough scholarships, and to win one of those it helps to have been educated first at a very good prep school, which itself will be costly, so breaking into the system has never been easy. This problem has become more acute as middle-class parents find themselves without the means to pay the fees demanded, and the schools themselves have become increasingly reliant on foreign students, from China, Russia and elsewhere.

That, of course, takes one to the moral dilemma. Why should the excellent education on offer at Westminster and Winchester be so hard for people of modest or even middling means to obtain? We might be willing to pay for education, as we might also be willing to pay for private healthcare, but there remains at the back of our brains a moral scruple that itches a little. To some extent, this issue was addressed when a large number of schools inhabited a middle ground between grammar schools and public schools, in the Direct Grant system of scholarships that Labour swept away in the 1970s. These schools, it is true, were hobbled by the heavy representation among their governors of local government representatives; in this way their independence was compromised. When the Direct Grant ceased, Labour expected these schools to turn comprehensive or to shrivel, but many of them became completely independent and flourished as never before. Then there was the Assisted Places scheme set up by the Conservatives to provide scholarships at an even larger range of schools, including some of the ancient ones; the very first act of Blair’s new government was to sweep that system away as well.

The argument was about buying privilege, about the ease with which those who emerged from these schools could make their way in the City, in the professions or indeed in political life. It paid rather little attention to the main task of these schools, which was to educate. In the 19th century, the ideal of educating the whole person came more and more into focus; and the Clarendon Commission worried about the usefulness of the teaching that was offered in the nine schools it examined: plenty of Greek and Latin, but where were modern languages? Even mathematics was often treated with disdain. I can vouch for the fact that the cases David Turner cites in his book of science-less education around 1900 still occurred in the second half of the 20th century. I was asked at the age of 13, “Do you wish to do Greek, or do you wish to do science?” I very much wanted to do Greek, so I left school without any qualification in science (other than plenty of mathematics). 

It was the sort of school where the number of boys achieving Oxbridge awards each year was a matter of great pride; but that did not cancel out an insistence on building character that has been typical of these schools at least since Dr Arnold’s time at Rugby. Education was understood in a broad sense, and was not simply measured by exam grades. Once upon a time headmasters insisted that their schools provided training in “leadership”; nowadays talk of this aspect is rather muted. Yet, as Turner’s book shows, it cannot be entirely bad if there are places that produce a disproportionate number of eminent scientists, prominent politicians, great generals, and some of the leading young actors in this country. And this is even truer if, as he maintains, these schools have opened up opportunities for the middle classes, helping people work their way further up the social ladder. That rather few of those helped in this way have come from working-class backgrounds reflects the ending of the Assisted Places scheme and similar projects. 

In late-13th-century Florence you were at a serious disadvantage, in theory at least, if you came from one of the more eminent families, the so-called magnates. A culture of inverted snobbery came into being, with all the complications one might expect: people redesignated themselves as members of the popolo (“people”), adopting surnames such as Popoleschi in case anyone missed the point. In other words, there was plenty of opportunity to maintain the pretence of being just an ordinary bloke, while nothing could be further from the truth.  Much the same happened in ancient Rome, where patricians opted for plebeian status, like the infamous careerist Clodius, who was really a Claudius but could not become Tribune of the People while he was of patrician status (his scandalous infiltration of the rites of the Vestal Virgins, dressed as a woman, is a good story, but not relevant here). This wish to be counted as of the people is once again a characteristic of champagne socialists, but it is widespread across British society; its badge is the glottal stop that replaces the letter “t” in the speech of Harriet Harman and others. 

In case all this seems a digression from the topic of public schools, consider this. The Office of Fair Access (Offa) has entered into agreements with universities to ensure that they are making a full effort to identify disadvantaged students and offering them the financial and other support they will need. The “Guidance to the Director of Fair Access” issued by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills threatens that universities that fail to meet their target without good reason will be banned from charging the full fee of £9,000 per student. The real problem comes further down the line, as universities propose their way of addressing these demands. In Cambridge, it is assumed that one can measure the proportion of relatively disadvantaged students by increasing the number of state school entrants so that it matches the proportion of students in state schools who secure three A grades at A-level. It is hard to think of a cruder, more misshapen measuring stick. The category of state schools includes the remaining grammar schools as well as leading sixth-form colleges (which may be carefully selective), and a high percentage of the children coming from these schools also come from what can fairly be called middle-class backgrounds. Some children have switched from independent schools to state schools, such as a very good sixth-form college in Cambridge, to ensure that they are listed as state school entrants. In any case, something like 31 per cent of children in independent schools receive some financial support from the school so that they can continue to be educated there.

Everyone should applaud attempts to encourage children from genuinely disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to the best universities. That, indeed, is what Offa says it aims to achieve.  Much good work is done at leading universities to attract such candidates. But admissions tutors have also sometimes imposed quotas, and have told their colleagues that they can have no more boys and girls from public schools above the assigned number, forcing them to admit academically inferior candidates who may be ill-prepared for the demands of a top university and will struggle to keep up with their peers. Meanwhile, good students have been sent away with their tail between their legs, assured that they did not meet the standards required, when the real reason for rejection was positive discrimination.  The catchphrase “well-taught” sometimes signifies: “comes from an academic public school”.

Quotas leave many of us very uneasy. Years ago I came across a book in Cambridge University Library that tried to defend Mussolini’s regime, then in power in Italy. Surely, the author argued, it was necessary to address the over-representation of Jews among university professors in Italy? No one is suggesting that this discrimination is on that scale, but I would suggest that it lies along the same spectrum.

Positive discrimination helps no one, least of all those who are catapulted into a role for which they are not really prepared. There is a marvellous passage in the Bible, not a work most people turn to nowadays for moral guidance: “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not favour the poor, nor honour the powerful” (Leviticus 19:15). That sense of balance needs to be restored.

The post The English Public School: An Apologia appeared first on Standpoint.

Might I offer you some advice? All teachers want to be as good as they can be. But too often that impulse is crushed under the load of bureaucracy that the modern school system has been sprouting over the past 40 years, as the state has become more and more involved in monitoring school performance. 

Yet what I have seen all my career and in particular since becoming the Headmistress of Michaela Community School, a new free school that opened in September 2014, is that it really is possible to flourish without most school bureaucracy. If one gives staff autonomy and responsibility, they’ll fly with it. Bureaucratic control is based on a fear that teachers cannot or will not do a good job. Of course we need oversight of schools and of teachers but in reality our current bureaucracy makes failure all the more likely.

Please set an example by always asking yourself the question: will the decision to require more written accountability make our education system better? Might it even make things worse?

The government requires schools to justify themselves and heads in turn require the same of teachers. The problem is that targets and box-ticking proliferate. And schools get worse. Why? Because everyone concentrates on ticking those boxes instead of actually doing their jobs well. Successive PISA reports, and Sir Michael Barber’s famous McKinsey report, clearly show that the greater the autonomy at school level, the greater the potential for all-round improvement.

All bureaucracy does is make the bureaucrat-administrator feel better. And at the very top it makes Education Secretaries feel as if they are holding schools to account. But just because they feel this doesn’t mean they are actually doing it. It simply isn’t true that if it is written down, it is being done. In fact, the opposite is true, because if staff are writing it down, they are too busy to actually do it. Ms Morgan, you need to make decisions that actually improve the teaching of our children, not just make you, or even the public, simply feel better about our schools.

I want two simple things. Stop the madness of schools trying to justify themselves to Ofsted. And stop the insanity of teachers having to jump through hoops to get their performance-related pay. Both are degrading and make our education system into a joke.

1. Abolish Ofsted. Countless senior teams across the country are locked in their offices right now trying to second-guess inspectors, trying to tick dozens of boxes so that they can achieve a stamp of approval. The reality is that it is impossible to achieve consistency across the Ofsted beast. There are too many inspectors, too many systems, too much personal preference, and it is impossible to make it all cohere. Inspectors are now told not to grade lessons — but they generally do. Desperate to find something to pin their judgment on, they look for any possible box to tick, and write down a justification. So heads of schools and departments spend countless hours writing self-evaluation plans, school development plans and Ofsted strategies, while they should be doing important practical things like supporting teachers on pupil behaviour or raising standards. Similarly, teachers are forced into writing lesson plan after lesson plan instead of simply teaching well.

If you don’t have the stomach to be that radical, then, at the very least, reform Ofsted out of recognition. Because if you abolished it, you would have to replace it with proper competition between schools and actually give families real choice over their children’s education and I can’t imagine any government ever doing that. (You do know that people don’t have real choice? The only families who have choice are the ones who can afford to move house. If you can’t, you have to go to your local school.)

So if you can’t abolish it, rein it in. And I mean properly rein it in. Michael Gove thought he could reduce its power by allowing governors and head teachers to devise their own ways of reviewing school performance, but Ofsted has in effect squashed that. A real reform would be to demote Ofsted to the educational equivalent of the Health and Safety Inspectorate, giving schools a basic check on order and hygiene. No rats? Finances in order? Great. Let’s get on with teaching.

While you may feel schools are being held to account, some 20 per cent of our children leave school innumerate and illiterate. In what way is Ofsted holding our schools to account? Nearly 30 per cent of secondary schools were found to be either in need of improvement or inadequate last year. Has anything happened to them? People often cite “safeguarding” as a reason for Ofsted’s existence. But when does one ever hear of Ofsted exposing a school for not safeguarding pupils? Rarely. Why? Because all inspectors can do is execute the bureaucratic task of ensuring that a school’s Single Central Register has been properly filled in. The SCR lists staff and their DBS checks — which they apply for to prove they have the all-clear to work with children. But what does Ofsted’s visit of once every three or so years mean? It does not mean children are properly safeguarded. It means both the Ofsted inspectors and the school’s senior team are adept at filling out paperwork. Do you remember the Trojan Horse schools? Ofsted had given one of them a glowing report. In fact, we only ever knew that there was a problem in those schools thanks to a whistleblower.

2. No more Performance-Related Pay (PRP). You should want to hire first-class, highly-committed people who regard teaching as a vocation, not people who want to be set a target and rewarded financially for achieving it. PRP undermines everything we believe in by encouraging the wrong motivation in teachers and it creates an extra bureaucratic workload by having to justify achieved targets. PRP disincentivises a head of department from supporting a newly-qualified teacher by taking the more difficult pupils because it might mean her not hitting her target. With PRP, teachers cannot work as a team.

Teachers have limited time. Either they spend their time doing an excellent job, or they spend it writing things down. Those who manage to do both do not survive for long and leave the profession within a few years, burnt out from the crazy workload. At Michaela, teacher well-being is central to what we do. We keep marking to a minimum and feed back from the front of the class. We use IT to ensure that teacher workload is reduced. We do not have PRP so my teachers work like a dream team. As an example, we’ve had trouble finding science teachers who fit with our philosophy. The whole school, including heads of maths and humanities, are helping to find science teachers for the school precisely because we don’t have ludicrous targets and their pay does not depend on them doing other things. The ethos at Michaela is such that we all work together for the betterment of the school.

We don’t expect lesson plans from teachers and we don’t grade their lessons either. We trust our teachers to be professionals. Of course there is a system of accountability if teachers were to disappoint. Just because we trust and respect our teachers does not mean our systems are lacking in rigour. Steve Jobs once said that one should not hire clever people and set them targets. One should hire clever people and get them to tell you what to do. This is exactly what we do at Michaela.

We keep bureaucracy to an absolute minimum. This has a hugely beneficial impact on staff morale and performance. We have 100 per cent of our teachers staying on next year. And 100 per cent of our teachers have 100 per cent attendance at school. This provides the children with continuity and consistency and we exemplify the behaviour we expect from them. I often have conversations with families who are not good at getting their children into school every day. I say, the staff are always here and your children should be too. Our staff are always at school because they love being there, thanks to the ethos and environment we have created. I trust them and they trust me.

We centralise detentions and homework so that teachers don’t have to chase pupils. Our bespoke IT system to record bad behaviour has been created with minimal writing required from teachers. Homework is either self-marked or peer-marked: less paperwork for the teacher.

As headmistress, I am simply unwilling to bury staff in paperwork. But keeping bureaucracy at bay exposes the school to the risk of being slammed by Ofsted for doing just that. The problem with Ofsted inspectors is that they often believe their own rhetoric: boxes are all-important. How do I know this? Because all schools hire inspectors who double up as consultants to advise schools on how to play the game with their colleagues. It really is just a game, Ms Morgan. Many give schools scripts on what to say and how to argue with an inspector to raise the grade given by the inspector. The emperor really isn’t wearing any clothes. Please can we all stop saying that he is?

Although Michael Gove believed he had fixed things by not requiring self-evaluation plans from schools, inspectors are quick to point out that if a school doesn’t have one it immediately sets alarm bells ringing in their heads. But it simply isn’t the case, as one inspector told me, that one cannot evaluate one’s school on one’s own terms. He was absolutely convinced that one must always use the Ofsted handbook and apply it to the school. For him, that is simply what self-evaluation is.

I wonder what handbook Steve Jobs used to evaluate Apple?

After arguing at great length the other day with an Ofsted inspector on the value of written justifications, I asked him for the main thing he would change if he could go back to being a head. He had been head of two different schools before becoming an Ofsted inspector. He smiled and said that he would write a lot less down.

If we want innovation and creativity in our schools, we need to throw away the rulebook, get rid of Ofsted, and get rid of the pernicious, target-driven culture in our education system. Give heads the freedom required to run their schools the way they know works. Give families the freedom to choose the school that they want, meaning you need to abolish catchment areas, and prevent the middle class from rigging the system to work for them.

So much of the system is upside down. Please, Ms Morgan, be part of the struggle to turn it right-side up.

The post An Open Letter To Nicky Morgan appeared first on Standpoint.

Since 2010, we have seen a genuine revolution in state education. Gove took the nascent Labour reform of City Academies, which produced 204 state schools independent of local authority control, and rolled it out nationwide. Five years later, 60 per cent of all English secondary schools and 14 per cent of primary schools are academies — around 4,500 in total. Combined with cuts to their budgets, academisation is sounding the final death knell of local authorities’ control of schools. A journey towards a public sector market of autonomous schools and chains of schools is well under way.

When it comes to teacher training, the coalition reforms have promoted school-based teacher training to challenge the previous dominance of university education departments. Last year, more than a third of new teachers trained through either Teach First or Schools Direct. As such, two of the big beasts of the education establishment, university-based educationists and local authority employees, are on the wane. Schools today have unprecedented freedom to train their own staff; pay them as they see fit; design their own curricula and assessment systems; take over neighbouring schools; and establish new schools from scratch. Such liberalising reforms will be sustained with a momentum of their own, as schools embrace their new freedoms to innovate, collaborate and expand. From this perspective, it could be argued that Gove’s reforms are only just beginning.

A less pugnacious and single-minded figure than Gove could never have achieved such radical change in such a short space of time. However, as is so often the case, his attributes may also have been his undoing. Even some of Gove’s strongest supporters concede that he did not carry enough of the teaching profession with him in support of his reforms.

Among my colleagues who are outspoken Gove loathers, one article which he wrote two years ago for the Daily Mail is repeatedly cited as justification. In it Gove branded opponents to his reforms “enemies of promise”, and never really heard the end of it.

It is safe to say no such bellicose rhetoric will be coming from Nicky Morgan. The best-case scenario is that she will continue the spirit of Gove’s reforms, but allow for some healing to occur between the profession and the government. Before the election, Morgan made much of her concern for teacher workload — a well-judged campaign to indicate to the profession that she is on their side.

The worst-case scenario would be that Morgan presides over a rerun of the last three years of John Major’s government. After a period of energetic education reform during the early 1990s, Gillian Shephard, a former teacher, was made Education Secretary with a similar mission to heal wounds. Education as a political issue was kicked into the long grass, reform went cold, and schools experienced three years of benign neglect from Westminster. In 1997 Major ran for re-election on the rather desperate promise of “a grammar school in every town”. 

I am confident such deceleration will not happen this time. Morgan should be aided by the fact that, though Gove may be gone, many of his appointees remain. At Ofqual, the National College for Teaching and Leadership, and the Department for Education, kindred spirits in the crusade for higher standards and school autonomy have stayed firmly in place.

Far from devising new reforms, Morgan’s most significant mission will be to protect Gove’s reforms from the vested interests within the education establishment. In particular, qualifications reform is still in its infancy and must not be derailed. New maths and English GCSEs will be taught for the first time from September 2015, with other core academic subjects (history, geography, science and languages) following in 2016. They will only be examined for the first time in 2018. Morgan will have to stand firm to ensure that there is no backsliding from the exam boards away from the high academic standards set by the previous government.

One of the few untrodden roads of education reform which Morgan should hurry towards is reining in the schools inspectorate Ofsted. Perhaps the most powerful single organisation in the education system, Ofsted is disliked by many different people for many different reasons. For the unions, it is a punitive imposition which leads to increased teacher workload and stress. For teachers of a more “traditional” bent, Ofsted is the enforcer of “trendy” teaching methods and innumerable other education fads.

Among free school heads, there is a strong feeling that their purported “freedom” is constrained by the constant threat of being given a poor grading by visiting inspectors. As numerous studies have shown, the inspection process favoured by Ofsted, particularly the use of lesson observations and a 1-4 grading of different aspects of the school, is impressionistic and inconsistent.

Change has been promised. In a July 2014 letter to schools, Ofsted’s chief Sir Michael Wilshaw explained plans for “fundamental changes” to take effect from September 2015. One of Morgan’s first tasks will be to ensure that these reforms convincingly halt the Ofsted leviathan in its tracks. A smaller, streamlined inspectorate would please everyone from right-leaning think-tanks to teaching unions, and be an easy first win for the new Education Secretary.

Gove’s unpopularity within the teaching profession owed far more to presentation than to policy. With my classroom colleagues I could talk through his reforms and find agreement on a point-by- point basis, but still not dent his position as a source of abhorrence. This was often for pretty inchoate and unjustified reasons: he hated teachers; he wanted to privatise state schools; he wanted to foist on schools a jingoistic version of British history. None of these slurs was true.

Nicky Morgan must now persuade schools and teachers that the Conservative party need not be their implacable enemy. Greater freedom for schools, a much-reduced level of centralised direction, and more robust examinations are things many teachers should naturally support. Gove was the best minister for realising these reforms, but Morgan is perhaps the best candidate for convincing teachers of their merits. 

The post Is Nicky’s Knack To Put Teachers First? appeared first on Standpoint.

Economists have pointed out that most students would continue to make tuition loan repayments for most of their working lives: any debt still outstanding after 30 years would be written off by the government. The main beneficiaries of Labour’s plan are people who can pay off their loans in less than 30 years — and that will only be possible if they earn large salaries or inherit wealth.

It is very odd for Miliband, of all people, to propose a policy which chiefly benefits the wealthy. If the Labour party believes money can be raised by cutting tax breaks on pensions, it would be better spent on what Labour insists on calling “the forgotten 50 per cent”.

Expanding technical education would benefit many young people, including some who currently go to university in the false belief that it is the only path to success. Indeed, today there is a growing amount of graduate unemployment.

In reality employers are crying out for people with technical skills, qualifications and real-world experience, a blend best achieved by combining work and study — learning and earning. Young people deserve clear, well-supported paths that will take them all the way from school to highly-skilled, highly-technical careers.

That’s what we set out to deliver in University Technical Colleges. From ages 14 to 18, students combine core subjects such as English, maths and science with demanding technical subjects such as engineering. We’re doing the same in Career Colleges, where the specialisms include hospitality, catering and digital technology.

At 18 most UTC students already have Level 3 qualifications, meaning they are ready and able to go straight on to Higher Apprenticeships with companies like Rolls-Royce, Network Rail, JCB and the National Grid, where they will have a salary of £15,000 and study for a foundation degree at the company’s cost. The students could go on to a full honours degree, but not for a full three-year term as they will want a course of two years, studying one or two days a week. Very few universities offer that sort of course. These students would get a full degree and have no debt.

I am convinced many more young people would take this path if they could. However, figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency reveal an alarming fall in part-time higher education in the last four years. Looking purely at UK residents attending English higher education institutions (HEIs), part-time enrolments fell from 667,000 in 2009/10 to 490,000 in 2013/14.

Not surprisingly, there has been a parallel fall in qualifications awarded by HEIs. In 2009/10 they awarded 140,000 foundation degrees and undergraduate qualifications other than degrees. Four years later it was 98,000: a fall of 30 per cent. This decline is due in part to part-time students not qualifying for maintenance loans, and there are hardly any scholarships for part-timers.Meanwhile, the number of full bachelor degrees awarded — three-year, full-time courses — rose from 351,000 to 383,000.

Fees of £9,000 a year guaranteed for three full years have allowed universities to maximise their income. It has been a golden period for them, and over the last four years most English universities have seen their balance sheets grow by frankly astonishing amounts. In effect, universities have been ring-fenced while further education has been cut. Take Leicester University, for example: in 2009/10 fixed assets were valued at £174 million. Four years later: £259 million (an increase of 49 per cent). Over the same period the general reserve went up from £58 million to £82 million (an increase of 41 per cent).

I looked at the accounts of 20 universities ranging from Anglia Ruskin to York. All of them saw their tangible assets increase in value between 2009/10 and 2013/14. The smallest percentage increase I found was at Birmingham University — 7.9 per cent. At the other end of the spectrum, De Montfort University in Leicester increased its tangible assets by 78.4 per cent. Across 20 universities the average increase was 30.2 per cent. Perhaps that explains why every university I visit seems to be in the middle of a major construction project. If they pour money into buildings it’s theirs forever.

A lot of this is being funded from tuition fees. However, we know many students will never repay their loans in full and that the taxpayer will have to write off billions of pounds. The journalist and HE expert Andrew McGettigan estimates that over the last four years the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has used £10 billion of extra reserves to cover falls in the recoverable value of existing student loans. Billions more will be written off in the decades to come. By moving the cost of universities to students’ fees, higher education has been moved off the Government’s balance sheet and it will only come on again when a large number of loans are written off.  When companies resort to off-balance sheet financing it is usually a prelude to their collapse.

In short, Labour has set its sights on the wrong target. The questions we really need to ask are the following: Are we paying universities too much? And should we invest more in technical and part-time courses and less in full-time first degrees?

If it is a choice between the two, I would say “yes” to the second question. My manifesto commitment would be this: in order to increase opportunities for all 14-year-olds, we will launch a ten-year programme to enhance the status of technical and vocational education, and spread it across the country by creating specialist colleges ranging from engineering and computing to catering and hospitality, digital technology, creative and performing arts, business studies, professional and caring services, and sports science.

The post Learning And Earning appeared first on Standpoint.

As reported in the Sunday Times, Andrea Brady, Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, commented that the Department of Education’s approach is “based on a fantasy of the good old days, when students sat up straight and memorised Kipling. The skills that we value at university—the ability to read carefully, to discern the characteristics of a poem through inventive close reading—are not ones which would be tested by this exam.” Her carping reference to Kipling is as crass as it comes—proof that she hasn’t read him very closely or creatively. Unfortunately, “inventive close reading” is honoured far more in the breach than the observance. Instead, English students are too often browbeaten by critical theory and penalised if they fail to repeat its dogmas of deconstruction, new historicism and semiotics ad infinitum.

Considering the uproar, the exact wording of the e-petition is disarmingly mild. In response to the requirement for students from 2017 “to remember” 15 to 18 poems in order to “closely analyse” them, it asks that the government consult with the English teaching community “as to whether this is the fairest and most meaningful way of assessing students’ understanding and appreciation of poetry”. Its creator, Mary Meredith, a Lincolnshire schoolteacher, followed the e-petition with an open letter to Glenys Stacey, the Chief Regulator at Ofqual, to express her concern that a “closed book examination is not the most valid way of assessing poetry appreciation”. She complained that even learners “with the critical sensitivity to fully understand the impact of a half rhyme, an extra metric foot, a line break, a full stop, a comma—most of them will not have the opportunity to demonstrate this sensitivity in an exam which emphasises memory over forensic engagement with text.”

This strikes me as odd. How else could you appreciate, say, the impact of a half rhyme, without saying it, hearing it, feeling it and being able to bring it to mind? Isn’t that part of knowing why it’s there? In “Strange Meeting”, Wilfred Owen’s battering chain of “escaped”, “scooped”, “groined” and “groaned” has little impact on the page, in the deathly silence of the exam hall. Meredith asks for one simple change: “an open book anthology paper”. Pupils will perform better when they “have in front of them the object for close analysis—rather than just a memory of that object”. This object for “forensic engagement” and “close analysis” carries a rather clinical feel: a nightingale carefully asphyxiated within a Victorian bell-jar.

Sadly it seems that no one, not least of all our blessed poets, bothered to do their homework. In response, Stacey has stated quite explicitly that “it is not a requirement of the exam for students to memorise text”. So there we have it. We can all breathe a sigh of relief—or disappointment. True, students will not be allowed to bring their own textbooks into the exam because it’s too easy to cheat by cramming them full of annotations. Instead, they will be presented with an unseen text and asked to discuss it in relation to works within the anthology. That’s it. To do this, they will need to have a good basic knowledge of the poems, yes. They will need to grasp similarities and differences in theme and style, yes. They will need to have some quotations to hand and some arguments at the ready, yes. But will they need to memorise any poem, word for word, by rote? No. If the unseen text in my exam happened to be “Strange Meeting”, then I would need to compare its use of half rhyme with whole rhyme in, say, a Shakespearean sonnet. But to do so, would I need to stand on a chair and say the sonnet over and over until I go mad? No. Would I be forced to recite it until iambic pentameter bleeds out of my ears? No. Would I be put off poetry forever and forever? Probably not, either.

What a storm in a triolet! But why does the spectre of rote learning arouse such powerful emotions? Why is it regarded as a diabolical blasphemy against education? Why has it fallen into such disfavour?

For a wonderfully dispassionate guide to this debate, there is no better book than Catherine Robson’s magisterial Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton, £30.95). Neither sentimentalist nor cynic, Robson traces the glory days of the memorised poem from the late 18th century to the Second World War. Prior to this, the first reading for almost all children was doctrinal: “the ABC with the catechism, the primer, the psalter, the Prayer Book, biblical passages and varied prayers and graces.” In the 1700s, infant readers continued to be fed on a diet of morally improving texts, but older children were given literary extracts to aid elocution. Of the former, “How doth the little busy bee” was a particular favourite, and popular enough to be mocked by Lewis Carroll as “How doth the little crocodile” in Alice In Wonderland. Of the latter, recitations from Milton and Shakespeare were typical standards.

Revolution came with the arrival of universal education in the 19th century and the establishment of the elementary school, the main engine of memorisation. Money drove the practice; from 1862 there was a direct link between successful classroom recitation and the size of a school’s budget, presumably because this kind of performance was easy to test by visiting inspectors. By 1882, the whole of the English curriculum consisted of recitation, from knowing 20 lines of simple verse at the first level to 150 lines at the last. Yet the money went hand in hand with social reform. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold, in his role as a school inspector, saw memorisation as a great equaliser. He said, “It is strange that a lesson of such old standing and such high credit in our schools for the rich should not sooner have been introduced in our schools for the poor.” Within its “mass of treasures” were discipline, intellectual and spiritual nourishment, and an encounter with literary genius.    

Robson shows that, inevitably, Arnold’s ideals were not always the reality. School inspector John Morley complained in 1868 that while he heard every child in a classroom “read with apparent fluency from his or her reading book, not one of them could read the simplest words in a similar, but hitherto unseen, volume”. Later, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor of the famous Oxford Anthology of English Poetry, described the depressing spectacle of poverty-stricken Cornish children reciting poetry of which they had no understanding, let alone enjoyment.

In response to such concerns, from 1905 up to 1944, guidelines were relaxed and children were encouraged to make their own selection of poems to memorise. But the seed of doubt was planted. Robson argues that memorisation had been defended on two grounds. First, “learning to read” and, second, “something to read”. However, once it was decided that memorisation was at odds with selection specific language building, it was viewed as unhelpful to both teacher and pupil. Then, as poetry became increasingly regarded as a personal, creative, expressive outpouring rather than as a skill learned, the business of reciting the work of previous poets was seen to deaden sensitivity to the art. Finally, the replacement of the Elementary School with the Primary School in 1944 brought the mass chanting of poems to a definitive end. Whole classroom activities such as recitation were replaced with a more child-centric approach to learning and an emphasis on silent reading.

The cut-off point of the Second World War is telling and perhaps accounts for the depth of feeling on this subject. This date is lodged in the British psyche like a landmine. Yet it would be a mistake to make this a battle of tradition versus modernity; class against equality; Conservative versus Labour; the imperial nightmare of the past versus the Utopia to come. There is collective concern for the collective memory we are losing. As Robson notes, the less-than-Tory figure of Gordon Brown reminisced happily on BBC radio about reciting Gray’s Elegy at school and wondered why this approach to poetry couldn’t be included in today’s curriculum. One answer is that poetry has now fallen victim to the belief identified by Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths About Education (Routledge, £14.99) that learning facts prevents understanding. If the words of the poem are the facts and facts prevent understanding, then to understand the poem we can’t know the words. If we know the words, then we can’t understand them. This is why a Professor of Poetry complains that memorising poems (which no one is even suggesting) prevents “close reading”. How much closer can you get?

Yet recitation isn’t going quietly. As the e-petition gathered steam, the finals of the Poetry By Heart competition were being held at Homerton College, Cambridge. This endeavour emerged from Sir Andrew Motion at the end of his laureateship as an initiative of the Poetry Archive, itself a fantastic resource for poets to hear the voices of the past.

Mike Dixon is an ambassador for the cause, and, as the former head of a sixth-form college (and head of English too), has decades of experience in the classroom. He explains: “Our philosophy is that we remain entirely voluntary. We have 333 schools and colleges taking part with 1,150 registered. We’ve had a 20 per cent increase of people doing it, year on year. So there’s momentum.

“It works like this. Schools register and run their own competition. There are county rounds; the county winners join us for an all-weekend event. This year we had 43 people go forward to the national final and eight get through to the very last round. There are weekend activities and it’s a real celebration with a lovely atmosphere.”

Old enough to remember closed book exams, Dixon considers the proposed changes to the GCSE to be fairly unremarkable; he also agrees with Robson that silent reading has had some adverse consequences. “We have lost touch with the acoustic quality of verse. Watching younger people recite poetry it’s fascinating to see what happens. The speaker and the audience are very exposed. You’re taking away the book and the lectern. You’re taking away barriers.”

How do the participants remember all those words? He says, “We talk about poetry by heart, not rote learning, and there is a difference. Rote learning sounds dry, deliberate and dusty. The children use a range of ways: repetition; recording their voice and hearing it back. They also use the memory temple.” The method of loci effortlessly links Ancient Greece with the modern classroom.  

Memory and understanding work together as a process. “First of all you choose the poem. Then you begin to think about it. You learn and memorise it—and finally you share it with others. Young people somehow suspect poetry is subject to a code and they want to know the code. They say ‘just tell me what it means.’ We don’t do that. We encourage a confident, enjoyable, individual response to poetry and we introduce them to all the great stuff out there.” This covers Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth as well as neglected works from Anne Finch, Mary Leapor and Hannah More. The winner this year was Emily Dunstan, 16, from Tooting, south London, as judged by a panel including poets Jo Shapcott, Daljit Nagra and Patience Agbabi. Dunstan recited “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, “The Death Bed” by Siegfried Sassoon and “Ode to a Nightingale” by Keats. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment.

The Faculty of Education next door is home to a remarkable Poetry and Memory research project that began in January 2014 and promises to supply a dose of scientific rigour to any sentimentality around “the good old days”. This grew out of a project in which Professor David Whitley and fellow researcher Debbie Pullinger interviewed poetry teachers from primary school through to university level. He says, “Many of the most passionately committed teachers thought that it was essential for them to feel that they had ownership of the poems they were teaching, in some way, and felt deeply concerned that they should find ways whereby their students could also feel they took ownership of the poems.”

Whitley continues, “The more profound importance of this topic resides in the question of whether it may actually be central to what poetry is and does, how it really ‘lives’ inside us. Is memorisation, on this broader view, really a mode of relationship between individuals, cultures and poetry that modern cultures and pedagogies—with their increasing emphasis, as children get older, on the detailed analysis of words on the page—tend to side-line or ignore completely?”
The project has gathered material from an online survey completed by over 400 respondents. This asked people what poetry meant to them, what value they saw in it, when they memorised poems and in what circumstances. The next phase will explore the most significant issues that emerge from the survey through in-depth interviews with individuals.

“I’ve been impressed—and actually very moved—by some of the accounts I’ve read so far from respondents about what a particular memorised poem means for them. Many of our respondents seemed to feel that a memorised poem was a significant expansion of their being.

“Two other things strike me as being very interesting. First nearly 90 per cent of people said they’d first memorised poetry as children and a similar proportion said that they learned poems as an adult (80 per cent). It would seem that very few people have learned poems as adults who hadn’t first done so as children. If the practice is valuable, then, it would seem vital that we begin early. Secondly, people had learned poems for many reasons but ‘pleasure’ was the most often cited.”

This last insight doesn’t surprise me in the least. For nine years, I wrote a poetry column in a free newspaper in New York in which I stressed the need to remember the words. I was inundated with messages from professors to housewives, high-school students to businessmen. An email from “Scholar Spartan” is saved on my desktop. He wrote, “I was on the subway when I came across your piece. Thank you for explaining the nuances of Shelley’s narrative poem Alastor. It furthered my understanding—and interest—in the poem to the point where I quietly recited the last part (‘He lingered, poring on memorials . . .’) the rest of the ride home until I knew it by rote; because, really, by that time I knew how the narrator felt when ‘meaning on his vacant mind / Flashed like strong inspiration.’” Such inspiration can only occur when the poem stops being an object and starts being us.

Whitley quotes Derek Walcott: “When you read a poem on a platform, you are asking an audience to make an effort of memory, no matter how difficult the poem is. I think this has been lost in Western poetry: memory is not part of it any more, and if that is denied, you’re not going to get any real poetry . . . The function of poetry is to recite.”

In Robson’s book, I was fascinated to discover a disreputable canon of popular verse snubbed by the major anthologies, with works including Felicia Hemans’s “The Child’s First Grief”, Southey’s “After Blenheim”, Scott’s “Death of Marmion”, Longfellow’s “King Robert of Sicily”, and Whittier’s “Snowblind”. You can see why they have fallen out of fashion. Many feature battles. They promote virtues of bravery, heroism and sacrifice. They tend to be ballads and they invariably rhyme. Yet even at their worst (and some like Lowell’s Vision of Sir Launfal are bloody awful), they’re far more fun to say aloud than the great slabs of tasteful tedium in the TLS. Something indeed has been lost. Do today’s poets have the noisy, vulgar, mawkish, commanding gifts of rhetoric to capture an audience?

Whitley reflects, “If you accept even a part of Walcott’s assertion, then a case has to be made for bringing the memorisation of poems back in from the shadows, seeing it as a central element in revitalising our relationship with poetry in modern, Western culture. That may seem very grandiose, but it’s close to what I’ve come to believe.”

It’s what I believe too. For me, “forensic engagement” restricts the poem to the exam hall, where it will soon be forgotten. It is memory that takes the poem outside and into the world. The poem then exists in the street, on the bus, in the pause between stations. I don’t want poetry to be a political battleground. I just want people, of any age, to remember the stuff, for no better reason than it’s wonderful. Because it expresses the essence of what it means to be human—and life would be empty without it. If the poem is never known by heart, it stays on the page, little more than a crossword puzzle, a plaything of clever cleverness and never personally meaningful. It can never spontaneously arise at the right moment to provide comfort, solace, wisdom. It can never provide joy. Rachel Kelly’s memoir Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me—My Journey Through Depression (Yellow Kite, £16.99) shows how poetry lifted her out of suicidal depression. That’s not some flip academic game. That’s life at its most raw, when the soul cries out for what is true.

Remember Mnemosyne. She is the mother of literature, science and the arts. She is the mother of all knowledge in the endless dance between the past and the future. To defend memory is not only to defend the essence of ourselves but the essence of civilisation.

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It is a monumental life that has been masterfully captured by my colleague Daniel-Dylan Böhmer, a journalist at Die Welt, in his book about Langlands, The Major Who Outwitted The War, published in Germany. It goes well beyond the biographical details and the challenges Pakistan currently faces: it is even more the story of what the country might look like once peace prevails. Langlands has become a global figure attracting global attention to Chitral while Pakistan’s future remains fragile.

In remote Chitral, bordering Afghanistan and the war-torn Swat district, tolerance has become a reality through the Langlands School. A different narrative of Pakistan is being written there. Boys and girls alike enjoy a good education, parents take pride in the opportunities that then open up for their children, and the Major is accorded the greatest respect for his commitment to the region in which he still lives. (You can follow him on Twitter, where he  has nearly 32,000 followers.) He has a firm and realistic belief that children need attention, identity and success stories they can write themselves.

The people of Chitral have resisted the Taliban because of their moderate religious beliefs and because their children embrace debating the politics that touches their young lives instead of taking up arms. Their strongest weapon is their thirst for empowerment. While education can be sometimes the right way to combat radicalism, empowerment always is.

It is too early to call what the people of Chitral have created a real civil society, but it is certainly the beginning of one. That future society is made visible through the individual stories that Böhmer relates in his book — a biography that reads like poetry. Böhmer describes how coincidences have always been part of the Major’s journey but, as he says, “You don’t live this kind of a life by accident.”

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