Jeremy Pointon Sorry my typing is lousy. That should have been £9000 not £90000 but its certainly not true that "the avg cost of schooling a kid privately as opposed to the public sector is a mere matter of another £wk per annum". I live in Edinburgh and can state quite catagorically that most of the private schools here charge around £9000 pa - and that's for the basics. You can add on another £1500 for school meals and the same again for other extras - ie hobbies or anything else outside the basic curriculum. If you want to go the whole hog there are also a couple that charge in the region of £20-25000 pa. I have no intention of supplyinhg a list. You can get on teh web and check them out if youy are that interested. It's all perfectly clear and upfront on their websites. This is not an issue soley about teh Labour party. The Tories haven't exactly covered themselves in glory. Just holding out a cartrot so that a handful of people capable of making heroic efforts can squeeze their kids through private education is only a solution for those people. There is a deeply rooted problem in Britain that requires a solution that recognises the needs of the whole nation - not just a lucky few.

andrewD fees of £90000 a year. List of schools charging £90,000 pa please. Googling will find that the avg cost of schooling a kid privately as opposed to the public sector is a mere matter of another £wk per annum. Given the importance of education, would it not have been better that Labour spent the billions it pissed away on this, that and the other, on really improving state education. However, as we all know, dogma is more important than the well-being of the country's kids. Vile.

"West is best" is an absurd assumption anyway. It is an inverted conclusion based on a thoroughly incomplete analysis of the development of knowledge. Indeed it presumes that knowledge is a static lump, ring fenced by an inflexible culture when it is nothing of the sort. Our forebears used Roman numerals, a western invention and got along swimmingly for two thousand years or so. But the idea of zero emmantated from India and algebra from the Arabs. Did they say "west is best", we will keep our numerals thank you very much? Of course not, their value was recognised and new knowledge adopted. That is how it works and I learnt that at school.

FRANK S - you are absolutely right. The powers that be are ensuring that the mass of kids get a very poor education compared to those who are able to send their childen to fee-paying (I hate the word "public" in this context - as it imnplies that members of the public are only those who can afford fees of £90000 a year)schools. This is quite deliberate and is simply to ensure that the same ruling class and a handful of aspirants who manage to meet the fees, monopolise the best opportunities for their children. Unfortunately its also a collosally short-sighted approach. As the world economy becomes ever more complex, Britain can only compete by having a highly skilled, highly educated workforce. But such an innovation would require major changes to the social system. This the current ruling class will not allow. Much better to allow major industries to be relocated offshore, provide poor education options for the majority and a Rolls Royce service for those that can pay and leave millions on the dole rather than in productive work. Then sniff at them as uncultured oafs and benefit scroungers. Never mind that Britain will decline voluntarily to the staus of a third-world state; never mind that freeborn Britons will be left living as uneducated peasants. The lucky few in London and the south east will have a high standard of living and access to a global economy. So that's alright then.

It is impossible to even begin to understand the crisis in Western education altogether without taking into account the over-whelming influence of TV on the minds and bodies of children. TV is easily the most powerful formative influence. A good place to begin to understand the situation would be the book This Little Kiddy Went To Market by Sharon Beder. Plus Evolution's End by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

I'm not sure Miss Birbalsingh understands language teaching (or even this general debate) as much as she would have us believe. The skills she talks about are one part of a broad spectrum of skills that children are taught in schools - she's trying to suggest that all we do is focus on a few techniques and methods. The reason that private school children do better is down to a number of social and financial reasons; a return to a knowledge-based curriculum would widen the gap as well as making state-educated children less equipped for the job market. It's laughable what she says about privately-educated students travelling the world (my students would love to travel the world but guess what - They can't afford a £400 weekend in Barcelona or Paris) To give a simple example - i can teach my students the words agua & fiesta in Spanish (knowledge) but then what happens when they have a new word made up of the two: 'aguafiestas'?. I could tell them that it means a 'party-pooper' (someone who throws water on the party); but what happens when they come across another word like this? They need the skill of parsing texts for themselves (learning independently/learning how to learn) Knowledge is only useful when you know what to do with it. I wonder what her explanation of this is...http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/23/state-school-pupils-better-university

Of course context matters and skills cannot be learnt in isolation. Those who solve the o-level question above are likely to do so through the use of a number of higher order problem solving skills, rather than knowledge of the answer. Wouldn't Hard Times be a better Dickens novel than Great Expectations for the new curriculum?

It's probably intended to keep the lower orders in their place - something reinforced by the secondary intake policy based on catchment area.

It seems to me that one of the roles of public education is to pass on a common body of knowledge, a common framework of reference, so that everyone at least recognises the names of great authors, significant historical events, scientific achievements, great composers etc. This common framework is one of the elements contributing to a cohesive society. It appears to have been removed. Divide and impera? On another note, a very smart person once told me that at his school a whole year of History was taken up by learning about "Mary Celeste." Yes, "Mary Celeste" - as the means of learning to recognise primary and secondary evidence. He was unable to tell me when the Industrial Revolution happened. Sad. As to those who rabidly oppose Katharine's stance, why do they think it is better that children know less?