Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Schools can’t make society fairer on their own
Is anyone is seriously surprised at the findings of the latest report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. The conclusion of ‘How fair is Britain’? Our nation has glaring inequalities between men and women, rich and poor, and different ethnic groups. No wonder all our young political leaders are in a fight to the […]
Private school bursaries are not a public benefit
So private schools are planning to lure state-educated pupils into their sixth forms with the promise of partial bursaries to study certain subjects. Ever since the 2006 Charities Act, the private sector has been under pressure to prove it provides ‘public benefit’ and this must be the latest wheeze. The 2006 Act led to the […]
Fairer admissions for poor children? Let’s start by ending selection
So Michael Gove wants the admissions system to benefit poor children. Excellent. But rather than given a few schools the option of prioritising children on free school meals, he should start by ending academic selection, and all the other covert methods many schools use to hand pick the affluent children most likely to succeed. And […]
Free schools – who really gets to choose?
Link to original article in Guardian Education I am not in the habit of reading the Spectator, but a few weeks ago someone alerted me to its front page story ‘The new school bullies’. I got an honourable mention for supporting legal challenges to academies. The gist of the piece was that similar ‘guerrilla’ tactics […]
Why did the rush for academy and free school status fizzle out?
Almost the first thing the Coalition government announced after the May election was the urgent need for legislation to enable the mass creation of academies and so-called ‘free schools’. The rationale for the urgency being that there were several thousand local authority-maintained schools desperate to break away and hundreds of groups who wanted to establish […]
Labour leadership candidates need to make a break from the past
Link to original Comment is free article It was gratifying to read about Cllr Elaine Costigan, the Tory councillor who defected to Labour over her party’s education policies and the shoddy way in which her own government withdrew funding for new school buildings. Maybe she could encourage a bit more frankness among her new colleagues. […]
Guess what? The state sector is closing the gap.
You may not have realised it from the media coverage but this year’s exam results showed the state sector gaining on private schools at both GCSE and A level. In comprehensives the proportion of GCSE grades being an A or A* rose by 0.9 % and those achieving C or better rose by2.2%. In private […]
Watch out for private school spin and dodgy statistics
The private school spin machine is cranking itself up, in readiness for its usual post GCSE and A level orgy of self congratulation. Consider the story on the front page of this week’s Observer, which claimed that privately educated pupils were expected to get’ three times as many of the new A* grades at A […]
Should the Premier League run schools?
Immediate reaction to this story, that the Premier League wants to sponsor free schools? This used to be called the silly season when I was a daily newspaper reporter. Parliament has risen, everyone is on holiday, the free schools policy is looking a bit shaky with only 62 applicants, the government wants a gimmick to […]
Questions for the New Schools Network
Just discovered this organisation –The Other TaxPayers Alliance – interested in ‘fair’ rather than ‘low’ taxes. One of its current projects is to discover how the New schools Network, a registered charity, was given £500,000 by Michael Gove to deliver the government’s flagship policy of helping parents start their own ‘free’ schools. There are several […]
