Education

Good grief, are students nowadays really like this?

On Saturday I stood at Warwick University\’s union bar. I had been speaking at a rather excellent student conference and the organisers had invited me to join the students for the evening. Large numbers of the 400 students present were standing without anything to drink, unable to afford the highly-taxed lagers that were on sale. As a result, students stood in straight lines listening quietly to the live band. No one was smoking, which of course would have been illegal.

Point one:

We will never go back to selection

Point two (the next part of the same sentence):

but you could have a situation where 11-year-olds with a particular talent in a certain subject or the potential to go to a certain university are encouraged at an early age.

Leading to:

Potential Oxbridge students should be identified at 11 and given special mentoring throughout their school years to help them compete for a place, the Government\’s access tsar has proposed.

So when is selection not selection?

Much burbling about "fairness", "equity":

In a key test case, Brighton will become the first city in England this year to employ the system as a tie-breaker at all of its over-subscribed secondaries. It is believed other areas may be encouraged to follow suit in an attempt to bring greater transparency to the admissions system.

The new admissions code bans schools from interviewing children and parents, or asking for extra information designed to weed out pupils from poorer homes who may be more difficult to teach.

Jim Knight, the schools minister, warned it was "unacceptable that children may be missing out on school places" 12 months after the new rules were imposed.

And elsewhere:

Failure to teach children the three Rs at a young age is damaging the British economy, according to a report published by Cambridge University today.

Productivity lags as much as 25 per cent behind economic competitors such as Germany, France and the United States because workers lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills, it is claimed.

Those productivity numbers I\’m sure are wrong but leave that aside.

I can\’t help thinking that if less effort was expended on the "fairness" side of things rather more might be on the "teaching" side. It isn\’t the most difficult thing in the world, to teach the basics of readin\’, \’ritin\’ and \’rithmetic, given that the ankle biters are there for five years on a compulsory basis.

A report from the education front lines:

The report, Able Pupils Who Lose Momentum, found shortcomings in the 37 primaries across England visited by Government advisers.

One of the key problems uncovered by researchers was the failure to put children into ability sets or groups. Even when children were put in classes with children of similar abilities, clever children were still grouped with other "lower ability" pupils when carrying out work.

"Children often worked exclusively in mixed-ability groups and rarely worked with children who were making similar rates of progress," the report said.

Still insistent that children are a tabula rasa, that there are no innate differences in ability. Can we please, sometime soon, get back to the idea that all children should indeed be taught to the limits of their ability, but that ability varies?

Most amusing. Three points:

One of the most welcome parts of Balls\’s children\’s plan is the renewed commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020. If that happens, and it will take some investment, then many ogres of childhood may melt away.

Could we please get this straight? This wll not be investment. It will be current spending. We\’re not going to be able to spend billions up to 2020 and then stop, considering the problem solved. We\’re going to have to go on spending those billions forever, until the end of time. For each new generation of children will require exactly the same corrective taxation and benefits handouts to alter the market incomes outcome to the desired one.

Health, fitness and weight are all class issues. Obesity and heart disease are plagues of the poor. It is no accident that far more children are overweight in the UK, with its sclerotic social mobility, than in the fairer Nordic societies.

OK, we\’re on the page where the education system does or does not lead to social mobility. So can we please actually have a look at what those fairer Nordic societies actually do in their education systems please? Sweden has a pure voucher system for education financing. Finland has a modification of vouchers (and, to what will most assuredly be a fit of the fainting vapours from educationalists, divides children at 15 into academic and vocational streams, at different schools: this is Grammars and Sec Mods, just at a later age). Denmark has a private school system both larger than the UK\’s and also funded considerably by the State:

The private independent schools (frie grundskoler) play an important role in Danish education. There are around 430 private schools situated all over the country, and approx. 11% of a cohort go to private schools for primary and lower secondary education.

…

Primary and lower secondary education is free of charge at municipal public schools. The private schools charge a fee, and the average for non-boarding schools is DKK 13,000 per year. Both the government and the municipality contribute considerably to the cost of operating the recognised private schools. 

Primary and lower secondary education is governed at municipal level, and it is the obligation of the municipality to ensure that all children receive education. 

Both private schools and continuation schools receive a substantial state subsidy.

Oh, and note that it is organised locally, not nationally. So if we\’re going to try and change the UK education system to get to that fairer outcome, can we please start adopting some of the policies which lead to that fairer outcome? Like, umm, vouchers, subsidy of private schools, sorting the academic from the vocational? Or is real world evidence not acceptable these days?

Critics say it\’s not in the gift or remit of the state to confer happiness. Why not? When it has proved so adept at making children unhappy – by piling on too many jail sentences, Asbos, exams, dead-end schools and unreal expectations – it also bears a duty to be an agent of a better life.

Err, if the State is making people uinhappy then surely we don\’t want it to potter off and try and make them happy in other ways: what we\’d actually like it to do is stop making people unhappy, isn\’t it?

So we had the Sutton Trust report.

Parental background continues to exert a very significant influence on the academic
progress of children:
o Those from the poorest fifth of households but in the brightest group at age three
drop from the 88th percentile on cognitive tests at age three to the 65th percentile
at age five. Those from the richest households who are least able at age three
move up from the 15th percentile to the 45th percentile by age five.
o If this trend were to continue, the children from affluent backgrounds who are
doing poorly at age three would be likely to overtake the poorer but initially bright
children in test scores by age seven.
o Inequalities in degree acquisition meanwhile persist across different income
groups. While 44 per cent of young people from the richest 20 per cent of
households acquired a degree in 2002, only 10 per cent from the poorest 20 per
cent of households did so.

But we\’ve also got this:

The problem with this famous Eyferth study, which formed the backbone of Flynn\’s Race, IQ, and Jensen, is that it was a study of children. So? After Flynn wrote this book, behavioral geneticists gradually made the amazing discovery that the heritability of IQ (and many other traits) sharply rises as children grow up, while family effects on IQ fade out.

Now I have no idea whether that last is in fact true, but if it is it provides us with a way of interpreting the Sutton Trust\’s results. A way that will be most un politically correct. Children of the poor do badly in the educational system because they are dim. That dimness being a genetic problem, one which becomes apparent as they age.

It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the Trust\’s thrust. It isn\’t that a bad environment hampers the children of the poor, it\’s that we only find out about their dimness as they grow older.

No, I don\’t think I like that conclusion either but what if it is actually true?

What if, say, the educational mobility of the 50s through 70s was a one off event? That there were those with the brains but not the opportunity to rise, that once the opportunity arose they did in fact rise but that there\’s no more such to come?

All depends rather on the heritability of IQ I guess and that\’s something that creates a firestorm whenever it\’s mentioned.

As I say, I\’m not sure I like that conclusion but I\’m absolutely certain that it will enrage all of the right people.

Yes, I know the arguments about indoctrination on the taxpayers\’ shilling but:

The academic superiority of faith schools was underlined today as they dominated top positions in new league tables for 11-year-olds.

Two thirds of the 250 primaries in England achieving "perfect" test results were Church of England, Roman Catholic or Jewish schools.

Despite making up just a third of schools nationally, faith schools increased their hold on the top places from 44 per cent two years ago to 66 per cent in 2007. Last night, they hailed the results as a testament to good teaching and discipline.

Is it possible that at least some of the hatred from people like Polly T is that they actually do teach pupils better ? Thus showing up the rest of the comprehensive system?

Something of an indicment of the current way of doing things, don\’t you think?

Sex education lessons are so poor that most teenagers have no idea about sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, according to new research published today.

I understand about the problems with teaching 20% of them to read: it\’s not, after all, a natural activity. \’Ritin\’ is also a bit odd.

But you\’ve got to have a really bad education system if you can\’t teach teenagers to fuck properly.

A quarter of graduates do not have full-time jobs more than three years after getting their degrees, according to government figures.

The Higher Education Statistics Agency, which examined the career progression of 24,000 people, also found that 20 per cent of those who were employed were not working in graduate occupations.

So too many are getting a degree then.

It\’s time to end faith and grammar schools that damage children\’s chances and limit most parents\’ choices.

It is absolutely the time to remove the limits on most parent\’s choices. Of course, we shouldn\’t do that by the method you advocate, which is that pupils are assigned to a school, rather, we should work the other way around. We should maximise parents\’ choices by slapping a voucher on the back of every kid and letting parents choose as they wish.

As they do in Sweden.

Yes, I understand Labour\’s (perhaps "the left\’s" is better) hatred of private schools, I can even get my head around the dislike of Grammars (a single competetive exam at 11 years old might not be the very best way of predicting future academic success, for example) but this is astonishing:

However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted that grammar schools left poor children behind. "The Government has never been in favour of academic selection and never will be," said a spokesman.

That\’s vastly stronger and as such near insane. Not even selection within schools? A math prodigy is to be taught the same syllabus as someone who will never be more than marginally numerate? If we are to have no academic selection at all then I guess that means the end of special needs education, doesn\’t it? The end of schools specialising in the arts? Stage schools and the like?

Am I reading too much into that one phrase or are they really that barkingly egalitarian?

Something that slightly puzzles me here:

Labour is set to reignite the political row over selective education by making it easier for disaffected parents to force the closure of their local grammar schools.

Jim Knight, the schools minister, has instructed officials to look at how to simplify the balloting process by which schools can be forced to drop selection under a 1998 law.

Why is there no mention of being able to have a ballot to enforce selection? Is it simply because the article doesn\’t mention it? Or is it not actually possible to ask for such a ballot. And if the latter, why not?

So surprising, eh?

Sending children home from school to allow teachers to train is a waste of time, a leading academic says.

Pupils in England lose about a week of schooling every year as staff take "inset" days to brush up on the latest teaching techniques and Government reforms.

But research claims there is "depressingly little evidence" that it has any effect on teaching standards.

So teaching teachers the latest trendy educational nonsense doesn\’t improve teaching. Fancy that!

That is, I believe, what we were promised a decade ago, isn\’t it? So the first lines of two stories in The Telegraph today:

Private schools could lose their multi-million pound tax-breaks unless they help state-educated pupils get into universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, it was disclosed yesterday.

…

The number of failing schools has soared by almost a fifth this year, new figures showed yesterday.

None of those failing schools, as far as I can see, are in the private sector.

So, is it joined up thinking to remove subsidy friom what works and to spend more on what does not?

All are, as David Friedman finds out, living the Lake Woebegon Way.