Education, Education, meh.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s get one thing clear: I am not that bright.  I read voraciously and have a good memory for factual snippets that interest me.  I like to think I can construct clear and occasionally concise sentences.  Everything else is largely bravado coupled with being able to recycle parts of the Guardian I’ve read recently.

The school I went to between the ages of eleven and sixteen, I utterly loathed.  It was a school on an upward trajectory, one which had come through difficult times it probably now refuses to admit ever happened and was determined to make the most out of its burgeoning reputation.  Consequently it was, I think with hindsight, great at supporting the high flyers it wanted and at tackling the disruptive kids who threatened to derail everything, but less good at dealing disinterested middle ranks like myself.

And a lack of interest was the real killer.  Science, maths, woodwork, geography all failed to fire my imagination.  Languages I was – and still am – too bad at to take seriously.  Art I liked but was, again, somewhat crap and so lacked proper engagement.  I couldn’t see the point of IT lessons, after all: what would I ever need a computer for?  In fact, the only subjects which really fired me up were drama, history and English.  Like any of this is a surprise, right?

I went on to achieve middling GCSE results.  After the shock of an appalling performance at the mock exam stage, I was sufficiently spooked to get my act together and limp over the line with grades which are by no means bad but hardly spectacular.  I went on to A Levels and a degree, both of which I performed to a much higher standard, not least because I wasn’t bogged down by stuff which bored me. 

Yeah, yeah: me and every other teenager in the country.

My point is this:  I got away with being disenfranchised with my own education for first twelve years of it due to the system and generation I was lucky enough to be in.  I got away with not bothering to do any homework largely because my teachers didn’t seem to care, but nor did they look to find ways to interest me.  I got away with all the mistakes you should be allowed to make at a young age, realised by myself the importance of being able to read, write and formulate arguments and, for me, that’s worked out perfectly fine.  Had I been born a generation earlier, before comprehensive education, I would almost certainly have failed my eleven-plus exams and found myself in a secondary modern school, rather than a grammar school, from which it was notoriously difficult to advance to the next stages of education once you’d woken up to the fact that life was more comics, camping and coca-cola.

Grammar schools, so beloved by many parents, are a divisive tool of an unfair system which, by design or not, embed social inequality.  They expect children to be plugged into a life plan and the importance of their actions at an age when they are unlikely to have thought of schooling as anything other than an inconvenient block between playtimes and half-term holidays.  So it is no surprise to know that Michael Gove is a distinct fan of them.

Gove may have been sidelined in an attempt to make the Conservatives more electable but his dogmatic, ill-judged policies are festering through the department he was jettisoned from and the education system as a whole.

I’ve never been a fan of Gove, ever since his leaky smugness oozed over the TV in 2010, but his single minded lurch towards the eighteenth century seems baffling.  He’s championed moves towards nationalist biased programmes in history and English, backwards approaches to science and maths, the promotion of something as poorly defined as British values and a shift away from external quality assessments, leaving schools to be as high or low performing as they can be bothered to be.  Gove may be gone, but this sort of crap is still there.

The system has become incompressible (although in fairness, it is not all the Tories’ fault).  State schools, free schools, faith schools, academies, public-private partnerships.  All this is supposed to generate choice for the “consumer”, as though your child’s education was like buying a washing machine.  Instead, it just creates confusion and inequality.  Muddled half myths like the maybe introduction of radical Islam teachings in some Birmingham schools – which caused one American idiot to mindlessly proclaim that Birmingham was a no-go city for non-Muslims, the muppet – or statistical fact, like the underperforming of many of the free schools which were supposed to be saviours of some area’s education opportunities. 

In fact, it seems that the whole Free Schools’ idea only had the purpose of giving Toby Young more unwarranted airtime.

Who has got the time to wade through all of this mis-information?  Who would be confident they were sending their child to the right school for them?  All choice breeds, in these circumstances, is indecision.  Choosing a school is more monumental than choosing cheese.

In the BBC drama series, Cambridge Spies, about the group of students who went on to fill major roles in the secret service while still being double agents for the Soviet Union, the Kim Philby and Antony Blunt characters are sitting in the sunshine by the Ely, the tranquilly gorgeous college buildings behind them.

“Do you really want to tear all this down?” asks Philby, still unsure of his motivation.

“Tear it down?” replies Blunt.  “No, I want this for everyone.”

And that’s the point: education is one the key corners of society which should be free and of an equally high quality for everyone.  Every single pupil should get a fair start.

Meanwhile, the private schooling system sits happily on the stockpile of cash its mysterious charity status allows it acuminate tax free knowing that its alumni will ascend to the top and continue to look after its interests.

The restructuring of how money flows down to education means that the free schools and other currently in vogue initiatives hoover up the cash, while institutions like sixth form colleges suffer enormous funding deficits.  I fully believe that the transitional nature of sixth form colleges, a place which treats you like an adult, a university without having to leave home, was enormously important in me connecting with the point of learning.  I was there because I wanted to be; I came and went as I wanted; no-one told me what I had to do.  But what I wanted to do, at last, was learn.  Taking A-levels as just another two years at school feels massively introverted and largely pointless.  You might as well skip straight ahead to university.

Aside, from you know, the massive fees. 

I’ve already touched on the economic foolishness of saddlingthe young with debt, but there is also the affect it has on the learning experience.  I am old enough to have gone to university before any fees were introduced, the last academic year to do so, but it allowed a freedom to go and study for the sake of studying.  A degree in history which focuses on inheritance law in Plantagenet Europe and the reliability of the sixth century Merovingian scholar Gregory of Tours has been of absolutely zero practical application in the years since I graduated and yet I hold onto the knowledge gained dearly and the skills developed rifle through everything I do.

Student opposition to the government’s policies was, initially, reassuring.  There were flashes in 2010 – when London undergraduates stormed Milbank House and attacked Prince Charles’ car – which hinted at a generation of rebellious ideology finally returning.  People were prepared to stand up for what wasn’t fair.  But rather than be entrenched in protest, when the instant gratification the twenty-first century expects didn’t materialise, interest faded.  Flashes have continued around the country, but those have been more discrete, more subdued.  The desire for change seems half-hearted. 

Case in point.  I work close to University buildings in central London.  Over the past few years there have been protests against the University by students, largely focussed on the management of the union rather than any larger, nobler, political issue, but still protest is protest.  On one such occasion, I left the office and found myself amongst a small sway of rowdy students.  Unusually I was on foot and in a suit and yet I passed through the swathe with no confrontation.  The crowd dissipated the closer I got to the road, but some hesitant hangers on lingered.

‘Hey!’  A voice shouted.  I looked up at a young, tousled haired, skinny man in a light grey cardigan.  ‘Yeah you.’  He said.  ‘Four eyes!’

For various reasons, I’d had a really shit day.  I looked at him, but maybe my gaze asked:  ‘What’re you?  Fucking six years old?  You moron, come here and say something meaningful.’

‘Er...’ he said out loud, before scuttling away and jumping into a parked, bright yellow, bran new Mini-Cooper.

UKIP has ideas on education, as well as immigration.  I know, I was surprised too.  Apparently they’re trying to style themselves as an actual political party.  The plan is to offer free place at universities provided, obviously, you are a British passport holder and provided, less obviously, that you do a degree in science, maths or engineering. 

My initial thoughts were of ridiculousness, but the more I’ve read, the more it, worryingly, seems in trend with the current government.  There’s a full on assault taking place on the humanities, languages and social sciences.  Universities are being pushed, through lack of public sector funding, to become more business focussed.  To not be centres of learning, but to be engines of profit, and that means an enhanced focus on maths, science, technology and engineering.  Learning for the sake of learning, knowledge and understanding which encompass the full range of the human psyche are being edged aside.   Nicky Morgan, Gove’s successor at the department for education, effectively called a degree in humanities worthless.

In 1923, just 209 days after winning a significant majority, the Conservative Prime Minister, Andrew Bonar Law, died.  His heir, Stanley Baldwin, introduced a series of protectionist economic policies, directly contrary to the promises of the 1922 campaign.  Baldwin is one of our most under-rated politicians.  Prime Minister three times, he straddled the national stage for the best part of twenty years in times of extreme national instability – the great depression, the great abdication – and yet was so anonymous he is said to have been travelling on a train, while in service as PM, when one of his fellow passengers turned to him and asked: ‘So, what do you do?’

Anonymous, under-rated and Conservative maybe, but Baldwin was also a man of principle.  Recognising he was introducing policies no-one had voted for, he voluntarily went to the polls. 

And lost.

While he retained the largest share of the vote, and the largest number of seats he did not have sufficient to operate as a majority government.  Labour and the Liberals combined had gained seats and outstripped the sitting government.  It was on Baldwin’s recommendation that George V summoned James Ramsey MacDonald to the Buckingham Palace and asked him to form the first, minority, Labour government.

Politics at least appeared more civilised in those days; I’m sure that behind closed doors things were just as spiteful and barbarous, but there was at least a sheen of decorum that seems lacking in 2015.  The election campaign proper kicked off this week with Cameron developing a nervous tick that required him to say “Ed Milliband” and something unfounded, usually around tax, in every other sentence, ending any hope that the Conservatives will make this election about anything other than personalities.  

Labour launched their campaign in a more buyout mood atop the Orbit Tower in the Olympic Park; that’s probably supposed to be as symbolic as the 2010 Conservative launch outside the ruins of Battersea Power Station, I just can’t quite understand the metaphor.  The Party though was filled with bravado, Milliband having won the recent TV not a debate debate, whereby both Cameron and Milliband were interview by Jeremy Paxman in sequence, but were never in the same room as each other.  Maybe Milliband didn’t quite win, but maybe he did better than expected which is the same as a win.  Maybe Cameron won.  It depends which paper you read.  I’d forgotten how mildly tedious the twenty-four hour news cycle debrief makes everything.

Nick Clegg, meanwhile, managed to get a selfie with some bloke from The Only Way Is Essex.  Said bloke though that Clegg was called Nick Leg and that he was the leader of the Liberal Demo-cats.  Nobody is that stupid, surely.  Or anyone genuinely that stupid has no idea what country they live in let alone who the Deputy Prime Minister is.  So Nick Clegg has managed to get a selfie with someone who makes pretending to be stupid a living for as yet unclear satirical (or maybe just mindless entertainment) purposes, as though he was surprised five years had actually passed. 

Ramsey MacDonald, back in 1923, didn’t waste time.  He may have only managed to hold a government together for eleven months, but in that time most of the policies and reforms he managed to implement were around education.  They introduced a new secondary school system for all children from 11 to 14, converting the poor law schools into state funded institutions.  Funding for education across a range of initiatives drastically increased with the aim of ensuring that education, good education, was not just within the gift of the wealth but available for all.  Ahead of all the other reforms Labour planned on, educating the young was top of the list. 

Five years ago, my then new girlfriend and I were on our sixth date.  We were starting to relax into being a couple.  We’d seen each other the previous weekend and had plans to meet on the following Saturday, but had at the last minute slipped an additional mid-week meeting in.  A spurious excuse of wanting to see a now forgotten exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall was thrown out, after which we went for a drink on the Thames and then for dinner a Tapas place in the back streets of Waterloo where I’d once had a bordering on violent disagreement with the owner over the bill. 

It was a warm night and we sat in the courtyard.  Already dark, the air was lit by scattered candles and the streetlight glow sneaking over the wall and under the shadowing railway arches.  It was so warm that it felt as though the very air gave off light. 

Political discourse had already begun to fill our conversations.  It’s one of those things you’re definitely not supposed to do when you first meet people, but if you can get away with it then it will set you for life.  I was on some tirade about the Eton dominance of the cabinet the fundamental wrongness that private education creates.

‘I went to private school,’ she said, cutting me off before I really got going.  ‘Secondary only, mind.’

‘Ah,’ I replied and went silent, the zeal somewhat taken out of my sail.  I felt like I’d said too much, a common mistake, but what frustrates me is inequality.  While a lack of funding for buildings and facilities mean that many school infrastructures are falling apart – and no, Mr Gove, personally issued copies of the King James Bible do not help - private institutions are continuing to receive and pass on disproportional legs up.  Okay, so there’s always going to be people willing to pay for systems which are better (or perceived as better) than the state funded alternative and I should probably just accept that as part of life.   But maybe rather than shrugging and resignedly admitting that the private schools are offering something better we should look at what needs to be done to redress the balance.  If all schools were to have the same teacher/student ratio as Marlborough does, then the number of teachers needed would be triple.  If every school were to have the same facilities as Marlborough then 33 million acres would need to be developed, roughly half the English countryside (stats courtesy of Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s Cameron’s Coup).

That’s not feasible.  Fair enough.  What’s the alternative?  To concentrate on where the problems lie?  To improve that we’ve already got until it is a level playing field?  Free Schools, driven by ambitious middle class parents (and hostile, smug journalists), are not the answer.  Only 19% of free schools places offered were in areas where there was an identified educational place shortage.  The other 81% just means more choice, diluting the existing system.  I know people only want what’s best for their children, I understand that: all I want is the best for everyone.