In Britain, 47% of households with a cat have at least one person educated to degree level, compared to 38% of homes with dogs.
The Veterinary Record, February 2010
Half of Turkey’s 400 or so murders a year are “honour killings.”
Guardian, 4th February 2010
The 2010 Super Bowl had an average of 106.5m viewers—beating the US record for a television audience previously set by the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983.
New York Times, 8th February 2010
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Ed Balls, open the City Academy, Hackney
Twenty-five teenagers are silently studying in a bright classroom. The headmaster enters and they rise to their feet, immaculate in their grey uniforms. “Good afternoon, sir,” they chorus.
It’s a scene out of a Ladybird book, but this is Mossbourne Academy, a secondary school in a part of Hackney, east London, dubbed “murder mile” for its gang killings. Mossbourne was one of the first “academies”—the new type of school aimed at the educational underclass.
The school Mossbourne replaced, Hackney Downs School, had educated Harold Pinter and Michael Caine in its grammar-school heyday. But by the mid-1990s, it was so bad that the tabloids called it “the worst comprehensive in England.” It was closed down in 1995. Nine years later, Mossbourne rose from its ashes with new Mondrian-style buildings by the Richard Rogers Partnership, a knighted “superhead” in the form of Michael Wilshaw, and a £2m subsidy provided by Clive Bourne, a local boy who made his fortune in freight shipping. Last summer, Mossbourne’s first intake of students took their GCSEs and it made the headlines again—this time for delivering some of the best state school results in the country.
How was this achieved? Like all academies, Mossbourne is a non-selective, all-ability secondary school. But academies take a radical approach to school administration. Their defining characteristic is their freedom from local authority control—instead, they are managed by a sponsor, who appoints a board of governors. The governors choose the head and take responsibility for administration. Academies receive funding directly from central government, are given new buildings, and are encouraged to innovate in teaching, pay and the curriculum.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The familiar sounds of an early English summer are with us once again. Millions of children sit down to Sats, GCSEs, AS-levels, A-levels and a host of lesser exams, and the argument over educational standards starts. Depending on whom you listen to, we should either be letting up on over-examined pupils by abolishing Sats, and even GCSEs, or else making exams far more rigorous.
The chorus will reach a crescendo when GCSE and A-level results are published in August. If pass rates rise again, commentators will say that standards are falling because exams are getting easier. If pass rates drop, they will say that standards are falling because children are getting lower marks. Parents like myself try to ignore this and base our judgements on what our children are learning. But it’s not easy given how much education has changed since we were at school.
When I assembled a group of teachers aged over 35 at my local comprehensive school (which, despite being in the home counties, deals with children from very difficult as well as privileged backgrounds), I was struck by their honesty about what has been gained and lost since they were at school.
They started by justifying how they do things now—but with enthusiasm rather than defensiveness. “The education experience has become more exciting because learning has become more active.” Students, I was told, are encouraged to find things out for themselves, which allows them to understand things in more complex ways than if they are spoon-fed.
These teachers did not accept that students should have to learn vast quantities of factual information, as opposed to learning where to look for it. I pressed them on the risk of ignorance: “How can you understand history without some basic knowledge about what happened when?” I was relieved when a history teacher conceded that core knowledge has sometimes been neglected in the past, and assured me: “We have come back to a respect for facts.” But she wanted her students as far as possible to discover information for themselves. At present they are looking at evidence to decide the strengths and weaknesses of King John. I hope that along the way they learn that he signed Magna Carta and lost most of England’s possessions in France. I suspect that good teachers ensure this happens, but with others it can be hit and miss.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Politicians like talking about parent power. Tony Blair promoted his 2006 Education Act with boasts of a new era of parental choice. Today, David Cameron is in on the act—promising a Tory parental revolution, and a new “great Education Act” in his first 100 days.
For Emma Jones, though, such high rhetoric has a rather empty sound. About five years ago she began to worry about where her son and daughter would go to secondary school. A theatre director by profession, she and her young family lived in a small enclave of London’s borough of Camden, just south of the busy Euston Road. Although both children went to one of the five local primary schools, she knew there was no acceptable local secondary. The nearest were academically weak, to find an alternative would mean travelling many miles across the city.
This is a selection of responses to the March cover story by James Crabtree and Frank Field. To read the article in full click here.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
A misconceived scheme
13th March 2009
Citizenship First: The Case for compulsory civic service
Service as a rite of passage
9th March 2009
There are three recurring discussions I have with taxi drivers as I travel around the country- the weather (usually grey), where I’m from (Wakefield) and the state of the youth of today (the top two solutions proposed by most drivers being national service or bringing back the birch!)
It was during such a journey that I considered the need for a third response to the ‘youth of today’; what is it that makes a young person a citizen and how can this be made real for them? I asked myself do we need a modern day rite of passage; acknowledging the journey from youth to adulthood in some way that gives the individual that sense of transition and arrival in a new emotional place in the world? The keys to the pub as it were.
It was in this vein that myself and Dr Howard Williamson, Professor of European Youth Policy at the University of Glamorgan, had one of our many conversations about the real need for a youth transition initiative. Howard had written a paper in 1997 and together we refreshed it in 2002 on the basis of our debate. As pointed out in the paper, this debate is not new. In the 1980’s as youth unemployment became a critical social issue, there were calls from a variety of sources for such a programme. The debate then between a choice-based approach or a compulsory one. My view is that there is very much a case for a universal youth transition programme in this country. A compulsory programme that’s fun, engaging and developmental, designed with and by young people. Compulsory for the same reason that school is: we need to ensure every child benefits not just those that have the support to make the right choice. I could go on, but I’ve reached my word limit and it’s time to get out of the cab!
Lord Victor Adebowale MA, CBE ?
Finding a silver bullet
The world of education has been divided into two camps for at least a century. In one camp there are the optimists who look at young people and see millions of potential composers, surgeons, or business leaders whose talent is waiting to be unlocked. In the other camp there are the pessimists who look at the same young people and see a largely dull mass among whom only a small minority will ever have the talent to excel. For the first group the big problem is low aspirations; for the second, it’s that, if anything, young people’s aspirations are too high.
Over the last 50 years the optimists have won most of the big battles. Their argument that widening educational opportunity wasn’t just a moral imperative but also good for economic efficiency and social mobility, prevailed over the pessimists’ view that widening access to education would merely dumb down the system. So school leaving ages have crept up, and will rise to 18 in Britain by the middle of the next decade. The proportion going to university has also jumped, from barely 3 per cent to over 40 per cent in Britain and much more in some countries (over 70 per cent in South Korea). Education has become one of the few things that politicians believe everyone needs more of.
American political scientist Charles Murray, however, in his new book Real Education (Crown Forum) sees an attachment to “education, education, education” as little more than a romantic fantasy. His latest jeremiad sets out a modern version of the pessimists’ case in typically provocative style.
Boarding school starts at six
If there is one problem with my family’s idyllic life on this picturesque Chinese mountain, it is a typical one for parents: finding a good school for the children.
After much agonising we chose the Moganshan Foreign Language School, in our nearest town, Wukang, 40 minutes’ drive away. Its abbreviated Chinese name translates as “Mofor.” Isabel, our eldest at six, is now in her second month there. In her first week I discovered that the “foreign language” moniker is a gimmick to attract upwardly mobile townsfolk. None of the teachers seems capable of conversing in any foreign language.
Teach First—the scheme that recruits graduates from elite universities to teach in inner-city schools for two years—is turning into one of the most successful social movements in the country and helping to reinvent the idea of post-university public service. In July it was announced that the scheme will grow over the next five years to 850 graduates per year, up from the current figure of 380.
Teach First recruits top graduates, mainly from Oxbridge and the other “Russell group” universities, and trains them intensively in the summer after graduation. The students-turned-teachers are then placed in mutually supportive groups of up to seven (almost never singly) in lower-attaining secondary schools in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and other conurbations.
Teach First was launched five years ago based on the Teach for America scheme in the US. This year’s 380 students were recruited after a tough selection process from nearly 2,000 applicants, all projected to get first-class degrees or 2:1s from top universities. An extraordinary 5 per cent of the entire graduating cohort at Oxford applied this year, attracted by the two-year challenge, the social mission and the CV boost offered by the training and classroom experience at the sharp end.
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