Leo Hornak
Britain's primary schools are short of more than 2,000 places
This is the season of anxiety for many parents of young children. Although we are only a few months away from the start of the next school year, the scramble for primary school places is still gathering pace, particularly in inner city areas. According to a recent report, London urgently needs 2,250 extra primary school places, projected to rise to 5,000 next year, and over 18,000 by 2014.
If ever there was a time for a radical solution to this bottleneck, surely it is now.
As James Crabtree and Katherine Quarmby argued in the April issue of Prospect, one answer is to empower the parents themselves, and allow them to open schools of their own within the state system. The precedents in the US home schooling movement, and even in parts of Britain itself, are encouraging.
Is parent power the solution to the national shortage of school places? Or can the system somehow be made to fix itself? Let us know your thoughts below.
Brian Semple
Is he getting dumber?
It’s that time of year again that school children dread: exam time. In the next few weeks, millions of pupils will be sitting down to Sats, GCSEs, AS-levels and A-levels. And when results are announced in August, we can expect the usual debate about whether education standards are falling, and whether exams are being dumbed down to hit achievement targets. But, says Donald Hirsch in this month’s cover feature, we should instead be asking if we are making reasonable and appropriate demands of our children. Indeed, the row over exams distracts from a much more important question: what kind of education do we actually want for our children?
Hirsch also argues that, regardless of whether exams are getting easier, pupils are much better educated than most editorials suggest:
The educational experience of young people in the middle of the ability range has been transformed. Large numbers are being educated to age 18 or 21 who in the past would have left with few or no qualifications at 15 or 16. This must in part be positive news. For example, six in ten 16 year olds now get a GCSE at grade C or above in maths. Thirty years ago, most young people were turned off maths long before that age. Even if a grade C in maths GCSE is not that demanding, most 16 year olds are at least getting a qualification—helping to combat the “I can’t do maths” syndrome that hampers so many British adults.
Is Hirsch right: should the media and the public be asking different questions about education? Or is he fobbing the issue? As ever, weigh in with your thoughts below.
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