Soldato
- Joined
- 28 Oct 2003
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- 5,510
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- Worthington-on-sea
One thing which none of the nay-sayers have addressed is why they believe academies to be so bad.
Gove's School Bullies
- Thread starter MookJong
- Start date
I work in an academy and it has been a genuine success, in terms of education and teaching.
The management of money and the new building however... Here's £25 million, go build a school and, erm, just pick someone from management to be the project manager.
Genius
The management of money and the new building however... Here's £25 million, go build a school and, erm, just pick someone from management to be the project manager.
Genius
I like how Academies are now going to be ran for profit.
Also; Gove and his cronies haven't done anything to fix the education system, personally, I think they have made major strides backwards.
The same can be applied to many aspects of this Government.
Also; Gove and his cronies haven't done anything to fix the education system, personally, I think they have made major strides backwards.
The same can be applied to many aspects of this Government.
Well they cost more, which would be fine except the extra money tends not to go towards children's education but instead goes to the school management team, who often get six figure salaries, and private sector contractors.
Academies are also highly selective, which one suspects is how any improvement in results are achieved. Instead of following the Finnish example of no child being left behind, if a child doesn't make the grade they are simply removed from that school - see expulsion rates from academies compared to state schools. Now you might think that's great because disruptive pupils are removed from class, but these kids have to go somewhere - often to a state school a long distance away which suffers as a result. Who pays? The taxpayer naturally. "Privatise the profits, socialise the liabilities".
If academies are forced onto communities against their will, as was the case for that school in Haringey, then they are hardly serving that community.
Lastly there's the rather sinister nature of essentially putting millionaires with no background in education in charge of a large group of children's education. At best you could see how this might become a bit of a vanity project for the super-rich, at worst there's the example of the Sir Peter Varney academies up north somewhere that were teaching creationism. Ministers keep telling us academies are better because there's less regulation, but what if that regulation is there for a good reason?
Have the conservatives done ANYTHING recently which is actually in the public interest? As opposed to the economy and rich people? Hmmm cant think of anything?
Seriously can anyone name ONE thing they have done which the UK public actually agree with?
Seriously can anyone name ONE thing they have done which the UK public actually agree with?
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Keeping to education, the changes of focus from ICT to Computer Science is a really good move.
The toughening up of the exam regime is also welcome, the A* grade should never have needed to exist.
Schools are not forced to become academies. That's nonsense. There is a degree of hostility from some schools who are worried change is being forced upon them, and change is scary so they're angry. So those schools wont convert, fine.
The premise is to get away from staggeringly incompetent local government control in favour of a group of governors. The choice of governor is evidently important. It's also surprisingly important to handle the conversion well, Lakeland's point regarding project management is a case in point.
I suspect the success of the trial schools primarily reflects using highly skilled people as governors, and the wide scale roll out will be less successful because the governors will be less competent. That's an unfortunate bias if the trial schools are seen as testing whether the idea is viable. It makes a lot of sense if the trial schools are a means of producing dubious statistics to make the scheme look better while forging ahead regardless.
There are also "free schools" which I believe are new, but I haven't been paying enough attention to distinguish them from academies.
One suspects however that the problem with education lies with the children (specifically the disruptive and/or illiterate ones) and with the teachers. Restructuring the administration of the schools seems unlikely to resolve either.
edit:
If you think improving the economy is against the public interest, you're a moron.
The premise is to get away from staggeringly incompetent local government control in favour of a group of governors. The choice of governor is evidently important. It's also surprisingly important to handle the conversion well, Lakeland's point regarding project management is a case in point.
I suspect the success of the trial schools primarily reflects using highly skilled people as governors, and the wide scale roll out will be less successful because the governors will be less competent. That's an unfortunate bias if the trial schools are seen as testing whether the idea is viable. It makes a lot of sense if the trial schools are a means of producing dubious statistics to make the scheme look better while forging ahead regardless.
There are also "free schools" which I believe are new, but I haven't been paying enough attention to distinguish them from academies.
One suspects however that the problem with education lies with the children (specifically the disruptive and/or illiterate ones) and with the teachers. Restructuring the administration of the schools seems unlikely to resolve either.
edit:
If you think improving the economy is against the public interest, you're a moron.
So improving the economy is not in the public interest?
What would you define as being in the public interest? I'm pretty sure anything you mention will cost some money, which is paid for by having a good economy...
This is exactly what happens.
This isn't always the case. For example the Academy I work in is fully inclusive. The Academy works with other local LEA schools to trial difficult students and give them a second chance rather than expelling them.
This is down to each Academy and it really should reflect the community it is in, I couldn't comment on any other Academies though.
I guess it depends if it's in the best interests of the community, some people just don't want change and are blind to any benefits that may come from an Academy.
Also many Academies with sack the head of the old LEA school almost instantly and replace them with a 'super head.' The governors are often replaced with those from companies 'sponsoring' the Academy. So there is often other reasons why schools will refuse to accept Academy status.
Fully agree with this. Most Academies will follow LEA structure and the national curriculum anyhow.
The main reason our Academy has improved from 'special measures' to 'good' is because we amalgamated with another school which meant there was too many staff, this allowed management to go through two lots of redundancies and get rid of poor staff who shouldn't be teaching any number of reasons.
Whether or not this is a good thing I don't know as most of them will have been employed somewhere else.
Hiking the 0% Tax band to £10K has given me almost £60 per month more in my paycheck. Thats a real difference to me and a lot of hard working people. And the most any government has ever given me since i started my working life in 2000
If that is the case how come I am now working in an Academy that was forced through? Parents and governors campaigned to keep the two predecessor schools open rather than having them merged into a new Academy.
Both of the predecessors schools achieved "good" ratings at the prior two Ofsted inspections and results were increasing year after year. Eighteen months after opening we now "require improvement" and our exams results have gone backwards.
Teaching staff remain the same on the most part, the difference is we are now run by a sponsor who seems clueless and put in place a head teacher that was out of his depth, but talked a good talk. We now have eighteen months to turn things around and are currently advertising for our third head teacher in two years.
Academies are great!
*edit* Also on the note of the comments regarding to teachers being rubbish. This may be the case in some areas, but on the whole the staff that I work with everyday are dedicated and great at their jobs. Their lives are dominated by school, in at 7am out at 6pm (when the building closes) and then get home to more work, often taking until 9-10pm in the evening. I know this is not the reality everywhere but it is here.
The real problem our school faces is indeed the students and the parents. There is such a feeling of "can’t be bothered" amongst the students they take zero pride in their work or learning new things. Backed up by parents who constantly blame the staff when their child causes issues, swear or threaten staff, and then refuse to help put sanctions in place. Phone calls home are often greeted by "they are not doing that detention, it's not their fault". Parents in this area on the whole (not all of them) take zero interest in their child’s education and treat the school as a babysitting service. Aspirations are low and when I asked my class of 30 15 year olds what jobs they would like to do in the future, I was greeted by answers such as: "work in a shop" or "nothing because my dad doesn't and we have a nice car and a good TV".
I am generalising and we do have some great kids with supportive parents... but they are the minority.
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I’m reviving this thread in true gillywibble ‘give me a week’ style because I’ve been stacked at work and haven’t had an opportunity to write the reply I promised Hades.
I’m going to preface what I’m about to say with a disclaimer: I’m not suggesting everything the New Labour government did relating to education was perfect and there are plenty of decisions that I disagree with or, with hindsight, have proven to be less than prudent.
However…
Introduction:
Education is such a charged and personal subject because it shapes so much of our lives. Most people come in direct contact with the education system twice — once when they are at school themselves and again when their child or children go to school. This tends to give people the impression that they are experts on the subject because it has comprised a large proportion of their own life, despite an incredibly limited exposure to the system as a whole. Even worse, they disregard the opinion of those within the education sector because they assume that they are biased or protective.
It doesn’t help that the media and government continuously tell us that the education system is going down the toilet.
Now I’m not suggesting that every school, every teacher and every student’s experience of education is going to be fantastic, but just because your or your child’s time at school is less than perfect doesn’t mean the system in general is failing and it certainly isn’t ‘wrecked’.
Comparison:
So what are we comparing today’s education system with? When was this ‘golden age’ of British education that we’ve lost and by what measure are we judging it?
Was it in 1870 when the Liberals established compulsory education?
Was it 1918 when they introduced the Fisher Act — raising the school leaving age to 14 and implemented the School Certificate and Higher School Certificate?
Was it in 1947 the school leaving age was raised to 15 or 1951 when the Conservatives introduced O-Levels and A-Levels and the tripartite system became widely implemented?
In all of these cases only about 20% of 16 year olds actually took exams because the vast majority left school at 14 or 15 and went to work in mills, factories, shipyards or became miners. By default, the population sample had already been refined to include only the top fifth, so isn’t a particularly fair comparison to today.
Was it in 1965 when Labour introduced the the comprehensive system and Certificate of Secondary Education to cater for the missing 80% of students that left school without any qualifications or 1971 when the Conservatives raised the school leaving age to 16?
What about 1986 when the Conservatives replaced CSEs and O-Levels with GCSEs?
The point I’m facetiously trying to make is that I suspect most people would select the period of time that they were in school as the ‘good old days’. They will reason that they turned out all right and the scaremongering they read in the media or the bad experience their children are currently having ‘proves’ that things are now worse. It comes back to my original point that people judge the system based on their own experiences rather than any evidence or study of the system in its entirety.
Measurement:
Let’s go go back to the question ‘by what measure are we judging it?’
I expect that it’s generally anecdotal (see previous point) but let’s look at some ‘hard facts’.
Secondary school league tables were introduced in 1992 by the Conservatives and TIMSS (international assessment of mathematics and science knowledge for school children) was first introduced in 1995, so there’s very little data from a historical perspective to compare schools within the UK let alone the UK against other countries.
Bear in mind that league tables and international assessments like TIMSS and PISA aren’t the be-all and end-all of a school or country’s success. They are widely contested and in the case of TIMSS and PISA, don’t necessarily agree with each other. While they can be an indicator of attainment, they shouldn’t be relied on in isolation. In fact, the government has even suggested a league table of ‘added value’ which accounts for non-exam result related success.
It has been suggested that the introduction of secondary school league tables has caused a ‘race to the bottom’ for exam boards as they try and sell their wares to schools looking for easier exams so they can get more students meeting the five A*–C criteria and improving their league position.
However, grade inflation is nothing new. Contrary to popular opinion and memory, the A* grade for GCSE was introduced in 1994 (Conservatives) because between 1988 and 1993 the percentage of A grades had risen from 8.4% to 12.5% and they needed a way to differentiate the very top students. Even then, between 1994 and 1997 the percentage of A* students rose from 2.8% to 3.6%. Now admittedly it was up to 7.3% last year, but while ‘easier exams’, ‘grade inflation’ and ‘slipping down international league tables’ make for good headlines, they really don’t mean much.
There is also the dichotomy of grade boundaries between and within different year groups. Each year there will be some deviation in the distribution of attainment and exam boards ‘tweak’ the results required to achieve certain grades. This was most noticeable last year when they changed the boundary halfway through the year for English, so that the same result for an exam sat in January resulted in a different grade to an exam sat in May.
It’s ironic that teaching standards are supposedly falling (according to the media and the government) while at the same time results are improving.
Teachers:
Another aspect of popular opinion that goes against teachers is that many people assume it’s an easy job with lots of holiday. They believe that because they know a lot about a certain subject they could easily teach it when in reality there is far more to being a good teacher than simply knowing the subject matter.
I’m not suggestion that every teacher is flawless but the vast majority are dedicated, hard working and care about the children they teach.
There is now far more accountability in teaching than ever before. Not only is a school’s performance reflected in league tables but there are also Ofsted inspections (Conservatives in 1992), internal observations, governors and LEAs to answer to.
Even though this is in direct contention with popular opinion, the latest Ofsted annual report concludes that although there is still a long way to go, schools in England are getting better. I’m sure it will be disregarded because, despite being impartial, Ofsted will be seen as ‘part of the system’ and on the side of the schools and teachers.
The tripartite and comprehensive systems:
When the tripartite system became widely used it was heralded as a grand solution for social mobility and some people today still believe this. Bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds would receive the same education as their more fortunate peers based on academic ability alone by taking an exam at the age of 11. Anyone who passed the exam would attend a grammar school and anyone who failed would attend a secondary modern or secondary technical school. Secondary technical schools were never widely implemented and so it really became a bipartite system that lasted for about 20 years.
Critics argue that rather than improving social mobility, this actually cemented the class divisions within our society. Grammar schools received the majority of the funding and secondary modern schools were correspondingly neglected. The top 25% of children attended grammar schools and worked towards O-Levels and the remainder left school without any qualifications until the GCE in 1965. As I mentioned before, this wasn’t such an issue while there were still manufacturing jobs and apprenticeships to offer school leavers who had no qualifications but it enforced the bias towards the top quarter of children.
The comprehensive system was promoted as more egalitarian, rejecting the idea of deciding a child’s future based on a single exam at the age of 11 by catering for all abilities within the same school and allowing all children to take the same exams.
Critics of the comprehensive system argue that it has disadvantaged the brightest students because they have to cater for the lowest common denominator. This aught to be resolved through the process of ‘setting’ children based on their ability in each subject independently but it is still contested.
I would suggest that if a child was bright enough to attend a grammar school they would more than likely be in the top set for all of their subjects at a comprehensive school. Also, the ability to change sets throughout one’s school career provides more flexibility and opportunity than a single exam at 11.
Catchment areas:
The other criticism of comprehensive schools is the catchment area debate. In order for your child to attend a good school, you have to move within the catchment area of that school and many poorer families don’t have this luxury, leading to a de facto selection according to parents’ financial means rather than the child’s academic ability.
Something that exacerbates this problem is the school league tables because everyone wants to send their children to the ‘best’ school in their area, even if that school isn’t necessarily the best for their child’s needs.
The other issue with catchment areas is the rise in population. Classroom sizes are meant to be restricted meaning that there is a finite number of places at any one school. If a catchment area receives an influx of families and the school can’t accommodate everyone, the local council either has to move the catchment area boundaries to send children to another school or has to build more schools.
This is not a new problem. Yes, net migration has increased over the last decade and the influx of EU migrants has been widely documented but this alone hasn’t attributed to the increase in population growth, we’ve also gone through a native baby boom.
Germany:
One of the countries we often compare ourselves to is Germany. They run a form of the tripartite system and they regularly score above us in international league tables.
However, they don’t have the social stigma associated with a class system the way we do and they have an incredibly well run apprenticeship system for those children who don’t attend a gymnasium (grammar school). Also bear in mind that Germany has a higher rate of immigration than the UK and while there might be more ‘space’ they still have limited resources to go around.
One of the biggest differences between our two systems is continuity. Germany is generally governed by a collation and so it’s very hard for a single political party to make wholesale changes to the education system for ideological reasons. This has led to a more stable system which ultimately results in a better outcome for the children.
Society and parents:
It’s no secret that the more attention and care given to a child by its parents during its infancy, the faster and better that child will develop. Lower-class families will on average be less well educated than their middle-class counterparts and this trend will continue with their children.
The rise of technology hasn’t helped as some parents spend less time with their children and rely on the TV and computers as a distraction. They also rely on teachers to do their parenting for them and blame the school for their child’s lack of progress and discipline instead of taking responsibility themselves.
In the past this wasn’t such an issue because lower class children would still be able to find work without qualifications in the industrial sector or low-skilled employment. However, with the fall of UK industry under Thatcher and the rise of the welfare state under New Labour, this issue has been exacerbated.
Academies:
It’s already been fairly well covered but I will reiterate the issues surrounding academies, UTCs, free schools and studio schools.
These schools are funded directly by central government but are divorced from local authority control. This means they don’t have to teach the national curriculum, they can set their own pay and conditions, enforce their own admissions policies and the ‘teachers’ they employ don’t have even have to be qualified.
While they aren’t allowed to make a profit, they can subcontract elements of the running and management of the school to other organisations including private companies and in time this will probably lead to for-profit schools paid for with public funds.
We’ve discussed the need for more schools but is this really the best way to meet the demand? It’s removing funding from existing state schools and creating schools that are separated from the usual checks and balances our schools are subjected to.
University:
New Labour’s target of 50% of school leavers attending university was supposed to improve social mobility and increase the general level of education for the UK population. Under some measures this has been the case. We have more people staying in education after school and college than ever before and more graduates.
In order to meet these targets they had no choice but to introduce fees because even New Labour couldn’t afford the pay for all of those extra university places. Having said that, the £3,000 per year that I paid to go to university only accounted for 25% of the actual cost per year and the government still subsidised £9,000 per student per year.
Under the Coalition, all that has changed is the balance has switched so that the student now pays £9,000 and the government subsidises £3,000. However, because of the way new graduates have to pay back their loan (or not) all that has really happened is the money has been moved from one column on the government books to another.
There’s no denying that this target for university attendance saw an increase in ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees but to say that it has devalued all degrees is disingenuous. There will always be demand and respect for the hardest and most valuable degrees, especially within skilled professions.
Conclusion:
My personal opinion is that the education system is changed too often. Consecutive governments and successive education ministers have had too much power to make radical reforms too quickly, usually for ideological reasons and usually ignoring education professionals.
My fear is that the introduction of academies, free schools and studio schools will fragment the system resulting in confused teachers, FE and HE establishments, employers and most importantly children.
If resources continue to be syphoned away from the mainstream to fund these pet projects as they currently are, we will end up in a situation where comprehensive schools equate to the old secondary moderns — underfunded and ignored until the government's naysaying becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So allow the media and the government to confirm your presumptions that the education system has been wrecked. I believe that as a whole children today have never had a better education but of course there is and always will be room for improvement.
I’m going to preface what I’m about to say with a disclaimer: I’m not suggesting everything the New Labour government did relating to education was perfect and there are plenty of decisions that I disagree with or, with hindsight, have proven to be less than prudent.
However…
Introduction:
Education is such a charged and personal subject because it shapes so much of our lives. Most people come in direct contact with the education system twice — once when they are at school themselves and again when their child or children go to school. This tends to give people the impression that they are experts on the subject because it has comprised a large proportion of their own life, despite an incredibly limited exposure to the system as a whole. Even worse, they disregard the opinion of those within the education sector because they assume that they are biased or protective.
It doesn’t help that the media and government continuously tell us that the education system is going down the toilet.
Now I’m not suggesting that every school, every teacher and every student’s experience of education is going to be fantastic, but just because your or your child’s time at school is less than perfect doesn’t mean the system in general is failing and it certainly isn’t ‘wrecked’.
Comparison:
So what are we comparing today’s education system with? When was this ‘golden age’ of British education that we’ve lost and by what measure are we judging it?
Was it in 1870 when the Liberals established compulsory education?
Was it 1918 when they introduced the Fisher Act — raising the school leaving age to 14 and implemented the School Certificate and Higher School Certificate?
Was it in 1947 the school leaving age was raised to 15 or 1951 when the Conservatives introduced O-Levels and A-Levels and the tripartite system became widely implemented?
In all of these cases only about 20% of 16 year olds actually took exams because the vast majority left school at 14 or 15 and went to work in mills, factories, shipyards or became miners. By default, the population sample had already been refined to include only the top fifth, so isn’t a particularly fair comparison to today.
Was it in 1965 when Labour introduced the the comprehensive system and Certificate of Secondary Education to cater for the missing 80% of students that left school without any qualifications or 1971 when the Conservatives raised the school leaving age to 16?
What about 1986 when the Conservatives replaced CSEs and O-Levels with GCSEs?
The point I’m facetiously trying to make is that I suspect most people would select the period of time that they were in school as the ‘good old days’. They will reason that they turned out all right and the scaremongering they read in the media or the bad experience their children are currently having ‘proves’ that things are now worse. It comes back to my original point that people judge the system based on their own experiences rather than any evidence or study of the system in its entirety.
Measurement:
Let’s go go back to the question ‘by what measure are we judging it?’
I expect that it’s generally anecdotal (see previous point) but let’s look at some ‘hard facts’.
Secondary school league tables were introduced in 1992 by the Conservatives and TIMSS (international assessment of mathematics and science knowledge for school children) was first introduced in 1995, so there’s very little data from a historical perspective to compare schools within the UK let alone the UK against other countries.
Bear in mind that league tables and international assessments like TIMSS and PISA aren’t the be-all and end-all of a school or country’s success. They are widely contested and in the case of TIMSS and PISA, don’t necessarily agree with each other. While they can be an indicator of attainment, they shouldn’t be relied on in isolation. In fact, the government has even suggested a league table of ‘added value’ which accounts for non-exam result related success.
It has been suggested that the introduction of secondary school league tables has caused a ‘race to the bottom’ for exam boards as they try and sell their wares to schools looking for easier exams so they can get more students meeting the five A*–C criteria and improving their league position.
However, grade inflation is nothing new. Contrary to popular opinion and memory, the A* grade for GCSE was introduced in 1994 (Conservatives) because between 1988 and 1993 the percentage of A grades had risen from 8.4% to 12.5% and they needed a way to differentiate the very top students. Even then, between 1994 and 1997 the percentage of A* students rose from 2.8% to 3.6%. Now admittedly it was up to 7.3% last year, but while ‘easier exams’, ‘grade inflation’ and ‘slipping down international league tables’ make for good headlines, they really don’t mean much.
There is also the dichotomy of grade boundaries between and within different year groups. Each year there will be some deviation in the distribution of attainment and exam boards ‘tweak’ the results required to achieve certain grades. This was most noticeable last year when they changed the boundary halfway through the year for English, so that the same result for an exam sat in January resulted in a different grade to an exam sat in May.
It’s ironic that teaching standards are supposedly falling (according to the media and the government) while at the same time results are improving.
Teachers:
Another aspect of popular opinion that goes against teachers is that many people assume it’s an easy job with lots of holiday. They believe that because they know a lot about a certain subject they could easily teach it when in reality there is far more to being a good teacher than simply knowing the subject matter.
I’m not suggestion that every teacher is flawless but the vast majority are dedicated, hard working and care about the children they teach.
There is now far more accountability in teaching than ever before. Not only is a school’s performance reflected in league tables but there are also Ofsted inspections (Conservatives in 1992), internal observations, governors and LEAs to answer to.
Even though this is in direct contention with popular opinion, the latest Ofsted annual report concludes that although there is still a long way to go, schools in England are getting better. I’m sure it will be disregarded because, despite being impartial, Ofsted will be seen as ‘part of the system’ and on the side of the schools and teachers.
The tripartite and comprehensive systems:
When the tripartite system became widely used it was heralded as a grand solution for social mobility and some people today still believe this. Bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds would receive the same education as their more fortunate peers based on academic ability alone by taking an exam at the age of 11. Anyone who passed the exam would attend a grammar school and anyone who failed would attend a secondary modern or secondary technical school. Secondary technical schools were never widely implemented and so it really became a bipartite system that lasted for about 20 years.
Critics argue that rather than improving social mobility, this actually cemented the class divisions within our society. Grammar schools received the majority of the funding and secondary modern schools were correspondingly neglected. The top 25% of children attended grammar schools and worked towards O-Levels and the remainder left school without any qualifications until the GCE in 1965. As I mentioned before, this wasn’t such an issue while there were still manufacturing jobs and apprenticeships to offer school leavers who had no qualifications but it enforced the bias towards the top quarter of children.
The comprehensive system was promoted as more egalitarian, rejecting the idea of deciding a child’s future based on a single exam at the age of 11 by catering for all abilities within the same school and allowing all children to take the same exams.
Critics of the comprehensive system argue that it has disadvantaged the brightest students because they have to cater for the lowest common denominator. This aught to be resolved through the process of ‘setting’ children based on their ability in each subject independently but it is still contested.
I would suggest that if a child was bright enough to attend a grammar school they would more than likely be in the top set for all of their subjects at a comprehensive school. Also, the ability to change sets throughout one’s school career provides more flexibility and opportunity than a single exam at 11.
Catchment areas:
The other criticism of comprehensive schools is the catchment area debate. In order for your child to attend a good school, you have to move within the catchment area of that school and many poorer families don’t have this luxury, leading to a de facto selection according to parents’ financial means rather than the child’s academic ability.
Something that exacerbates this problem is the school league tables because everyone wants to send their children to the ‘best’ school in their area, even if that school isn’t necessarily the best for their child’s needs.
The other issue with catchment areas is the rise in population. Classroom sizes are meant to be restricted meaning that there is a finite number of places at any one school. If a catchment area receives an influx of families and the school can’t accommodate everyone, the local council either has to move the catchment area boundaries to send children to another school or has to build more schools.
This is not a new problem. Yes, net migration has increased over the last decade and the influx of EU migrants has been widely documented but this alone hasn’t attributed to the increase in population growth, we’ve also gone through a native baby boom.
Germany:
One of the countries we often compare ourselves to is Germany. They run a form of the tripartite system and they regularly score above us in international league tables.
However, they don’t have the social stigma associated with a class system the way we do and they have an incredibly well run apprenticeship system for those children who don’t attend a gymnasium (grammar school). Also bear in mind that Germany has a higher rate of immigration than the UK and while there might be more ‘space’ they still have limited resources to go around.
One of the biggest differences between our two systems is continuity. Germany is generally governed by a collation and so it’s very hard for a single political party to make wholesale changes to the education system for ideological reasons. This has led to a more stable system which ultimately results in a better outcome for the children.
Society and parents:
It’s no secret that the more attention and care given to a child by its parents during its infancy, the faster and better that child will develop. Lower-class families will on average be less well educated than their middle-class counterparts and this trend will continue with their children.
The rise of technology hasn’t helped as some parents spend less time with their children and rely on the TV and computers as a distraction. They also rely on teachers to do their parenting for them and blame the school for their child’s lack of progress and discipline instead of taking responsibility themselves.
In the past this wasn’t such an issue because lower class children would still be able to find work without qualifications in the industrial sector or low-skilled employment. However, with the fall of UK industry under Thatcher and the rise of the welfare state under New Labour, this issue has been exacerbated.
Academies:
It’s already been fairly well covered but I will reiterate the issues surrounding academies, UTCs, free schools and studio schools.
These schools are funded directly by central government but are divorced from local authority control. This means they don’t have to teach the national curriculum, they can set their own pay and conditions, enforce their own admissions policies and the ‘teachers’ they employ don’t have even have to be qualified.
While they aren’t allowed to make a profit, they can subcontract elements of the running and management of the school to other organisations including private companies and in time this will probably lead to for-profit schools paid for with public funds.
We’ve discussed the need for more schools but is this really the best way to meet the demand? It’s removing funding from existing state schools and creating schools that are separated from the usual checks and balances our schools are subjected to.
University:
New Labour’s target of 50% of school leavers attending university was supposed to improve social mobility and increase the general level of education for the UK population. Under some measures this has been the case. We have more people staying in education after school and college than ever before and more graduates.
In order to meet these targets they had no choice but to introduce fees because even New Labour couldn’t afford the pay for all of those extra university places. Having said that, the £3,000 per year that I paid to go to university only accounted for 25% of the actual cost per year and the government still subsidised £9,000 per student per year.
Under the Coalition, all that has changed is the balance has switched so that the student now pays £9,000 and the government subsidises £3,000. However, because of the way new graduates have to pay back their loan (or not) all that has really happened is the money has been moved from one column on the government books to another.
There’s no denying that this target for university attendance saw an increase in ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees but to say that it has devalued all degrees is disingenuous. There will always be demand and respect for the hardest and most valuable degrees, especially within skilled professions.
Conclusion:
My personal opinion is that the education system is changed too often. Consecutive governments and successive education ministers have had too much power to make radical reforms too quickly, usually for ideological reasons and usually ignoring education professionals.
My fear is that the introduction of academies, free schools and studio schools will fragment the system resulting in confused teachers, FE and HE establishments, employers and most importantly children.
If resources continue to be syphoned away from the mainstream to fund these pet projects as they currently are, we will end up in a situation where comprehensive schools equate to the old secondary moderns — underfunded and ignored until the government's naysaying becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So allow the media and the government to confirm your presumptions that the education system has been wrecked. I believe that as a whole children today have never had a better education but of course there is and always will be room for improvement.
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