This morning the Daily Mirror reported that the former Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, had sent her dyslexic son to a special private school because she felt that the provision in her area, Tower Hamlets in east London, was inadequate. As it happens, although the school is reported in the Evening Standard to be a school which specialises in preparing dyslexic and dyspraxic children for entrance exams for private schools, her intention is for her son to return to state education after a couple of years. Her other children are still in state schools.
So, she’s not the hypocrite the mass media are making her out to be. But even if she were, whoever leaked this to the press did so dishonourably. Even if we concede that politicians’ private lives are matters for public exposure and debate, we must surely admit that the pre-teenage children of politicians are entitled to private lives. And I feel very strongly that decisions about children’s education should be made with the children’s own needs put first. Ruth Kelly’s son is not bound by his mother’s political commitments; if he was anyone else’s child, his parents would not be told in the media to put her colleagues’ policy before his interest.
After all, there is a reason why special education provision has gone downhill over the years, and it’s not just because of a dogmatic insistence on inclusion for its own sake. It’s because education is expensive, and New Labour has always been a movement all about making voters unafraid to vote Labour on financial grounds, which means not asking people to pay higher taxes to fund the education of other people’s children and a health service they will only need if they get ill. Of course, if the Labour party is run by someone obsessed with currying favours with the US government by, oh, say, sending British troops into their wars for uncertain benefits, the money has to come from somewhere. But I’ve no doubt that some of the people who were carping at Ruth Kelly today were people who had been afraid to vote Labour at all until the mid-1990s because they were afraid of tax rises. Well, guess what? Someone has to pay for the schools if we’re going to have them.
And the other old saw which was used on Kelly today was “whose fault is it if the local school is bad? You were the education secretary!”. If schools are underfunded and bad decisions are made at her level, it’s clearly her fault. However, if particular schools are dumps, it is likely to be the fault of the teachers and of the local community for raising such riff-raff. My own school (Kesgrave Hall, a special private school) was a nightmare to be in, but I don’t blame Kenneth Baker or whoever was in charge of the education department in the early 1990s despite the fact that the school took local education authority money; I blame the headmaster and his thugs and jobsworths. It’s stupid to blame the education secretary, who is typically in post for just a couple of years and has no educational background, for the poor state of individual schools.
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This is not just about funding. The Left destroyed the grammar schools, which were the greatest engine of social mobility this country has ever known. Fewer state school pupils get into Oxbridge than did 30 years ago, because state schools are comprehensives, and comprehensives are rubbish.
Labour politicians, hypocrites to the core, know that comprehensives are crap so they send their kids to private school. Meanwhile, the Somali girl in the tower block, whose parents want her to marry a cousin at 16, has no escape route. Once, if she was bright, she could have got to grammar school, then university, when the word meant something, and told her primitive parents to get knotted.
Progress? Equality? Labour want to keep the working class in their place.
I went to an old-fashioned grammar school, OP, and it was every bit as “rubbish” as any contemporary school you could find. A different kind of rubbish, true- rote learning by intimidation to get a better percentage of O and A levels than the next one one down the road and force-fed intellectual and cultural snobbery.
But at least O and A levels were worth something.
Now, because comprehensives have lowered standards, A levels have been dumbed down so everyone passes and GSEs are virtually worthless.
Assalaamu alaikum,
I hear these terms all the time, but don’t know what they mean. (In the U.S., if we use those terms at all, they have different meanings. Grammar school is just a word for any elementary - or primary - school; at least that’s how I use it.)
So what’s a grammar school? And then what’s a comprehensive school?
I finally sort of have an idea what O levels and A levels and GCSEs are (and maybe I’m using outdated terms for them…), but could someone explain those, too?
As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,
Grammar school: school which takes pupils at 11 who pass an entrance exam (in the past there was a standardised entrance exam known as the 11-plus, which is still the case in some areas; pupils who failed it, which was most, went to so-called Secondary Modern schools)
Comprehensive: a school which takes pupils from a particular “catchment area”, meaning the local area, and deals with differing abilities internally
O-levels: exam taken at 16, usually after two years’ study; abolished in mid-1980s
GCSE: ditto, introduced in mid-80s, amalgamation of O-level with the old CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) but nowadays considered “dumbed down” compared with the old O-level.
Yusuf wrote: “O-levels: exam taken at 16, usually after two years’ study; abolished in mid-1980s”
O-levels were not abolished everywhere. :) I’m currently teaching classes in O-level Accounts and Economics (as well as some A-level Accounts classes). We don’t teach any GSCE classes at this school, but I have looked at one of the GCSE Econ textbooks and, yes, it’s complete rubbish. The lack of O-level Econ courses in the UK has made finding a decent textbook for me to use in my classes near impossible. So I’ve been “creating” one of my own on the fly, using a variety of sources. I do think my accounting students are getting a decent introductory education at the A-level (on a par with US college freshman-level accounting).
Now, because comprehensives have lowered standards, A levels have been dumbed down so everyone passes and GCSEs are virtually worthless.
If more people are passing GCSEs and A-levels those qualifications are being devalued, irrespective of whether the exams are objectively getting easier or whether students are genuinely getting better.
The value of any qualification is based on the ratio between the number of passes and the number of appropriate job vacancies.
What should concern us about Kelly is not the hypocrisy,which is deep enough, but the dishonesty. While it may be sustainable to argue that she is feeling protective about her son’s possible future (as well she might when bullying is endemic in many state secondary schools and is probably rife in Tower Hamlets)are we really to believe that she has put all her other children through state schools in that same borough? It seems far more likely to be the case that Kelly has recently moved from some far leafier suburb where,like the Blairs she has been able to get them into prestigious middle class state schools.
If it turns out that this is indeed the case and that the decision to go private with the special needs child has more to do with keeping him from the depredations of East End oiks,then the hapless Kelly will have sewn the seeds of her own downfall, which given her record was always going to be her likely fate.
Still,watching the usual po-faced New Labour figures trotting out the same line of spin that says they are not at all embarrassed by the Kelly business will be amusing, and things will become hilarious if Ms Kelly has the temerity to give an interview in which she will likely come across as similarly inept and incoherent as the likes of Beckett and Prezza!
The comic spectacle of the bi-lateral consensus of our two main party leaders on the issue again makes for a story of immense tragi-comic dimensions.
Assalaamu alaikum,
OK, thanks for the explanantions, Yusuf.