State control means state schools struggle to shine
nick cowen, 28 November 2007
The number of privately educated pupils being accepted into the UK’s top 20 universities is gaining over state educated pupils, despite government policy to encourage universities to widen their intake. The BBC’s somewhat aggressive headline ‘Private pupils grab top courses’ makes it sound almost like their achievement is more down to their superior grappling technique, perhaps practiced during the push and shove of the tuck shop queue!
The truth, however, is that private schools do not just generally provide a better standard of education, but are now increasingly the only schools offering the necessary qualifications that make students eligible for high quality courses such as maths and natural science. How exactly has this happened? It is not as if pupils from poorer backgrounds should be systematically less able to cope with complex knowledge. Unfortunately, it is the politically driven weighting of courses which means that each A level is worth the same number of UCAS points regardless of the subject. This means that so far as league tables and government statistics are concerned, more (of just about any subject) is better and a few solid qualifications in tough subjects, the ones that top universities are interested in, are just too much effort to complete.
This is a systematic flaw in our qualification system, yet it seems Ed Balls is repeating the same error as the new diploma courses are launched. He has already specified that they will be worth multiples of GCSEs, although he has left it to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to set the final ‘value’. We have seen previously how the QCA is not really independent of political control at all. Once this supposed value has been set, any state school that cares about their rankings (and doesn’t want a dressing down from Ofsted) will rush to fulfil the requirements of the new course and curriculum, lest they fail to benefit from the generous grades to be won for their students. They will not have any incentive to consider the long-term prospects of the students in their charge and whether knowledge behind the courses being taught has value the QCA has given it. This is the natural consequence of valuing a qualification artificially rather than seeing what it represents in terms of skills and knowledge in practice.
This means, years later, we will see the disparity between private and state school success at gaining entry to university is the same (or worse). Once again, there will be intonations that private school pupils are greedily hoovering up the best places with the universities’ blessing. But in reality, it will only be those pupils that are still taking qualifications that can in any way prepare them for further education.
The superior alternative is to let more pupils (regardless of economic background) attend independent schools.
No, Mr Jackson – rubbish is your department, not mine. Read Tibor Szamuely on the Soviet education system, published as one of the “Black papers” in the sixties. As for the word “prole”, again – yours, I believe. I try not to use such terms. Furthermore, I would like to see everyone educated and NOT according to “class” but according to aptitude. If there has been any failure to educate the British working class it is not due to those of us who support selection.
John, this is already under way. There have been (at least) 3 “prongs” to the attack on Private Education.
(i) the “colluding on fees” attack a year or so ago.
(ii) OFSTED ‘inspecting’ (and requiring compliance with this week’s DfES rubbish – how OFSTED actually quantify “education quality”) – perfectly described in a Civitas book by Anastasia DeWaal (sic ?)
(iii) Redefinition of “Charity” – and putting a New Labour zombie in charge of what will be (yet another) quango that makes arbitrary unaccountable decisions.
IMO a next possible move (given the falling costs in transport) will be for Private Schools to be set up in countries which don’t control freak bully people to their own agenda.
Simon Dennis
You are writing rubbish. Why is it that the Russian Federation leads the world in child literacy at the age of 10? I am not a communist but I can see that there is no real wish to educate the proles in this unequal country. At least get your facts right.
“This means, years later, we will see the disparity between private and state school success at gaining entry to university is the same (or worse)….”
Logically your prediction is likely, but in practice the moronic liberals (Nulab and Nutory) will simply extend their destructive control over private schools and the elite universities. This prediction is a certainty because as long as we still have one good school and one good university the failure of the rest is evident to those prepared to look. It will be so much easier to destroy the little excellence that remains than to put right a generation of dogmatic failure.
Typical of the squalid BBC, but even the Telegraph referred to a private school “strangle hold” on university places. Partly, this is due to journalism’s tendency to exaggerate. It also reflects the ancient British hatred of efficiency and success, now enjoying a renaissance under Brezhnev-Brown.
Another dismal aspect of this story is the way in which the mere appearance – the number of A-levels – is allowed to conceal the truth of the matter – which centres on the nature of the A-levels. Yet, there is something more than mere “journalism” at work in the Beeb’s failure to deal with this question. Yes, they are out to get private schooling. More sinister still, they refuse to understand the distinction between domestic science and astro-physics.
For the people running the Beeb, you only have to differentiate between types of qualification and all the meaningless accusations of Political Correctitude are rained down upon your head. You’re an “elitist” for goodness sake!
The fact remains, however, that we need to distinguish between academic and vocational education and to assess who needs to go down which path. Both should be of high quality, but skills in hairdressing should not be confused with those gifts which merit a place at university – unless we are out to destroy the very idea of such an institution. I wouldn’t put it past the left or its pet organisations in society – the Beeb being merely the most prominent.
There have, after all been calls to subject universities to quotas and lotteries, like the poor beleaguered secondary sector.
Moreover, the left has an inbuilt suspicion and hatred of intellectual eminence. All the bolshevik regimes from Lenin to Pol Pot have regarded intellectuals as no more than a particularly troublesome branch of the “bourgeoisie” and have done everything possible to destroy them. Academic hobbling of “former persons” was commonplace in Soviet times.
Those currently in positions of power in Britain are heavily influenced by the doctrines and attitudes which found their fullest expression in communism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the education establishment. Unless they, together with this repulsive government are stopped, the last vestiges of genuine education will soon be extirpated in Great Britain.