If anyone catches me attempting irony in a blog post again they can eat my children. That will save me having to decide how to educate them.

When it comes to economics, there are regular moves between the LSE and U of Chicago because they are about the best in this subject. It is similar to choosing the national sports squad . Most of theplayers will come from a few top clubs. If the manager picked equal numbers of players from all the leagues , I cannot see it improving performance.

In summary, I would like to see poor children from inner city comprehensives obtain the A Levels in maths, sciences and modern languages in order to enter our top universities so as to increase social mobility. However many comprehensives do not deliver the results. How are these poor comprehensives to improve sufficiently, such that aspirational parents, who have able children, know that they are capable of teaching to the same high standard as public or grammar schools in all subjects?

Where money is being made is where people set up companies to develop new technologies and sell them to the large organisations. In fact whether in mechanical , medical/drug, electronic, computer, mineral exploration, much of the innovative work is done by the small companies which then sell out to the large companies. This is why UK universities setting up companies to commercialise their research so important the for the future success of this country( W Hutton and H McRae have written on this subject). The problem is that 24% of R and D expenditure is around London and university research is dominated by Oxford, Cambridge and London. Many of these small high tech companies have been set up by people from the large companies/organisations( which are located in S England) frustrated by the lack of innovation. This is why it is so important for inner city kids to have the education to enable them to enter Oxbridge, Imperial , UCL, LSE, Kings, Manchester, etc in order to obtain at least a masters degreeso that they can be employed by companies working in high value advanced science and engineering.

An engineer in their late 20s returning to to their inner city comp, explaining their well paid work on FI Grand prix teams and time spent travelling the World, would probably be quite exciting for the pupils.

@83
Peter Hitchens has only done one notable thing in his life, and that is make his odious brother sound sane and reasonable by comparison.

Again, the Tory love of all things naturally skewed is that no matter what position a Tory occupies in society, they can look down their nose at someone.

Economic writers such as H McRrae and Will Hutton have pointed that much economic growth will come ideaopolis ‘s ; areas where top universities support high tech companies such as silicon valley and NE USA, with Harvard, MIT etc, to drive economic growth. The UK needs Anna Labno more than she needs the UK. How many comps produce students with 6 As at “A” level? The brain drain of able crafstmen, scientists and engineers to the USA and to lesser extent Australia , in the 50s to 80s, could have only harmed British industry.

A: Because some parts of the right are nostalgic, stupid and keep missing the point.

Remember how David Willetts was moved from Education for suggesting that grammar schools didn’t work? Truth was, he was right, and the Tories (and their media allies) were wrong, not least because no-one ever advocates secondary moderns as the logical counterpart of a return to a grammar school model, just as grammar school advocates always assume them and theirs will get in, which might not be the case: allowing the occasional bright working-class kid in means that some middle class kid will lose out, and hell hath no fury like a middle class sense of entitlement.

What Willets realised was that the real divide was not grammars v comprehensives, but selection v non-selection; the use of a ‘death or glory’/one-off cup final contest in the form of the 11+ versus a system designed to focus on developing the abilities of all children. For all her faults, Hazel Blears summed it up well: she passed the 11+ and became a Cabinet Minister; her brother didn’t, and drives a bus. Recall how Blunkett told Labour supporters: ‘Read my lips: no selection’. The fact that he reneged on that pledge is both typical of New Labour and something the grammar school nostalgics have repeatedly overlooked. As it is, thanks to New Labour’s education reforms, schools can now select:

- by specialism (e.g. languages or sport)

- by religious denomination (why else encourage ‘faith schools’?)

- by status (Academies have far greater freedom than other types of school)

- by gender (the belief that single-sex schools for girls will improve their results, while boys’ results would be better in mixed schools – you do the math to square that circle)

- by ‘aptitude’ (though this is only a small percentage, there’s nothing to stop the current or next government from raising it)

In short, New Labour has provided all the tools to reintroduce selective education in schools, with ‘specialist vocational academies for good Catholic boys’ as the new secondary moderns, if the grammar school-obsessed Tories weren’t so stupid or nostalgic to realise it.

This report says that the number of UK students at American universities is “still less than 10,000“. Presumably in the thousands then.

If one looks at the web site for many public and grammar schools, they are obtaining large numbers of grade As in A levels in the harder subjects.

When a retired professor from Imperial College who is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an admissions tutor from IC tell me entry standards have slipped, I believe them.

The succes of Britain at winning Nobel Prizes and in taking out patents shows the UK still is capable of producing great scientists . The problem is that too many scientists end up working in City of London. I remember talking to a scientist from UCL , the problem for the department was that many of those with doctorates left for the “City” .

Britain has a manufacturing capability which accounts for 15% of GDP, Germany’s is 25% of GDP. Companies such as Rolls Royce Aero Engines, Shell, BP, Rio Tinto, Unilever, consulting engineers, grand prix teams , drugs companies are Wold Class; we just need more of them.

Globalisation means the best students fom around the world are competing for jobs in the best companies. Children from comps have to compete with those from grammar and public schools for places at the best universities and employment in the best companies but also with those from overseas . Therefore, globalisation makes competition tougher for many people. Any British football player is now competing with people from around the World in order to play for a club in the Premier League.

How do we ensure the bright child from an inner city comprehensive has the same chance of obtaining the 3 or 4 As at “A” level in the hard subjects required to enter a top university, as someone from comprehensive in an affluent suburb, grammar or public school? If this cannot be achieved, many middle class professional parents will suport grammar schools or move to catchment areas of good comprehensives , often in the suburbs and pay for private tuition?

That’s a bit subjective, isn’t it? Seems to me like you’re pushing the “Inscrutable Asians good at maths” trope to me, with a possible “We must stop the Chinese and Indians takign over the world” twist. Older-style exams weren’t any more “stretching” educationally, they were just more oriented to regurgitation of large quantities of facts as opposed to critical thinking, which is why top dollar is paid for coaching schemes to pass these exams.

And as for the rest of your answer, there’s very little point in doing maths and engineering in the hope of getting a job in this country, as the Tory move to a service-based economy in the ’80s pretty much extinguished most of our industries in which they’d have be useful. In such endeavours, we’re mainly doing work for or with overseas firms, in which case the source of the qualification a candidate has is pretty immaterial. And the “Indian with a doctorate from Caltech [et al]” in all likelihood built up to that doctorate with an undergrad degree from his or her home country, so I don’t see what you’re driving at.

Globalisation means the best students fom around the world are competing for jobs in the best companes. Look at the number of Indians who graduate with american post grad degrees and work in Silicon Valley. Does anyone really think a silicon valley company , no matter how ethical, is going to recruit an american citizen from a poor university in preference to an Indian with a doctorate from Stanford, Berkely or Caltech?
Historically, entry to many middle class jobs was based on who one knew. Now it depends upon going to the right university . No matter how well connected a parent, hardly any organisation recruits to the high flyers streams, Tim Nice But Dim. This is a main reason why so many professional middle class parents are concerned about their childrens education. Michelle Obama’s parents did not send her to the local state university but Princeton and Harvard .

73. Pagar. Sounds like communism.

74. john b. Not yet, but more are going to the USA- actress from the Harry Potter films for one.

But is this fair? It’s not the case that anecdotal evidence has no weight at all. Rather, it’s the case that if anecdotal evidence is contradicted by good statistical analysis etc, we ought to reject the anecdotal evidence (because, as Chris Dillow points out, there are many reasons why anecdotal evidence might be unreliable that don’t apply to other sorts of evidence).

So, Dillow’s attack on Paul Sagar only has teeth if there is good non-anecdotal evidence that can act as a defeater for Sagar’s anecdotal evidence (for the view that standards have slipped in comps). Is there? I don’t know. But Dillow certainly didn’t bother to link to any. Given that, I’m inclined to take Sagar’s claims as prima facie plausible.

I’m pretty sure that these are exceptional cases though.

Not for British undergrads, they don’t.

The only certain way to address the problem of lack of equality in education is to eliminate parental choice and make certain all children are given the same opportunities. It logically follows that the only way to do this is by ensuring that they all have the same educational experience.

There is no question in my mind that Eton will be a much better school when it has to take a proportion of its intake from the Windsor council estates and that Oxford and Cambridge will be much better universities when they intake their fair share of mentally retarded students.

As nobody has taken issue with any of the above, perhaps we need to go a little further down the same line.

To equalise life chances for everybody, would it not be fairer to remove all children from their parents at birth and bring them up in state run institutions where they could be exposed to a uniform stimulus throughout their childhood? In this environment signs of individuality and initiative could be eradicated and anyone found doing anything better than anybody else could be dealt with appropriately.

This kind of upbringing will perfectly prepare children to become good and valued citizens of the kind of state we are in the process of building.