The roots of Britain’s shocking educational underattainment, …. is the ongoing educational apartheid that polarises David Cameron’s really and truly brazenly elitist Eton on the one hand with Bog Standard Comprehensives for the rest of the population on the other.

Schools need to have the socially mixed intakes that facilitate classroom learning.

Not so.

The 7% who pay to have their kids educated privately do not tend to live in the catchment areas of the sink schools; they live in upmarket parts of town.

If you stopped the rich from educating their kids privately tomorrow, they wouldn’t be sending them to the down at heel comprehensives near the council estates. They’d go to the schools in the affluent leafy suburbs.

So how would their inclusion in the state system help?

#1

One word for you:

Bussing.

The Tories don’t even need to get into this level of detail. So long as they smash collective pay bargains and allow schools the freedom to having their own hiring policies, salaries for good teachers should rise naturally: http://www.springerlink.com/content/8jhnh043kq4ppn8f/

The Tories don’t even need to get into this level of detail. So long as they smash collective pay bargains and allow schools the freedom to having their own hiring policies, salaries for good teachers should rise naturally:

…or school managements will screw down wages to cut costs?

Managers could do that but they won’t last long in the ed bizz if they do. If people have a choice of school, they’ll tend to go to the school with the better teachers. And better teachers will, other things being equal, teach at schools with better pay and conditions.

Managers could do that but they won’t last long in the ed bizz if they do

Really? Presumably the kids who don’t get into the good schools have to go somewhere? A manager who was better at delivering some form of education on the cheap might just find his/her niche in such a ‘market’.

The parasitical dominance of financial services has distorted the British economy to the point where these are virtually the only realistic career choices for anyone who desires anything as basic as a house in a half-way decent part of London

The rest of us, however, don’t give a shit. A teacher’s salary is pretty good money in most places.

“Teaching used to attract good people with good degrees from good universities, because they made the conscious decision that they wanted to be teachers.”

I don’t think so. It mopped them up because they had nowhere else to go that had a pension attached. Clever, educated women especially, had limited career choices compared to today and would become teachers rather than going into banks or joining the FO where they would only be allowed to do the typing. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘secret subsidy’ of state education post-war.

The way to get good people back into schools, though, isn’t to make it better paid or more ‘prestigious’, it is to make it more dossy. That has always been the attraction of teaching: lots of time off. It is the whittling away of this that has forced out the aspiring novelist of real ability and it is why the public schools do better in that regard, I think.

This happens already to a certain extent – two primary school teachers were having a conversation about this in a meeting – one had started midway through the ‘scale’ due to getting a First at uni when the female teacher had started at the bottom due to getting a 2:2.

Does this happen in all public sector roles or just teaching? Do Doctors get paid more based on their degree grade? Isn’t there a case for more intricate and careful grading at uni level – as the male teacher in my example above may have done only slightly better if she had a high 2:2 and he had scraped a First?

There is also the issue of working class graduates doing worse than middle class grads – it seems unfair that their socio-economic background should dictate their salary so starkly…

That said – I do seem to meet a lot of middle-class grads with Thirds who seem to have better jobs and positions in society than I do due to having more money for an MA, better contacts through parents, etc, so perhaps they should get less money than ppl with upper seconds who scraped their way through uni like I had to!

“Really? Presumably the kids who don’t get into the good schools have to go somewhere? A manager who was better at delivering some form of education on the cheap might just find his/her niche in such a ‘market’.”

Thats the “lump of good schools” fallacy you have there. So long as new schools are permitted to come into existence to challenge bad practices, overall bad schools will be driven out of the marketplace.

In the same way, there are different sorts of supermarkets catering to different customer requirments, but it is very difficult to say which one is truly “the best” because anyone that truly stands out as better for very long is emulated by all the others. Is there a “best optician” in the UK? If there is, there isn’t very much in it.

@10: “So long as new schools are permitted to come into existence to challenge bad practices, overall bad schools will be driven out of the marketplace.”

Yes, I understand the competitive theory but market pressures may take longer to work out than the length of a child’s school career.

Secondly, because of deeply embedded neighbourhood cultures, there are localities where tradition and habit effectively determine school choice and outside biggish urban areas there may be little practical alternative to going to the local comprehensive school. In short, the competitive market theory isn’t necessarily effective in rooting out bad schools.

Does no one here recall the case of The Ridings School in Halifax:

“The Ridings School in Halifax – once labelled the worst school in the country – is to be closed down after more than a decade of rescue attempts.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7067956.stm

Is no one addressing the issue of the very different structures of comprehensive schools: the popular combination of 11-16 comprehensives linked to 6th form colleges, all through 11-18 comprehensives and the Leicestershire Plan structure of 11-14 junior high schools feeding 14-18 senior high schools.

IMO the major problem with 11-16 comprehensives is that the final year is highly likely to be dominated by early school leavers in deprived neighbourhoods and that effectively decides the character and values of the school.

The problem with “choice”, and the reason why it doesn’t resonate with most parents is that the urban elite imagine that everywhere is like London, denseley populated with most people everyone having at least a theoretical choice of state school. What they, and the centralised education bureaucracy don’t seem to understand is that outside London (i.e where most of the population actually live) there is in reality no “choice” unless you are prepared to get up in the middle of the night and have a 100 mile round trip for a school run.
This is why the “market” model of education won’t work unless it is a genuine market where it is relatively easy to set up local schools, state intereference is minimal (confined to regualtatory compliance, not “policy”) and where it is the parents who exercise choice. The latter can only be acheived through some form of voucher system.

“Yes, I understand the competitive theory but market pressures may take longer to work out than the length of a child’s school career.”

It could well do but policies of any sort take a longtime to change any real outcomes on the ground. It is useless to pretend that command and control policies, even if they happen to be useful, get there quicker. It is actually a very bad habit of politicians to promise watershed changes in service provision overnight. Like all services, improvements in educaton will happen very gradually as a result of local experimentation and competition.

11. Bob b . Good points. Many inner city comprehensives which perform poorly have many violent and unruly children. If Reform Schools were recreated teachers could be selected and trained to deal with such violent and disruptive pupils. Consequently, teachers at comprehensives could actually spend a whole period teaching rather than having to perform the duties of a police officer, social worker and psychologist. The success of private , grammar and religious schools is in part, their ability to not select out and / or expel disruptive violent and disruptive pupils.

Bob b . Last para good point. Those who want to leave school but have to wait until the GCSEs are over can be very disruptive and serious damage the education of others.

Schools need to have the socially mixed intakes that facilitate classroom learning.

Uh huh? And how would you suggest this should be done? If you weren’t so focused on London you’d realise that there are parts of the country that have this by default simply because – as someone has pointed out above – transport makes a ‘market’ in education impossible. But how is this going to happen in a big city where there’s money sloshing about and people can make placing requests, move house or go private?

Working class children need to be incentivised to swot

‘Incentivised’ indeed! Set an example and write proper English, goddamnit!

“chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system”

Perception?

The system is blatantly broken. That’s our starting point here. The Tories might not have come up with any solutions (I mean really, their proposals are nonsense) but they have identified the problem. Meanwhile the stereotypical leftwinger blames the good schools for the failures of the bad schools.

For those of us who work in comprehensives in deprived areas we aren’t calling out for more middle class students; we are calling for good management at every level: school, local authority and government. Instead we get managers who blame teachers for the anarchy in their schools, local authorities who spend a fortune on initiatives that don’t improve teaching, and ministers who are simply oblivious to what goes on in schools.

Teaching used to attract good people with good degrees from good universities

sorry but this is a perpetuation of Cameron’s boneheaded elitism. There’s no reason why a graduate of UCL should be any more capable a teacher of GCSE or a-level english than a graduate of Manchester Met.

and from personal experience, teaching attracts those who are most enthusiastic about their subjects, regardless of university or degree outcome. I’ve known so many students who had no interest in the subject – it was just the one they got the best grades in at a-level. They were probably canny enough to get a 2.1 then went into finance.

and they’re the people who cameron thinks will be best equipped to teach.

the lack of logic is staggering. i know this is blatantly playing to middle england wing voters, but it still demonstrates the tories’ utter lack of genuine policy.

17. organic cheeseboard. Look at the web sites of the top public and grammar schools:most of the staff com from the best universities, many with higher degrees. If we wish to reduce social inequality, having teachers with B.Ed degrees in science employed by inner city comprehensives is unlikley to educate pupils to high enough standards to read maths, science , engineering or medicine at Oxbridge/UCL or Imperial. Many teachers with a B.Ed in science are unlikley to be able to stretch the brightest pupils. Schools such as Winchester and Manchester Grammar now enter their pupils in national and international olympiad competitions. A school, whose pupils who are successful in winning medals at maths, physics and chemistry olympiads are advertising their expertise at teaching these subjects to the World. An Asian business tycoon who wants the best education in maths, physics and chemistry for their children is liklely to send them to the school with the best results.

funnily enough, a friend of mine has a b.Ed in science (because their anth degree from oxford wasn’t enough), from a non-traditional university, and they now teach at a very ‘elite’ public school. rather undermines your point. but since it was based entirely on evidence which exists in your mind i guess that’s only to be expected.

a good degree does not make you a good teacher.

this kind of deluded nonsense about making all state schools like manchester grammar would be laughable if it wasn’t so offensive.

once again proving that tories and their supporters are truly disinterested in the working class. this is a transprent attempt to woo middle england but it’s still an unworkable, boneheaded policy.

19. Organic cheeseboard. It is about making sure a bright pupil from a poor back ground attending an inner city comprehensive receives the same quality of education as those attending Winchester of MGS such that they have equal opportunity of entering a top universty.Something like only 30% of comprehensive pupils are taught science by a teacher with a degree in the subject. In adition,many comprehensive pupils do not take take single subject science GCSEs. Science , technology, maths and medicine at Russell Group universities and even more so in the G5( Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL and LSE) are dominated by by those from grammar and public schools. Look at the teachers at grammar and public schools who prepare pupils for STEM subjects at G5 universities, most come from similar intitutions.

It is very difficult for a school to allocate resources of only 1 or 2 pupils are good enough to apply to a G5 university and it is difficult for the pupils. Most schools tend to have a bias to the arts or the sciences so it is worse if the pupil attends a school which is not so good at the subjects they wish to study. If there are about 6 or more pupils for each A level subject who are good enought to apply to a G5 university support is much easier for the school to provide the resources and the mentoring . In addition, the pupils can help each other. Schools which regularly send people to G5 universities know what to expect and can mentor the pupils from the moment they start their A levels.

Perhaps it would be an idea for all boroughs/county to have teachers who can move around schoools and ensure all those considering applying to Russell Group and especially G5 universities are mentored and given any additional teaching required. Poor bright hard working children from inner city comprehensives need the quality of teaching which will enable them to fulfil their potential and enter our World Class universities.