Why I don’t believe in faith schools
What’s to stop a bunch of North London Trot parents scraping two million quid together and sponsoring a secondary school with, as the jargon has it, a distinctive ethos? I have asked this question, semi-seriously, of people with a better understanding of New Labour educational policy than I can personally claim. As far as they can tell, such a project would technically be within the rules.
After all, Evangelical car salesmen with a few bob to spare have set up educational establishments that inculcate creationism. So why not Karl Marx Comp, where students get to study permanent revolution alongside evolution?
Of course, cynics will take one look at the political composition of the average inner city National Union of Teachers branch and argue that we are as near as dammit there already. And what of the omnipresent risk of a serious split in the sixth form, with a Reesite faction convening clandestine meetings behind the bikesheds to discuss major analytical differences over the potential for a united front orientation towards year seven?
I make these points, of course, after David Cameron attempts to embarrass the government over alleged state support for two schools run by the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation backfired humiliatingly, largely on account of half-arsed research. The claim of Hizb ut Tahrir involvement is, at best, not proven.
The Truth about Immigration – The migrants you don’t hear about in the tabloids
Fact: The population of the UK rose by 3.737 million people between 1990 and 2007.
Fact: Total net migration to the UK between 1990 and 2007 was 2.097 million, 56% of the total increase in population. Of that figure, 1.859 million stems from the period from 1997-2007.
Fact: Between 1997 and 2007, 1.292 million people were granted the right to settle in the UK.
Fact: Between 1997 and 2007, 1.646 million former migrants became British Citizens.
Fact: Net immigration rose significantly under New Labour. There is no denying that fact.
For some people those figures, alone, are sufficient reason to put up the shutters and declare that Britain is full, even if they barely scratch the surface when it comes to telling the real story of immigration over the last 12-18 years.
For example, although total net migration amounts to 1.859 million between 1997 and 2007, the number of people currently living in the UK with full settlement rights has risen by only 480,000. Britain is a net exporter of its own citizens, 811,000 in the period from 1997-2007 on top of the 297,000 (net) who left the UK between 1991 and 1996. So somewhere in the world right now, possibly Spain, someone is sitting down to read today’s copy of the Daily-o Mail-o and complaining bitterly to themselves about all the bloody Brits who’ve been going over there to take their jobs.
Migration is not a zero sum game. The net increase in Britain’s migrant population stems from population movements involving 12.454 million people between 1991 and 2007 (9.076 million since 1997) into and out of the UK. Of the 4.586 million foreign nationals who entered the UK between 1997 and 2007, 1.838 million had moved on by the end of 2007 and a further 1.51 million were still here only on a temporary basis, including 454,000 whose immigration status remains uncertain as they await a ruling on an asylum application. Of those pending applications, the data suggests that. A quarter, may be granted the right to settle or extended leave to remain in the UK, although it may be less than that as the UK tightens its approach to dealing to asylum seekers and most may eventually have to leave.
Once you drill down into the data, past the few scraps of information that make the tabloid headlines, the picture becomes ever more complex. It’s that picture we are endeavouring to present.
The Truth about Immigration
When New Labour’s election strategists sat down to look over the results of the 2005 general election, in which the party lost more seats than they expected, they quickly came to two very clear conclusions.
One was that middle-class opposition to the war in Iraq had spawned a protest vote from which the Liberal Democrats had been the main beneficiaries and had cost them a number of marginal seat. The other was that working class antipathy towards immigration was costing the party votes in its traditional heartlands.
Six weeks later, the government joined the race to the bottom on immigration in earnest with the publication of a new Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, which become law in 2006, restricting the right of appeal against refusal of entry that had previously been afforded to students, dependants and visitors to only human rights and discrimination grounds and imposing fines on employers who employ migrant workers who lack the necessary paperwork, i.e. entry clearance, leave to remain and/or a work permit.
The Conservatives may have spawned the mantra that ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’ but it was New Labour who gave it legitimacy.
continue reading… »
A Straight White Men’s Officer at SOAS..?
London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.
Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.
University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »
These are The Tories at Ground Zero
There’s a revelatory short post at the Adam Smith Institute yesterday. Here’s the most salient part:
You will never streamline the public sector by Treasury ministers bullying departments over money. Instead, you need a complete review of what government does, what it has to do, what it can do better, and what can be done better by other people and by the public. All departments need to buy into that, and it needs a reform, not a finance minister in charge if everyone is going to trust the process and be a part of it. After all, the process may find that spending in some areas should be increased, even if other departments are found to be doing a lot of pointless stuff.
In other words, the influential Adam Smith Institute wants to see an immediate post-election push towards savage public spending reductions in every single government department.
In one respect, of course, none of this is new. We know that the Conservative will cut public services, even if they are not as explicit as the Adam Smith Institute about the range of cuts.
continue reading… »
Tory Michael Gove offers support for controversial school programme
Since my last article on Steiner-Waldorf education in which I argued, that pseudoscience is not a valid educational choice, things have moved on somewhat.
In the last week or so Plymouth University has discontinued both its BA and Foundation degree courses in Steiner education, the only such courses in the UK.
Unlike Stockholm University, which took the same decision after concluding that the course literature contained ‘too much myth and too little fact’, Plymouth University have decided to axe their course due to poor recruitment and retention of students, although it is looking at incorporating a Steiner option into its existing BA course in Education Studies. They blame the government’s decision to withdraw funding for second degrees for the demise of these course. The excellent UK Anthroposophy blog has a rather more prosaic take.
Despite this obvious setback, the Steiner-Waldorf Schools Fellowship is pressing ahead with its efforts to get its nose into the state-funding trough by arranging a ’special pre-election seminar about possible developments in the state funding opportunity for Steiner schools’. This will take place on the 17th November 2009 at the Charity Centre in Euston.
And if you haven’t already guessed the ‘possible developments in state funding opportunity‘ are those already indicated by Tory Shadow Education Minister, Michael Gove:
Under the Tory proposals, new schools entering the state system would be free from the constraints of the statutory national curriculum.
Mr Gove believes many parents think the particular teaching styles “and atmosphere of the environment” at Montessori and Steiner schools would suit them and their children.
This event has, to say the least, an interesting line-up of guest speakers.
continue reading… »
Let’s talk about sex
The Government has announced plans today to make sex education in schools compulsory for all pupils between the ages of 15 and 16. Under the new proposals, all schools will have to teach personal, social, health and economic education to pupils from the age of five, but until those pupils reach 15 their parents will retain the right to withdraw them from classes. Staggeringly, considering the age of consent in this country is actually 16, that right currently exists for parents right up until their children hit 19.
Predictably, a good proportion of the commenters over at the Daily Mail have got their knickers in a twist about all this, as has Norman Wells, the director of the Family Education Trust, a group which believes that “behind the plausible-sounding arguments and innocuous-sounding words there is a specific agenda at work to undermine the role of parents and to tear down traditional moral standards” and that “Sex education is an ideological battlefield on which a war is being waged for the hearts and minds of our children.”
And equally as predictably, I wholeheartedly disagree. In fact I think sex education, or PSHE (or is it PSHEE now?) should be compulsory for all pupils, including those still at primary school.
That’s not to say that I think children as young as five should be learning about sex, but I do believe that even the very youngest children have a right to know some basics, like the correct terminology for parts of the human anatomy for instance, or the fact that it’s perfectly normal for both boys and girls to feel emotions and to cry. (I also believe it’s tantamount to neglect that in this day and age a girl of 16 can find herself pregnant because she “only did it the once and everyone told me I couldn’t get pregnant the first time,” as happened to a friend’s daughter.)
Teachers and classrooms: blaming inclusion
When set against the context of the number of children you’ll teach throughout a school year, incidents of violent, abusive or threatening behaviour are actually quite rare. The occasions when a pupil dreams up allegations of abuse by a teacher are rarer still, and the occasions when those false allegations result in disciplinary action or a criminal conviction are even more infrequent.
That said, everyone’s heard at least one horror story about a teacher who’s been the victim to a malicious allegation. It does happen, and more can be done at school, local authority & central government level to ensure that good and safe teachers are protected from career-destroying fairy tales. Ending the atrocious policy of isolating accused teachers from contact with their colleagues would be a good place to start.
So it’s not like I’m ambivelent to or dismissive of a problem which does prey on a lot of teachers’ minds, and the general thrust of Jenni Russell’s piece on the topic is generally correct. Still, it is a Jenni Russell piece, and so every article must contain at least one moment of eye-watering idiocy:
Classrooms are becoming more difficult to manage because the policy of inclusion means that children with emotional, mental or physical difficulties are being put into mainstream schools without the extra support they need to cope.
Whether Russell is basing this on any actual evidence is unclear, but unlikely.
continue reading… »
Fact-checking Michael Gove on Churchill
Further to my recent blog on Michael Gove and his education policies, there was one other part of Gove’s speech at party conference I found pretty irritating:
The body responsible for writing the curriculum – the QDCA – spends more than one hundred million pounds every year – and after hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill.
I guess it’s always possible that he’s right. Maybe there’s some secret document doing the rounds, written by scores of ‘unaccountable quangocrats’ which does indeed remove Winston Churchill from the history curriculum. But it would have to be a secret document, because when you hop over to the QCDA’s website, you’ll actually find quite a few references to Britain’s Greatest Ever Tory.
He’s mentioned here, here and here, in these guidance notes for teachers and, rather inconveniently for Mr Gove, in this rather unwieldy PDF (p22):
continue reading… »
The Miseducation of Michael Gove
I suppose there’s a difference between the harmless conference season patter shadow education secretary Michael Gove practices now, and the more mundane – but massively consequential – steps he’ll take as Secretary of State.
On arriving at the DCSF, he’ll hopefully be informed that most schools do, in fact, have school uniforms, that classes are often set by ability and that for all the horrid neglect of Winston Churchill in history lessons, kids are at least not being taught that WWII was won single-handedly by a smilin’ Joe Stalin.
Take this list of topics Gove wants kids to be taught in history lessons. All our Greatest Brit hits are on there: the Roman invasion, 1066, the Bill of Rights, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Reform Act, both world wars (with particular emphasis on the awesomeness of a former Tory PM!) and something rather vaguely called “Modern history to the present”.
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having knowledge about these or any other areas of British (or even – gasp! – non-British) history, and it’d come in extremely handy if your son or daughter ever wanted to work in a museum or on Time Team. However, the emphasis here is on what is taught, when it should really be about what is learnt.
continue reading… »
Tory education policy: Set ‘em while they’re young
Here’s my (brief) story. I’m a web developer, I dabble in new web technologies and find it all incredibly exciting. I started web development almost as soon as I first got an opportunity to go on to the internet, around 1998 and years later I took Computer Science at A-Level and university. Yet despite all of this I was never at any point sure, not even 70 or 80% let alone 100%, what it was I wanted to *be* when I “grew up.”
One of the reasons for this was the feeling that the state of this world was not one for pigeon-holing one’s self; I’d started my journey with 28.8kbps internet, AOL chat rooms and over the next 5 years was entering a world of ISDN, CSS, standards and the monopoly of internet explorer.
The fact was that the world of employment and hobby could change very quickly, for the better or for the worse. For me a broad understanding of science, mathematics, philosophy and literature would provide for my future far better than becoming an absolute expert in the one field that I had such an affinity for.
So why, in this world of changing ambitions, vast opportunities for development and greater accessibility to new careers and education, do Tories want to propose to set up highly specialised schools for kids aged 14+?
continue reading… »
BNP: a very British Berufsverbot
Police officers and prison workers are already banned from becoming members of the British National Party. Now the government is considering the addition of the teaching profession to a growing list of jobs covered by Britain’s slowly expanding backdoor Berufsverbot.
But should the left support the introduction of a softly-softly version of the German system, which forbids members of all organisations deemed by the state to be extremist from holding public sector employment?
Is such legislation somehow OK if it applies to sensitive positions only, keeping the fash out of the classrooms and the cop shops while still allowing them to Sieg Heil to their heart’s content while emptying our wheelie bins? continue reading… »
Academics: sexist and out of touch
By now most of you will have picked up on Dr Kealey of Buckingham University’s disgusting piece in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in which he advises university lecturers to treat their female students as ‘perks’, and enjoy watching the little hussies ‘flaunt their curves’. (KJB has a brilliant satire on the whole fiasco over at Get There Steppin’).
Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count – straight, male ones – Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that ‘normal’ young women are more interested in men than in their education:
Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?
“Enjoy her! She’s a perk.
Welfare handouts, idle people and Michael Portillo
On August 30, former Tory MP Michael Portillo penned a Sunday Times article carrying the headline ‘Idle young should be entitled to nothing‘, a celebration of the ideology and beliefs of controversial American libertarian Charles Murray, a bloke who gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s for his statements about “the underclass” and the alleged link between ethnicity and intelligence (see here for an overview).
Particularly surprising is the fact that the champion of such ideas is Michael Portillo, the man who, a few years ahead of David Cameron, called for a Tory makeover that would disentangle the party from the deepest right-wing morass it was stuck in. Compare in fact Portillo’s mid-90s ‘SAS speech’ with the cuddly toy TV personality currently hopping from one settee to another on Andrew Neil’s This Week.
In any case, Portillo is guilty of superficially rehashing ideas that don’t have a leg to stand on now any more than they did back in the Eighties. Notions that go back and forth like a tennis ball between Daily Mail columnists and neo-Conservative politicians to the point that they’ve grown into their default ideological background.
One phrase in particular struck me for its staggering degree of superficiality.
continue reading… »
What’s really worrying about Tory health plans
The more I think about Tory health plans, the more they worry me. And I’m not talking about Daniel Hannan.
Hannan does worry me, of course, because there’s clearly something wrong with him (a case study in the dangers of under-funded mental health services if ever there was one). But he will, at least, be a very long way from anywhere he can do any real damage.
The people who’ll decide the fate of the health service in any Conservative administration will likely be David Cameron and Andrew Lansley. And what they’ve decided, it seems, is to keep throwing cash at the NHS.
That is what worries me.
continue reading… »
The Sun: a hypocrisy machine
The Sun’s exclusive on Theresa Winters, the woman from Luton who has had all thirteen of her children taken into care and is now pregnant with her fourteenth, ticks all the paper’s buttons. Broken Britain, scrounging feckless layabouts and of course the bourgeois journalists working for a “working class” newspaper sneering at their own target market.
It doesn’t really make much difference that I can’t think of anything less feckless than being perpetually pregnant, and that yet again the paper is pushing for benefit reform by finding the most extreme case it can, regardless of how the kind of reform it demands would punish those who are deserving as well as those who “aren’t”.
Combine this with the casual dehumanisation which infects all such stories, with Winters described as the “Baby Machine”, leeches and slobs and you have a classic example of a newspaper providing its readers with a target they can hate without feeling bad about doing so.
continue reading… »
How important is ‘civility’ in society?
Last week I looked at the Conservative crusade against the ‘broken society’, and pondered why that campaign had found resonance where John Major’s ‘back to basics’ had failed. Responding to that post, Joe Hallgarten linked to this report from the Young Foundation which explores whether a renaissance of civility could help us shrug off this societal gloom.
Earlier, I discussed the Rowntree Foundation’s publication on ‘social evils‘, which reported that the public believed the modern age had made us more selfish & individualistic, less honest & compassionate.
As with the report on social evils, defining what does and does not constitute ‘civility’ is difficult because we don’t all interpret each other’s behaviours in the same way. Likewise, there’s no research method available which could tell us whether we’re being more or less civil to each other; the only thing we can measure is whether people feel they experience civility, and even then you’re relying on the subjectivity of human experience. It’s simply impossible to measure this kind of thing objectively.
continue reading… »
Why does the right keep believing in grammar schools?
Why do so many people think grammar schools are a way of improving social mobility? It’s not because the social research says they are. I suspect instead that plain error is involved.
One such error is the availability heuristic, mixed with survivorship bias. The handful of working class people for whom grammar schools were a means of upward mobility have high profiles, make lots of noise and get lots of attention. It’s easy, therefore, to over-estimate their numbers.
continue reading… »
Purnell: What might have been
As James Purnell launches his new think tank project, having seemingly learned nothing from his undistinguished ministerial career, it seems an appropriate moment to look at how things might have been so different.
So let me present, from Paskini’s alternative history files:
continue reading… »
Banning the BNP from classrooms?
I doubt this’ll work for everyone, but before deciding whether or not to support some new legislation, I like to set a few simple tests. First, the proponents would need to convince me that the problem they wish to address is important enough to require legislation, that only legislation could solve this problem and that the proposed legislation will actually work.
Next, you’d have to be pretty circumspect in ensuring that the ’solving’ of this problem wouldn’t then create a chain of unintentional negative consequences in the months & years to come, and that it doesn’t further restrict the liberty of people whose behaviours aren’t bothering or harming anyone.
By those standards, I’m not yet convinced by the recent call from the NASUWT to ban members of the BNP from the teaching profession.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
|
66 Comments 20 Comments 13 Comments 10 Comments 18 Comments 4 Comments 25 Comments 49 Comments 31 Comments 16 Comments |
|
LATEST COMMENTS » Sunny Hundal posted on Complete tits » Lee Griffin posted on The Labour leadership's token contender.. and it's not Diane Abbott » dan posted on Defend the urban fox! » Richard W posted on Boris rise for Living Wage left of Labour » Julian Swainson posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » sally posted on Complete tits » Joanne Dunn posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Lovely Lynnette Peck posted on How many cabinet MPs went to private schools? » Nick posted on Why don't MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours? » Bob B posted on Complete tits » Nick posted on Complete tits » Mike Killingworth posted on Complete tits » Mr S. Pill posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits » Nick Cohen is a Tory posted on Complete tits |
