Saturday 7 March 2015

Back To School

Despite David Cameron's latest Bourbon pronouncement on the subject, no free school was considered suitable for Nancy Cameron, just as none was last year for Beatrice Gove. We are all supposed to be terribly impressed that Cameron has acknowledged the existence of at at least one good school in the state sector, as if that were somehow news.

But it was recently shown that, for all their cosy relationships with admissions tutors, for all the routine representation of the swankier corners of higher education on their governing bodies, and for all their social cachet in general, the academic record of the commercial schools is such that they would be in special measures if they were subject to inspection by anyone other than their own former or aspirant employees.

Once they arrive at the better universities, state school pupils do far better than their expensively coached peers. The Camerons need hardly worry about their social cachet, so they can hardly be blamed for having chosen an academic education for their daughter, and therefore a state school.

Although I should love to know how the Grey Coat Hospital came to be one. Westminster, the other school closely associated with Westminster Abbey, most certainly is not. Very few of what are now state schools were founded, as the Grey Coat Hospital was, in 1698.

In fact, Church of England state secondary schools are quite rare. Primary schools were and are associated with individual parishes, but it was generally assumed that the Established Church was so enmeshed in the Tory county set, and vice versa, that having secondary schools run by the latter amounted to having them run by the former.

The existence of a state comprehensive with a special connection to Westminster Abbey, and reserving most of its places for the daughters of churchgoers, is one of the many thousands of contradictions of the lazy assertion that this country has a "one size fits all" model of secondary education.

Not merely the ad hoc cultures, but the formal institutional arrangements, of state education in each of the four parts of the United Kingdom are diverse to an extent that is incomprehensible to observers almost anywhere else, where the local school is just the local school.

That Cameron and Gove think so little of the free schools programme that was their party's only specific policy on any subject in 2010, is all the more reason for this year's incoming Labour Government to enact primary legislation making Cameron, Gove and Toby Young personally liable for the cost of the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme in order to pay for these vanity projects.

Nancy Cameron will run no risk of being exposed to the latest poisonous effusion of Gove's Henry Jackson Society partner in crime, Oliver Kamm. In what is no doubt a work of faultless British Standard English, Kamm advocates an end to the teaching of such to the plebs, in order to restrict their economic, social, cultural and political opportunities. What a hateful creature he is.

Not that anyone pays any attention to Kamm. It is nearly two years since he harassed David Goodhart with tweets ordering him not to attend a conference organised by John Milbank. But I know that David was there, because so was I.

He and John have both contributed to the political book of the year, the blueprint for the next Government, as has the head of the Labour Party's Policy Review, as has another highly plausible candidate for the next Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and as has a highly plausible candidate for Mayor of London.

There is no essay by Oliver Kamm.

No comments:

Post a Comment