"One size fits all" is an apt description of a system that takes people from every part of Britain, of all countries, and turns them out with the same accent, an accent that only they have.
If applicants from that background are finding it more difficult to gain admission to Oxford or Cambridge, then that may be because the people on the other side of the desk were now a much more international lot, to whom class quirks of speech, dress and so on were not merely unimpressive, but imperceptible.
Of course, such features still do and will matter to the people who run plenty of other things in Britain, so with or without the small extra expense of VAT on the fees, the schools that inculcated them will not be going bust anytime soon.
Their favoured IGCSE, which has been banned in the state sector for being too easy, is therefore safe for the foreseeable future. That may be another reason why Oxbridge no longer found their products attractive.
You are winding up all the right people.
ReplyDeleteAnd all that they can do is shout more loudly. Such fun.
DeleteRE your post on education...."Hitchens is behind the curve on Tony Blair's Westminster tutors for his two elder sons, but everyone on the Left knows that nothing in Britain is treated as really having happened until it has appeared either in the Tory papers or on the BBC. Private tutoring would go on whatever state education arrangements were in place, as it always has. Grammar schools did nothing about that, they still do not where they still exist, and they never would anywhere. ....Most egregiously, Hitchens extrapolates from a handful of extremely unusual London institutions to suggest that a state secondary school's location told you anything about it. I spent seven years as a pupil and eight as a governor of a comprehensive school, not one of those referred to above. It was in the most affluent part of its catchment area, but that said nothing at all about the place, as it still does not.
ReplyDeleteThis is embarrassing. The point about Blair hiring private tutors and sending his kids to exceptional, covertly selective fake comprehensives miles outside his area is that it reveals Blair didn't believe in the "non-selective" comprehensive system he imposed on everyone else by making it illegal to open new grammar schools. And while private tutoring will always exist, the obvious point (how could you have missed it?) is that if grammar schools were available in every town (rather than a few posh parts of mostly Southern England) then the kids of the sharp-elbowed middle class wouldn't be getting into them at the expense of the poor as there'd be enough places to go round.
The obvious reason that a school's location makes the difference as to its performance is that wealthier areas have more well-educated parents who can also afford to private-tutor or take time off to home-tutor their own kids and therefore the intake of the top-performing comprehensive schools is atypical even of their areas. The Sutton Trust (Selective Comprehensives" found: "Findings show that in all three nations, the proportion of disadvantaged pupils at the best comprehensive schools is around half of the average school, showing that their intakes are substantially different from the norm."
As Hitchens says, that is selection by money. And that's why estate agencies charge a premium for buying a place close to these schools. Often, this premium is actually higher than the fees for private tutors (or a private school).
In abolishing grammar schools, as Hitchens says, Anthony Crosland merely replaced selection by ability with selection by money.
You need to give this up because on Twitter even if not yet in print, Hitchens has.
DeleteNo he hasn’t. It’s just part of his “Britain is finished” spiel, that the comprehensive school revolution means we’re now so badly educated few could teach at a grammar school. He’s right that comprehensives have lowered standards among the general population but there are just enough escapees from it to provide teachers for grammar schools and we could always bring some in.
ReplyDeleteI was just pointing out your education post completely missed the point. The Sutton Trust’s research has proved the best comprehensives practice selection by money, as shown in the figures I quoted above.
He's given in. He was vaccinated, and now this. Make your own joke, I suppose.
DeleteIndeed Peter Hitchens is currently writing a book on the destruction of grammar schools and its disastrous effect on our educational standards (and social mobility).
ReplyDeleteThe book went to the publisher months ago. In the meantime, he has admitted on Twitter that what he envisages could not be staffed, so it could never happen. In any case, the Britain of the generation between the Butler Act and comprehensivisation was far more public school dominated than it is now, and private schools were if anything even less academic than they are now. They are very unacademic indeed now, even still using the IGCSE that has been banned in the state sector because it is too easy.
Delete