| [Education For Tomorrow: No 95, 2008] Any hope for Jason? The battle in defence of the comprehensive school (part two) Jason brought suspicious objects into school a number of times in the past: a steel comb, a Stanley knife, a pen knife, a box of matches, the circular blade from a brush cutter, and an adjustable wrench. He has issued threats to other children, but there has been no evidence of serious physical bullying. On this particular morning, in the playground, before school, everybody’s attention was drawn to a rumpus. Jason and a woman who turned out to be his mother were wrestling on the ground. Two teachers rushed over and, after sustaining some kicks, restrained Jason and managed to release his grip on a nine-inch kitchen knife wrapped in a polythene bag. His mother had been alerted when she saw that he was clearly hiding something in his sleeve. It later transpired that he had threatened a fellow-pupil the previous afternoon that he would be ‘cut up’. By the way, Jason is eight, one of five children, another being on the way. There is more than one father, but none in evidence at the moment. His school-age siblings are in care and Jason was recently returned to his mother after being fostered for several months. An elder brother is implicated in a recent stabbing a few miles away. Is there much hope for Jason? How unlike the daily life of a private school! After a decade in power New Labour has failed to ameliorate the problem of poverty and social division dismally. For society’s consequent ills, teachers and comprehensive schools take a regular lashing from the government. Don’t get me wrong: schools can and do make a difference, but schools have the children for only 25 per cent of their waking hours each year and none at all before they enter the nursery. The base-line assessments of so many children at age four or five indicate parental neglect or ignorance or both, basic social and cognitive skills being at such a low level that the early years are a catch-up challenge. If the home circumstances are a constant negative drag on the child’s progress, then attainment may remain below average regardless of the school’s best efforts. The Blair-Brown target culture is based on the notion that if you bully them enough, teachers will solve the problem of under-achievement (and the health workers will sort out the hospitals for you) within a five-year parliament and ensure your re-election. They press on with this failed strategy and the proliferation of academies, specialist schools, faith schools, trust schools, federations, their deplorable Private Finance Initiative schemes, as well as consultancies replacing local education authorities. De-regulation and privatisation of the state school system has moved apace and we now see the first step in the direction of the privatisation of the examinations industry. All of this will only make matters worse and eventually the tangled mess will have to be undone. No quick fix Brown, Balls and Adonis, listen to me. There is no quick fix, but there are two principal measures which will assuredly result in a better future for the nation’s children: implement a genuine programme to end the relative poverty of millions and end selection in all its forms. The welfare state and nationalised industries born of the 1945 Labour government and the resurrection of the economy after thirty years of depression and war were starved and stunted by the obsession with retention of the Empire, rearmament for the Cold War and the struggle to maintain a world role. Maintaining armies in the colonies, joining the Americans in Korea and driving for nuclear weapons caused a massive diversion of resources at the expense of modernising industry and significantly improving the social and economic state of the working class. Even the leaders of the Labour left were sucked in by the hubris of this grandiose enterprise to make Britain second only to the USA as a world policeman. And it continues to this day; hence Iraq, Afghanistan and our feeding of the insatiable maw of the military. Instead of economic morality we have Labour’s total weddedness to the market economy; all virtues derive from the market and all deficiencies are the fault of state intervention. Brown, like Blair, sits at the feet of Thatcher. While lots of people receive indecently inflated salaries and bonuses, others have not enough to live a normal life. The gap between rich and poor widens. The social problems we see among the least well-off in the population can only be solved by redistributive policies which substantially increase their total share of the nation’s wealth in terms of employment opportunities, wages, benefits, pensions, housing, health services and education and training. The multiply deprived, those in poverty, can fairly be described as socially excluded, provided that term is taken to mean that many families, and even whole communities, have a level of resources (wages, benefits, decent housing etc.) which is so below the average that they are effectively excluded from ordinary, generally accepted family life, living patterns, health standards and social mores. Economic morality The relief of such poverty lies not in the largely punitive policies emanating from Downing Street’s Social Exclusion Unit (which has morphed into the Social Exclusion Taskforce), which sees the solution to everything in limiting benefit entitlements and forcing everybody into a job, no matter how dead-end and low paid. Instead we need radical redistributive measures implemented through higher minimum wages and benefits, through the tax system, provision of high-quality social housing, better financed local social services, the NHS and the education system. Without such moves towards economic morality and social justice teachers will continue to find many problems of under-achievement to be intractable (and there will be no hope for my Jason). ‘The views in this report are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department for Children, Schools and Families.’ Thus reads the public health warning on a recent report on secondary school admissions commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) and destined for the ministerial dustbin. The study (DCSF Research Report RR020, January 2008) was conducted by Sheffield Hallam University and the National Centre for Social Research. The point of the study was to find out how much change there had been by 2006 in admissions practices, and parents’ experiences of the process, since the introduction of the School Admissions Code of Practice 2003, which has been beefed-up a bit from 2007. Not surprisingly, church schools were found to be less compliant with the 2003 Code and more likely to ‘covertly select’ than community schools. No surprise, too, that the local authorities with grammar schools had more social segregation between their schools, fewer parents gaining their first preference and more appeals. Furthermore, as numerous studies have confirmed, while the retention of the eleven-plus results in marked social selection, there is ‘little if any compensating gain in overall educational standards.’ With the increase in so-called specialist schools, with their right to select ten per cent of their intake by aptitude, there has been an increase in this type of selection, the voluntary-aided and foundation schools being ‘much more likely to select in this way than Community or Voluntary Controlled schools’ and ‘there are strong arguments to suggest that selection by aptitude is likely to be socially selective by default.’ In setting out possible means of ameliorating or removing the worst effects of present secondary school admissions policies, the report points out that ‘Selection by ability/attainment is currently also largely selection by social background’ and gently concludes that ‘One option would be to abolish selection by attainment.’ Simple: abolish the grammar schools and end the special status of the faith schools. If I thought the likes of Balls and Adonis could ever bring themselves to read educational research papers, rather than majestically plucking their mad ideas from the ether, I could imagine them gagging on that conclusion. The report then caps it by saying: ‘Some of the educational and social cohesion benefits of eliminating segregation between schools would be lost if social segregation was reintroduced within schools. Procedures such as streaming and setting pose this danger.’ Balls and Adonis dash for the nearest cliff in a demonic Gadarene fit. The report’s authors, mildly spoken academics (but clearly members of the monstrous ‘educational establishment’) then conclude: ‘A fairer and more effective admissions system will not solve the problems of lack of equal educational opportunity or social mobility but it can make a valuable contribution in combination with other policies.’ And those other policies would include the abolition of the independent schools, and if that is too much to ask, then at least the introduction of social and economic morality into our national life. Hope for the Jasons? Colin Yardley |