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Sharing success
Guardian 1/10/2008
The headmaster of Rugby school no doubt means well in his efforts to "reach out" to local schools (Letters, September 30), but seems to be unaware of the patronising nature of his assumptions. He discerns a need "to inject independent school best practice into the state sector" - as if state schools were sick patients - and later talks of "sharing expertise in curricular development with local schools", while having nothing whatever to say about what his own school might learn from such interaction. Clearly, his school is to be the bountiful provider and local schools are to be the grateful recipients, with their staff receiving "training" in how to improve on their dull "chalk and talk" methods. The success of independent schools is not primarily due to "expertise" or superior "practice", which exist in both private and state sectors - as do complacency and dullness - but to the expenditure of lavish resources upon carefully selected and highly motivated children. Perhaps Rugby's pilot project in philosophy will enable all its students to recognise this truth.
Michael Pyke, Campaign for State Education
Independent schools will always prioritise the rich and powerful - Guardian 25/6/2008
No amount of goodwill can alter the fact that private schools reinforce inequality
Bernard Trafford argues that the independent sector is "not just Eton and Harrow" but extremely varied, meeting a wide range of pupil needs; that independent schools try hard to be "good neighbours" to their maintained counterparts; and that they raise money to enable less wealthy children to have places (We're not all toffs, June 19).
He feels that the gulf between the private and maintained sectors is greatly exaggerated, and he expresses admiration and sympathy for state school colleagues, faced, as they are, with constant interference from government.
Trafford is not the first independent head to have persuaded himself that professional goodwill and a sense of community responsibility can overcome deep socio-economic fault lines. Sadly, he is wrong: no amount of goodwill can alter the fact that private schools in Britain, whatever their individual merits, collectively undermine public provision.
There may be variety within the independent sector but this cannot obscure the social role of most private schools, which is to act as the gated communities of British education, keeping out hoi polloi and those thought to be too difficult to educate. That some private schools, including Trafford's own, Wolverhampton Grammar School, try to be "good neighbours" by seeking to maintain links with their local community and its schools, is greatly to their credit; but Trafford would struggle to demonstrate that this is typical of the sector.
Trafford argues that he and other private sector heads "work our socks off" to fund bursaries for "far from affluent children". The economics of private schooling, however, dictate that such children can never number more than a handful, carefully selected on the basis of their ability; and the expression "far from affluent" is often a weasel term.
In Bedford, for example, four large private schools are able to give financial assistance to 7.5% of their pupils. This assistance is available to parents earning as much as £50k per annum (yes, really) for day schooling, and £64k for boarding. The four schools claim to have "no data" to indicate what proportion of their pupils would be entitled to free school meals, the standard measure of disadvantage in the maintained sector.
I accept that Dr Trafford's sympathy and goodwill for his state sector colleagues is wholly sincere and I endorse and welcome his comments on the damaging effect on schools of misconceived government policy; but I cannot accept his underlying message that we are all on the same side. We are not.
Schooling is not just about the intellectual, personal and social development of children: the way it is organised has profound consequences for the social and economic structures of the country. Since the Forster Education Act of 1870, the rich and powerful have insisted on educating their children separately from those of the rest of society, ensuring that privilege and inequality are reinforced and replicated. However much he dislikes the idea, Trafford cannot avoid being part of this system.
Tony Mitchell is a national executive member of the Campaign for State Education contact@campaignforstateeducation.org.uk
Good schools result from leadership - Independent 14/4/2008
Sir: Congratulations to Johann Hari on being the first commentator in a serious newspaper to break ranks with the prevailing educational orthodoxy.
For almost 20 years, governments have insisted that "failing" schools are the fault of poor school leadership and poor teaching and that "market forces" in the form of "parental choice" can be relied upon to bring about improvement. This has been in spite of overwhelming research evidence to the contrary. The result of this policy has been disastrous for the children of the poor, who have found themselves increasingly in "sink" schools, where their already low expectations have been reinforced.
If, as Hari suggests, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, has recognised the truth, that is to be greatly welcomed, but doubts will inevitably remain as long as the Government continues to roll out the preposterous and wasteful "academies" programme.
Michael Pyke, Campaign for State Education
Rural schools and the choice agenda - Guardian 8/2/2008
Even if Peter Preston's idea (Latte and lotteries, February 4) of distributing the "best" teachers around the state system were practical, it would have little discernible effect.
In spite of more than 10 years of conventional wisdom to the contrary, the quality of teaching is not the most important feature of a school. What really matters are the prior attainment of the pupils, their motivation to succeed and the extra resources available outside school. These, in turn, are a function of socio-economic circumstances.
The best chance for a child from a deprived background is to attend a school in which the peer-group culture is positive towards education. A proper system of comprehensive schools would make this a possibility for nearly all such children, but Labour's idiotic "choice and diversity" agenda has ensured that the children with the fewest resources are likely to be concentrated in the least "successful" schools. Labour's educational policies have actually entrenched social class division.
Preston's contention that good teachers "transform lives, poor ones ruin them" is largely a myth derived from old plays and sentimental films. It suits government to foster this nonsense because it is easier to blame teachers than to face the truth, which is that Labour is now the party of wealth and privilege.
Michael Pyke - Campaign for State Education
Charitable status - Independent 31/1/2008
Hilary Moriarty tries to argue that the tax relief conferred on independent schools by their charitable status can be seen as quid pro quo for the taxes paid by parents who do not make use of state education (Letters, EDUCATION & CAREERS, 24 January). On this basis, all taxpayers would be entitled to relief in respect of those public services that they do not directly use, a situation that would rapidly lead to anarchy and social breakdown.
Whatever their individual merits, independent schools collectively serve to undermine the cohesion of British society by reinforcing social and economic power and privilege. For them to have charitable status is completely ludicrous.
Michael Pyke, The Campaign for State Education
National audit on education changes - Guardian 17/11/2007
Jenni Russell (Comment, November 14) is right to be disturbed by the research reports from Lancaster and Cambridge universities that indicate the failure of costly initiatives, such as the academies and special schools programmes, to produce significant improvement in the education of those whom the education system currently designates as failures. She is wrong, however, to be surprised. Reports sponsored by the government (PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Audit Office, both this year) reveal much the same for anyone who reads beyond their upbeat executive summaries and looks at the data on which the reports are actually based.
Ms Russell's "hope that the new secretary of state will have the courage to look at the evidence anew" attributes to him a harmless naivety. Education serves a complex of purposes for the state we live in, but improving educational outcomes and life chances for the poor, otherwise known as failures, has always been of low priority. Moulding children to take their allotted place in the social hierarchy and defraying the costs to taxation through privatisation has always had a much higher priority, especially since Education Act of 1988.
The multitude of ungrounded, expensive and failed initiatives, all of which direct large sums to the private sector, only make sense in the context of the wider problems of managing the economy without altering the existing power relations. Putting the same money towards getting smaller class sizes, more and better paid teachers, and more basic resources such as books - rather like they have in private education - would have been just too radical.
Keith Lichman - Campaign for State Education
Failure to bite the bullet - Guardian 30/10/2007
Philip Beadle (There is a magic bullet to replace the sticking plasters, October 23) is absolutely right to describe government attempts to raise the standards of schools in deprived areas as "shiny sticking plasters covering an amputation". Expensive ones, too. A few of these initiatives will achieve some short-term success, but the long-term result will be more ministerial hand-wringing and huge amounts of wasted money. Although some of its details could be debated, Beadle's "nuclear option" of a genuinely comprehensive system is, broadly, what should have informed Labour's educational policies since 1997. But, when it comes to confronting vested interests, cowardice rules.
Michael Pyke - Campaign for State Education
Selective facts on academy schools - Guardian 3/10/2007
It does not seem to have struck David Cameron (Autonomy in the classroom, October 2) that "trusting heads and teachers" is not exactly consistent with "putting real power in the hands of parents". Sadly, it appears that, whoever wins the next election, our system of schooling will continue to reflect and reinforce existing social and economic inequality, as the ideas presented by Cameron are essentially no different from those that have brought us to where we are now. Earlier this year David Cameron got into trouble with his own party for courageously recognising that selective schools do not work for the poor. It's a pity that he has been unable to see that neither do "market forces", in the guise of offering parents "real school choice".
Michael Pyke - Campaign for State Education
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