The Guardian 14/1/12
Comprehensive students welcome
As an Oxford admissions tutor, I recognise some elements of Jeevan Vasagar's examination of the Cambridge admissions system (G2, 11 January), but not the division drawn between "good" and "poor" schools. Some of us welcome applications from comprehensive school students, not because these candidates can do well in spite of their school, but because their education offers them an excellent foundation for university. Many comprehensives offer imaginative lessons, encourage independent study, and provide an unparalleled social education. Being educated alongside pupils from a wide range of backgrounds gives these candidates the ability to negotiate cultural and social difference in debate, and the confidence to relate abstract or scholarly theory to the wider society in which they live.
They also know that academic success is founded on hard work and effort, not on family background and wealth - the criteria for entry to private schools - or the innate "talent" that selective schools claim to identify. Most importantly, comprehensives still provide far more students with the opportunity to do A-levels and apply to university than do private or state selective schools. They therefore send us candidates who would never otherwise have had the chance of a university education, but who go on to excel. Any weaknesses with comprehensive schools are due to the lamentable lack of government investment in them. It is a tribute to their teaching staff that their students continue to shine.
Dr Selina Todd
St Hilda's College, Oxford
Fairness and equality in education
The Guardian 19/10/11
Reading Neal Lawson and Ken Spours on education, one is tempted to wonder if they ever set foot in a state school during the 30 years they affect to understand. Phrases like "the [left's] mantra of … universalism of state education and comprehensive schools" imply a uniformity of institution that never existed. The "comprehensive school" embodied an ideal of fairness and equality of access for all children and it emerged through grassroots pressure. Parents, distressed by the damage that selective education and the grammar school system were doing to their children's life-chances, were able to impress their demand for fairness on democratically elected local councils. Fully comprehensive schools, populated by children with a complete range of abilities and backgrounds, were inevitably rare in the context of an education system that always retained a high level of selection by social class and religion.
Now, in the newspeak of the Department for Education, comprehensive schools of any kind no longer exist as a type of school. The category has been "disappeared" from its website. What is iniquitous among the manifold problems created by Gove's education policy is the closing down of any route to popular reform of education. Academies and free schools are effectively privatised schools divorced from local democratic input. What happens in them is contingent on the whim of the secretary of state or the school's private management. Whatever dissatisfied parents may want for their local schools, they will find it much harder to get because no democratically elected local authority will have the right to provide it.
Keith Lichman, Campaign for State Education
11-plus is enemy of advancement - not its envoy
TES 8/7/11
Dr Andrew Norman (letters July 1st) "calculates" that, had the 11+ examination been retained throughout the UK, there would now be 7,800 state educated undergraduates at Oxbridge and that, on this basis, 25,200 state educated pupils have been deprived of an Oxbridge place during the past 40 years.
Unfortunately for Dr Norman's theory, there are actually more than 10,000 state educated undergraduates currently at Oxbridge and the proportion of such students has risen from 37% in 1964 - the heyday of the post-war grammar school - to 56% in 2010. Indeed, Oxford is about to admit its highest ever proportion of state educated pupils.
Ironically, Dr Norman's naive and simplistic calculations lead to a conclusion which is the exact opposite of the one he wishes to draw: the sooner selection at 11 is completely abolished, the better.
Michael Pyke, Campaign for State Education
School admissions are in chaos
Evening Standard 31/5/2011
Evening Standard 31/5/2011
Allowing "good" schools to expand is fraught with difficulty. What if, having expanded, a school's quality is deemed to have declined? Will the new classrooms, equipment and teachers be moved to some other school that has become "good"?
The ban on lotteries applies only to those which are used throughout a local authority - a very rare practice - and not to individual schools. It is worth noting that South Korea, whose schools are more successful than ours, allocates all secondary school places by lottery.
Michael Pyke, Campaign for State Education