Skool rules ok
Latest installment of Mills v McCartney saga seems to be a fight over whether Beatrice should go to private school or not with Macca dead against.
Private education, in his estimation, “messes up” children and he hopes Beatrice would gain from being grounded by the experience of state schooling. Sir Paul has told friends how his other children had “certainly turned out all right”.
Is the fact that one is a fashion designer, another a photographer and the third “working in the music industry” an indication of other resources available to them (cultural capital)? I imagine it wasn’t a sink school/bog-standard comp that they attended and that the McCartney brand must have helped rather than hindered their passage in life.
All this comes hot on the heels of George Osborne’s U-turn in withdrawing his kids from the state primary for a £11k a year per head private school - a move condemned by bloggers such as Mike Ion and Recess Monkey. The comments thread on the Telegraph piece on it mainly consists of colonel blimp type saying it doesn’t matter a jot whether they go.
Although I recognise that the “setting an example” argument could apply in the Osborne case, I always got used to the idea that Tories did think themselves above the schools that the vast majority send our kids to. It is more shocking when Labour politicians choose to buy their way out of the state sector as happened with Diane Abbott amongst others. In my view the main aspect of private schools that needs immediately reforming is their charitable status. Many have huge endowments and they seem to be all engaged in a huge tax dodge.
Anyway surely the issue is grammar schools and how they continue to create elitism within the state sector and practice nothing short of educational apartheid: a child’s future determined by an exam sat the age of sometimes just 10. It may not be a big issue in metropolitan areas but in Chesham and Amersham one of the best organised and most vocal pressure groups is “Bucks Parents for Comprehensive Education”. In my book New Labour has been pretty timid on this one, serving up an inscrutable system requiring a ridiculously high threshold to even get held dressed up as “parental choice”. Phasing out these schools would not even cost a single Labour seat in the county of Buckinghamshire.
My three year old will hopefuly start at the local authority primary this September myself, if he gets in. It’s massively oversubscribed and the catchment area seems to be shrinking as people purchase property (or even temporarily rent) to get their offspring in. It’s another (covert) form of selection (by house-price) which maintains educational inequalities – something that Labour is officially against.
February 14, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Labour have ruined state education in this country.
A pathetic 15% of white, working class boys get 5+ good GCSEs.
I was lucky, they still had Grammar Schools where I grew up.
Now that they have been abandoned, how do poorer kids get up the ladder ?
February 14, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Yes, but what would you do if you lived in Bristol where the quality of state secondary schools is absolutely shocking ? I speak as a Guardian reader.
No one likes the idea of private education. But that rather assumes the state system hasn’t been ruined. It is well very well talking in the abstract about how one would like all children to have equality of opportunity.
If following that in practice means sending one’s child to the kind of school featured in the excellent book by ‘Frank Chalk’ called “It’s Your Time Your Wasting’, then one is not going to win any celestial ‘brownie’ points for having done the right thing if one’s child emerges at 16 with three or four GCSEs, a bad attitude problem and a pot habit.
I find it very difficult, in my heart of hearts, to commend hard-working professionals who decide that their priority in life is their child’s education, and stuff the BMW and foreign holidays which ain’t that important in the grand scheme of things.
Of course, I hear your complaint that doing this is stuffing up someone else’s life chances. But whose exactly ? That couple deciding NOT to send their child to a private school is not, on its own, going to do anything to improve the shocking performance of Bristol schools,
Of course, globally, those decisions are affecting Bristol results, because the pupils being ‘creamed off’ are, on average, going to be the higher achievers. And I hear arguments that those are the kids who are ‘leavening the bread’ when they are in a state school.
But I also know that it only takes ‘one rotten apple’ to disrupt a class, and ruin the education of everyone else in the room. If teachers are not willing to have the same ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to that which the parents would apply – why on earth should they be forced to feel guilty for opting out ? After all, they didn’t decide the ridiculous policies which make it all but impossible to exclude ill-disciplined little sh!ts from the classroom, no matter how disruptive and destructive it may be for other pupils.
My brother in law teaches at a Catholic school [even though he is not a Catholic] simply because his previous school did not support his zero tolerance of bad behaviour. Yet the head has a load of grief from his superiors for daring to boot kids out for drug use without giving them a ‘final warning’/second/third chance.
We have failed our children by failing to impose and demand the level of good behaviour which will be mandatory when they join the workplace.
Yet the tragedy is that it is children like those who damaged that Steven Lawrence memorial who a few short years earlier had to be kept in the mainstream education system at all costs, because excluding them would divide them from society etc. etc. Did it work ? Did it heck !
February 15, 2008 at 12:53 pm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7245122.stm
Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before ??
February 15, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Bristolian, went to your link. Sounds as crazy as when drug-dealer Jimmy Corkhill (Brookside) became a teacher by blagging his way in which caused real uproar in the profession
http://edward2910.tripod.com/jimmy_corkhill.htm
I agree though that when it’s your own kid, it is hard to sometimes maintain principle…
February 16, 2008 at 9:49 am
I’m not sure I understand the equivalence you are drawing between a member of the armed forces and a drug dealer ? Mind you, I never really watched Brookside so maybe I am missing something. For example, Prince William has been trained by the armed forces. Are you saying that would preclude him from doing ‘life experience’ in a classroom before he becomes King ?
Or are you trying to suggest that members of the armed forces take drugs ?
That might be true of Prince Harry, but let’s not generalise.
February 19, 2008 at 12:07 pm
“Although I recognise that the “setting an example” argument could apply in the Osborne case, I always got used to the idea that Tories did think themselves above the schools that the vast majority send our kids to.”
Conservative policy on private schools does not preclude their use by anyone. What is the ’setting an example’ argument?
“In my view the main aspect of private schools that needs immediately reforming is their charitable status. Many have huge endowments and they seem to be all engaged in a huge tax dodge.”
Charitable status is not a ‘tax dodge’. The schools that do have endowments were established at a time when education was of itself ‘charitable’. ‘Reforming’ the charitable status would itself create enormous problems with assets, land, buildings and even those endowments – all held on charitable trusts.
The value of the charitable status to the private schools is a matter of £100 million or so per year – its amendment would add about 3% of the fees. But even this would be reduced by commercial advantages in relation to tax reliefs both in terms of income and capital and in relation to VAT.
If these private schools, who educate 500,000 or so children, were abolished, there would be an additional cost to the taxpayer of at least £1.5 billion and probably in the region of £2.5 billion per annum. That does not represent the sum that the parents of these children pay to the private schools, but the sum that the Government would need to add to the education budget to pay for these children to be educated as well.
February 19, 2008 at 12:40 pm
“Setting an example”… usually raised in the case of what are precieved to be hypocritical decisions by Labour MPs. See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1290594.ece
which included the following paragraph:
Ian Gibson, the Labour MP for Norwich North, said: “I think it’s wrong. You should set an example as a minister and support your local school. It is a slap in the face for the teachers and the pupils in the school that the child has been taken out of.”
Diane Abbott and Ruth Kelly are named as offenders in the piece.
I don’t think private schools should be abolished. The real drain on state sector education are selective grammars. Even Cameron is recognising that.
February 20, 2008 at 10:22 am
Of course there is criticism of hypocrisy – but you applied the ’setting an example’ argument to Osborne’s decision to send his kids to private school – something that doesn’t seem to me to be apposite.
Having said that, if you live in many metropolitan areas of the UK, the standards achieved by local secondary schools, in particular, are worrying. Many people, my wife and I included, would like our children to attend a good state school – but the selection process, the standards achieved, the discipline problems all conspire against our wishes. The result is that those of us that can afford it decide to use the private sector – especially where the selection process means that rather than attending a truly local school, our children end up being sent to a school some distance from where we live.
The difficulty with removal of the charitable status is that the effect, without more, may well be to close down all but the richest of the private schools – because of the legal difficulties arising from the status of the ownership of assets.
I am not certain that I agree with your assessment of the ‘real drain’. I suspect that there are many factors and the fact that about 2% of children (less than half the number that go to private schools) attend selective grammar schools is probably not that important among them.