Births, Marriages And Especially Deaths

On one level, the decision of the majority of Plaid AMs to ignore party policy and back their coalition partners in introducing top-up fees in Wales is a tragedy for every Welsh student, present and future. But on another level it's a far more profound political event, my feelings about which are best described thus;

CYMRU
Plaid

Suddenly on the floor of the Senedd on Wednesday May 14th 2009, aged 84, of an overdose of cowardice in response to a morbid desire for ministerial car-related buttock comfort. Beloved father of Leanne and Bethan. Resting at Ty Gwynfor, Atlantic Wharf, Cardiff. Funeral service at the ballot box across Wales before June 3rd, 2010. No flowers.

Revenge Of The Soundbite

Certain things in politics are bound to leave you feeling slightly dirty. As it’s been in the blogosphere lately, I should go on the record at this point to say that Liberal Democrat practices at by-elections are not such a thing. The other parties should grow up a little and be clear that there is a difference between saying that the other candidate is an unqualified carpetbagger who doesn’t care about the area and saying, “He blows goats, I have proof”; one is a legitimate query about the suitability of a candidate for the job, the other is a baseless character assassination.

But I digress. The political thing leaving me feeling dirty at present is the creation of soundbites. Hopefully I should not need to explain to this readership the myriad of reasons why this is the case, but the problem remains that, very occasionally, soundbites have their uses.

The ongoing work of the Federal Working Group on Further and Higher Education has, unsurprisingly, brought the issue of fees to the fore in LDYS’ internal policy forums. At the moment, the intellectual right of the organisation are using the opportunity to score some points off the left, on the charge that the left’s opposition to fees logically results in us supporting subsidy of middle-class families.

Which is all very well, but it rather rests on the assumption that one should never spend any money on something purely because it is a matter of principle. What’s worse, at the moment that’s an easy assumption to defend because no-one has successfully established what the principle at stake is, exactly.

And so to the soundbite I’ve been struggling with, namely;

“higher education, meritocratic at the point of entry”

It’s an idea that often seems to be forgotten amongst all the debate about low socio-economic group access and internal markets, but I would hope that we as a party can at least agree that the mechanics of financing the higher education system should not obstruct the fundamental aim of that system, namely to identify and train the most able people in the country.

I’ll freely admit that this criterion doesn’t forbid fees, but it does place stringent conditions on how they can be assessed and charged and focuses on the requirement to consider fees holistically with maintenance requirements. This second point is vital to recognise; the current system does contravene the meritocracy criteria because, with the support loan limit as laughably inadequate as it is, many low-income students must rely on bursaries to meet their basic needs and as such bursaries are variable in the magnitude and availability, there is an additional market pressure on applicants choices.

So for now, let me just put the question out there; beyond the possible effects of a fees system on the social makeup of the university population, is there a deeper principle involved that requires us to get money out of the way of admission?

Everything You Learnt About Schools: The Sequel

Loathe as I am to get bogged down on specific subjects, the breadth of responses to last Thursday’s piece on grammar schools merited a full response, not least because an uncharitable mind might think that some of the respondents hadn’t read it. So let’s start again by restating the fundamental conclusion I put at the top of the last piece;

What makes you think that that is the result of selection by ability in and of itself?

Take for example the accusation that selection by ability closes off opportunities to children who don’t get into the “top” school. Now it’s true that if children have to stay in the same school for five years on the basis of the selection, those who do well may be held back by what they are able to achieve in the particular environment selected. But isn’t that a problem with it being five years? In reality, we do need to look at the split of years between different schools; the current 3/4/5/2 split should at least be 3/4/4/3 or maybe even 3/4/3/4. In that way, selection can be at 11 and 14/15, giving everyone two bites at the cherry.

Then again, the lack of logical diagnosis is not the real problem. In terms of grammar schools, there remains this ingrained concept that it is about “good” and “bad” schools, much of which relates to the idea that there are somehow vast swathes of children who aren’t particularly intelligent at 11 but by 18 will be off to Oxbridge to read biochemistry or nuclear physics. If someone would like to provide me with statistics showing that these people do exist, I’d be happy to publish them, but my suspicion is that they are a very, very small but vocal group.

Rather than expend enormous time and money trying to prevent a relatively rare occurrence, we should honestly state what education is there to achieve. I for one believe that education must be designed to maximise the potential of every child by providing tailored resources and teaching within an integrated framework that does not discriminate between academic and vocational training. You might be able to provide that within the comprehensive system, but it will be vastly more expensive to do so.

Above all, in education it is far too easy to be sentimental about things; rather than assuming that every child is born with the divine right to go to Oxbridge, let’s rise above the emotional attachment and actually consider what education should be achieving and how it can best be arranged to accomplish those goals.

Everything You Learnt About Schools Is Wrong

Are grammar schools liberal?

I ask because it rather bizarrely came up on Question Time when Ming was on and it prompted him into one of his leftier rants about social divisiveness and so forth. (I also ask because I enjoy sticking grenades under bits of policy we hold as sacrosanct, but that’s just my own particular perversity…)

The principal argument against grammar schools has remained unchanged for quite a while now; that by forcible dividing pupils at age 11, grammar schools established a fundamental divide between those who passed and those who failed, and that these attitudes dogged those who failed throughout life. Which is all very fine and splendid, but then it does raise another question;

In what way was any of that the fault of the grammar schools?

It should always be noted that the original specification of the 1944 Education Act had three tiers rather than two. The catastrophic nature of the failure to adequately fund the Technical Schools as an alternative to the Secondary Moderns cannot be overstated. In a three-tier system, your position in the grand scheme of things can be considered to have some connection to your ability; in a two-tier system, your position is the result of some arbitrary line in the sand that will never be acceptable to people, and with very good reason.

So let’s rephrase the question; is selection by ability liberal?

Now that is a relevant question, since what we are being offered at the moment is the very opposite, i.e. selection by anything but ability. First there were the specialist schools, designed to allow some selection by aptitude. Now let’s be very clear, specialist school status is bullshit; I’ve known this ever since Katharine Lady Berkeley school (taught French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Chinese) was refused Language College status in the same year my own school (taught French and German but was a grammar and a Beacon school) was granted that status. The net result is that specialist school status exists not to improve bad schools but to improve good ones.

Then Blair and co. come marching in with their big size nines and load on City Academies, Trust Schools and now Faith Schools. Again, let’s not beat around the bush; City Academies exist to give a mechanism whereby government can foist PFI rebuilding on any school that’s even so much as mediocre, to which I refer you to my previous comments about rail privatisation and how making the trains look shiny never solved the fundamental issue. Trust Schools exist to allow the schools that were good in the first place to ensure that status by letting them cherry-pick, and since in order to placate Prescott that cannot be by academic selection it will almost certainly be on the basis of teachers liking the look of people or liking the look of where they live. And as for faith schools, well, let’s just say, anyone stupid enough to come up with that idea deserves everything they get…

Thankfully, that whole system is so legally unworkable that it will collapse around the government’s ears. I can even tell you exactly where and how; it’ll be somewhere in East Lancashire or West Yorkshire, when a Muslim family with a son with a gift for cricket discover that their local Specialist Sports College is the local Roman Catholic High School. The cricket angle will get them pro bono legal work from some crusty old barrister who just happens to be an MCC member and the whole edifice will end up in the European Court of Human Rights.

In a way, we as a party have the solution already, in that we support full implementation of the Tomlinson Report. And yet Tomlinson remains an incomplete article in that it fails to consider the downstream implications of its own suggestions; ultimately, Tomlinson breaks the final division in education, that between academic and vocational subjects. The importance of that cannot be understated, not least when you consider it in reference to Bernard Woolley;

“Who wanted comprehensive education? Parents? Pupils? No, the National Union of Teachers wanted it.”

My point is, if there ceases to be a stigma around vocational subjects, then not only can pupils be allowed to specialise but teachers can be too. Once that happens, does it make any sense to coop them up in the same building as the Oxbridge candidates?

And yet, the best argument I can give against the idea that grammar schools are inherently socially divisive is my own. As I said, I went to Sir Thomas Rich’s School, one of the remaining state grammar schools. And yes, it was quite middle class as things go, but it was middle class in the 80’s way, middle class through people who had worked their way up not banked on the fortunes of others. In sixth form, a good proportion of people had done GCSE’s at comprehensives (including the worst of the lot, one so bad it’s now become a faith-based City Academy) but they’d met the standard and moved up.

But here’s the clincher; many of the best and the brightest were from Gloucester’s Asian community. Had I gone to one of my local comprehensives, I’d have had little to do with any of them, because I lived in the suburbs and they didn’t and catchment areas exist. But my school (which, by the way, had a strong moral ethos, a strong Christian ethos at that, but never felt the need to be badged by it) didn’t care if they were black, white, asian or anything; they only cared that they were talented. A world of faith schools, trust schools and city academies will ghettoise everybody; a system that was allowed to be truly meritocratic would not.

And there’s the rub; a grammar school system, with a full system of tiers, is ultimately the only truly meritocratic system going. It’s the only system that allows people to concentrate on and improve their talents in the right way for them, individually. Try and tell me that that’s not liberal? I shake my head, I really do…

And I Got 75% On That So They Let Me Right In…

Living as I do as an ex-pat in the North, most of my information about goings on in the south comes from the view from train windows. And if my experience of station platforms from Winchester to Wolverhampton is anything to go by, there is a least one trend that has bridged the North-South divide.

I refer of course to the incessant marketing of universities. In Granadaland we’re very much in peak season for it, which is great because no university has yet produced an advertisement that wasn’t unintentionally hilarious. To wit;

• Salford – It’s bad enough that their official slogan is “A Greater Manchester University”, but now they’ve produced a poster that’s meant to be a painting-by-numbers key to why there are 30 great reasons to study at Salford, half of which boil down to, “Salford; It’s quite near Manchester”
• Huddersfield – I’m sorry, I don’t care if he is the Chancellor, but it is impossible to take seriously an advert in which Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells me I should go to Huddersfield.
• Lincoln – This advert basically shows every single building the university has with various graduates in front of them. I’ve been to that campus, and I swear it was so nondescriptly modern I didn’t recognise it till they told me where it was at the end.
• Edge Hill – In fairness Edge Hill have updated their ad, but not so much as to remove the two key flaws it has, namely 1) that if you want me to be impressed by how many courses you offer, name-checking Sports, Business and Performing Arts isn’t going to cut it (and by the way, way to go reinforcing the stereotype!) and 2) flashing the words Liverpool and Manchester in front of me will not disguise the fact that you are in Ormskirk.

But what really gets my goat is this sudden craze for having university signs in train stations. I can think of two universities that have a legitimate excuse for this; Salford and Birmingham, and then only because they have stations on campus. For anyone else in university administration who thinks it’s clever, get your butts on the seats, zip your lips and listen hard…

In the first instance, marketing is a powerful force but it has not yet managed to raise anyone from the dead. There are only three groups of people going to university; those who want to get as far away from home as possible (there are reasons why I ended up at Manchester and this is one of them), those who want to stay as close to home as possible, and those who only bother at the last minute. The first two will research where they want to go and make an informed decision, the third will go to the university closest to where they live. Your sign on the station will matter to precisely none of these people.

Secondly, I have £14,000 worth of debt because I went to university, people starting now are likely to develop £23,000 and if you all have your way that number will be £35,000 (seriously, the Russell Group want fees to go up to £7,000), so trust me when I tell you that seeing that money pissed away on tacky signs makes me rather angry, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…

More importantly, however, no-one is going to decide to both go to university and to go to a particular one because they see a sign in a station. And if they do, it might be suggested that needing to see a sign in a station to realise that the University of Reading is a higher education facility in Reading to which one may apply is a pretty good indicator of incapability as far as academia is concerned.

I am not one of those who would seek to belittle graduates of the likes of the University of Gloucestershire (not least because my sister’s at that one right now doing Early Childhood Studies, a by no means unworthy choice), but we must understand that urging universities to become ad hoc ad agencies to meet an arbitrary target is folly. Yes, we need more graduates, but the problem is not that, say, Poland is producing more graduates than we are, it is that it is producing graduates with qualifications in science, in engineering, and yes in plumbing. No degree is meaningless to the person who obtains it, but it is the government’s duty to ensure that degrees are not meaningless to the nation, and right now it is a duty they are spectacularly failing to meet.

PS I should make a special mention of the University of Southampton, who manage to have their grubby little paws on three stations, at least one of which is quite rude, as I’m fairly sure Winchester has a university of its own (not least because one of my friends is at it right now too!)

PPS There’s a special prize to anyone who can identify the two comedy references (i.e. not the Incredible Hulk one) in this entry. I have to have a little fun with it sometimes, nerd-like or otherwise!