One Butt, Two Hands, No Joy

Reporting of little local difficulties (as the Foreign and Colonial Office might once have had it) is not really within the remit of this blog. However, as it’s Christmas and my creativity is taking a hit, my next three entries will ostensibly be reports of goings on at the local level. I should be excused however, as they serve as excellent case studies of a more general problem.

Our first voyage of discovery takes us to Saltash, which for those with slightly lower standards of cartographical knowledge is the first town on the Cornish side of the Tamar, which thanks to its location at the end of the road and rail bridges serves as a suburb of Greater Plymouth. Indeed, the western side of Plymouth is somewhat blessed in transportation terms, retaining as it does one of the few suburban rail services outside the major conurbations. Perhaps the most important site served by that service is the naval dockyard at HMNB Devonport, one of the area’s major employers.

With its own station perched at the end of the Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash was thus an ideal location for many of Devonport’s employees, who for many years enjoyed an early service that delivered them to work nicely on time. Until the latest timetable revision, however, when that service was retimed so it now delivers everyone to work late. While commuters on the Devon side of the Hamoaze can still use the train (as a separate service runs up the Tamar Valley instead), the Kernovians are left high and dry, in this case literally as they are forced onto the road bridge.

The economically enlightened amongst you might speculate that the demand for the service at that time was not actually high enough to justify its running and that it was removed on that basis, reducing the economic suicide that such a decision might ostensibly appear to be. My response to that would be to point out that the local rail franchisee in Devon and Cornwall is First Group, and the bus franchisee in Plymouth is… First Group!

Integrated (n.) any system in which alternative service providers are owned by the same company, allowing the anti-competitive destruction of one provider for the benefit of the other.

Activity: The Politician's Substitute For Accomplishment

Blog etiquette is clearly a still-evolving concept, but I suppose it’s only fair to my readers (theoretical though you all are) to give some apology for my recent sabbatical; unfortunately I’ve been discovering that the old adage about moving house and stress is all too accurate. That’s not to say that I’ve been completely inactive party-wise, and it seems a fitting time (both from my current state of creativity-sapping exhaustion and from the progress of things) to fill you all in on what I’m doing on the LDYS side of things.

But first, let us be frank and admit that, on policy matters, LDYS have in recent years dropped the ball. That’s not to say that this is anyone’s fault; turnover of activists has not helped, neither has the institutional single-mindedness generated by what I shall call, in order to protect those who should be shouted at/sacked/shot (delete as applicable), the Royal Festival Hall Incident and the Black Hole Plot.

Equally, solving those issues is not exactly within the remit of a Policy Officer; I can’t exactly be held responsible for the fact that ***** ******* is a complete ******* ****** who should be ****** *** ** *** ****, after all! What I can do is ensure that the process is right, which for fear of sounding unbearably grandiose is a massively important role in a youth politics organisation simply because the vast majority of its members will consider such things to be fundamentally boring.

The plan, then, is to completely revamp LDYS’s policy management systems. Instead of the current mass of policy motions, Policy Committee will maintain a constantly evolving policy book, building into what will essentially be a complete manifesto for the organisation from which the committee can build motions to Federal Conference. Moreover, shorn of the onerous nature of the current management system and empowered by a new, bolder development remit, LDYS Policy Committee should become a commissioning body in the role of FPC.

My point in mentioning all this is to remind the rest of the party that LDYS’ days of lying down and taking it are over; we are, to coin the delightful West Wingian phrase, Roberto Mendoza, and we’re coming to rob your house…

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…

Are We Really All That Bad?

As I trekked round most of the North of England today (specifically, York - Harrogate - Leeds - Settle - Carlisle - Preston - Manchester) a question dogged me; what does the party really think of LDYS policy?

I ask because it has now become something of a professional concern; as an LDYS Executive Member I've taken on a portfolio loosely entitled "Policy and Education" concerned with improving policy generation and management within LDYS and regaining some of our influence on Federal Party policy. But equally, as someone who has never attended Federal Party Conference (though only because it's always the same week as Manchester Freshers Fair and it's now become something of a protest for me) I can't really gauge the true feelings of the party at large.

Obviously I know we've something of a reputation for radicalism (I have after all at least read the pornography motion so that was ever so slightly obvious!) But is the dismay at our supposed irresponsibility real, or do people secretly take Paddy Ashdown's view that what LDYS thinks today will be mainstream in the party in five years?

In fairness my interest is only really academic; I certainly have no instinct to reel our radicalism in and I would hope that a democratic party would at least take it on the chin as an inevitable consequence of our nature. Still, it would be good to know exactly how mad people are at us before stepping in with me big size 12's...