Welcome to this week’s edition of The Carnival Of Education. We think that this roundup of entries represents a wide variety of educational viewpoints that are to be found in the EduSphere. All entries were submitted by the writers except

Indeed. Which is why, in order to get a really good job, you need a decent degree as well, but that’s another topic.

Getting zillions of A’s, amy would argue, currently does mean a guarantee to employers, parents or pupils that the end product is an ability to think, reason, research and draw conclusions, and my view is that a well-rounded person should have those skills.

Not a guarantee, no, but statistically speaking, it is a better risk to hire someone with 10 A’s at GCSE than it is to hire someone who didn’t pass Maths and English, but managed to scrape a few NVQ’s together from somewhere. This is why business organisations hate grade inflation, because no-one has the time to interview every applicant for a job to find out how ‘well-rounded’ they are. Instead, we rely on proxies and indicators, like their ability to pass exams.

Why would it cost more money exactly? It wouldn’t necessarily take more teachers, just a refocussing of energies.

That’s just naive. To give the sort of individualised learning you are calling for would require much smaller class sizes, much better facilities, and certainly more and better qualified teachers. I’m not sure that just telling teachers to refocus their energies is going to cut it, but I’d love to see you take the Prime Minister’s place at his weekly press conference and tell the world that the reason our education system isn’t working is because our teachers aren’t focussing on our children’s education…

Why would it cost more money exactly? It wouldn’t necessarily take more teachers, just a refocussing of energies. League tables have a lot to answer for here. The blinkered focus on results to the exclusion of all else has meant that teachers have little time other than to care exclusively about results rather than education. The two are not always perfectly aligned.

This leads nicely into the argument about teaching to results – the ability to pass an exam is not necessarily the same as the ability to think and reason. Getting zillions of A’s, amy would argue, currently does mean a guarantee to employers, parents or pupils that the end product is an ability to think, reason, research and draw conclusions, and my view is that a well-rounded person should have those skills.

Result – everyone’s a winner.

We certainly need to move towards some kind of selection according to ability. Please rember that in many cases, we have mixed-ability classes as well as mixed-ability schools and it is the former that I think most teachers would say are not working. Apart from anything else, the average class is too big to give the individualised teaching that mixed-ability requires, even if that were desirable – which I seriously doubt.

For those who raise the spectre of ‘three secondary moderns in every town’, a Northern Irish student teacher who’s doing her teaching placement in the lunatic asylum I’m presently teaching in made an interesting comment to: she said she had been to a grammar school but her brother who she said wasn’t so bright had been to a school like this one. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that we already have three secondary moderns in every town. It’s called ‘dumbing up’, I believe ;-)

False analogy. Firstly, it’s an order of magnitude bigger than electricity and gas prices we’re talking about here. Secondly, I always find the implication that poor people don’t care enough about their children’s education to actually do something about it, given the power, to be incredibly patronising, especially given the evidence to the contrary from other countries. Isn’t the point of education reform supposed to be that being poor doesn’t make you stupid?

Phil: Ben Elton once said that he was a socialist because he was selfish: he wanted the best possible healthcare, free of charge, when he needed it, at the hospital down the road. Education, same same. What the rhetoric of choice does is ensure that some people won’t get the best – and it doesn’t take much thought to work out who those people would tend to be.

The fundamental misunderstanding here is that vouchers will not just re-allocate kids around schools with existing levels of competence. Like it or not, competition will drive up standards (I realise this sounds like an article of faith to some of you…), and so people ‘not getting the best’ will matter less because the not-best can still be better than under a comprehensive state bureaucracy. It’s the old ‘bigger pie’ type economic argument. If the worst schools under my system are better than the present best comps, what have we lost? And again, the implication that poor people won’t be able to give their kids a boost, even when given a more level playing field. What is it with the left and this attitude?

Katherine: Why should an education system not aim to turn out well-rounded individuals – as a benefit to society this may not be easily measurably, but is certainly extremely valuable.

It is in some vague sense, but not really economically, or at least the benefits don’t outweigh the massive costs. You answer your own question though later in your comment, with this:

This is after all what certain public schools pride themselves on – turning out a certain type of person – the putative ‘well rounded’ person? Why should that be the preserve of the mega-rich?

Because they’re willing and able to pay for it, obviously.

And god forbid that we should actually desire an education system that did both – exam results AND well-rounded people. Why on earth can an education system not aim for both?

For the same reason the NHS won’t give out Herceptin on demand until people take them through trial-by-tabloid. It costs money.

Absolutely. There’s a gaping market failure here when you can’t credibly withhold custom entirely: there will be sinks that are there just to attract the LCD. And, Blimpish/Andrew, are you sure there are analogous markets that work competitively. Electricity and gas? Well, there are hundreds of thousands of people out there sitting on shit fuel tariffs because they can’t be bothered or don’t know how to get off them. Seems like a decent analogy to me – just it’ll be a whole bunch of kids on the wrong end of it.

I know some of this could be got round by removing some barriers to entry, but:

1. There’s still the capacity issue. Inner city schools have to physically go somewhere. That will always be that barrier.

2. I’m taking it on principle that there have to be barriers (aka “standards”) anyway. Medrassas in Hackney, catering to parental choice? No thanks.

(An aside: for me this is where education differs from healthcare. I’m neutral on government health provision (NHS) versus government as guarantor, like France. There’s no civic element that health fulfils. Education is quite different.)

The aim should always be this: Not Andrew’s average state comprehensive but Phil’s a school where hard work & academic attainment is expected of everyone. The old grammar school ethos, basically. That’s what I want for my daughter. For me, we need to look to primary education for the answers. If you can’t read, write and count when you hit your “chosen” secondary school, you’re screwed, probably for life. That’s a much greater driver of social (im)mobility than tertiary education ever was or will be.

Andrew, as a fellow member of the tax-paying society, I disagree strongly. Why should an education system not aim to turn out well-rounded individuals – as a benefit to society this may not be easily measurably, but is certainly extremely valuable.

Is the be-all-and-end-all of society exclusively the creation and carrying out of ‘work’ or is it to further the well-being of its members (including, undoubtedly, the creation and carrying out of ‘work’ in all its myriad forms)? If it is the latter, and I would argue that it is, then surely the education system should be part of that.

This is after all what certain public schools pride themselves on – turning out a certain type of person – the putative ‘well rounded’ person? Why should that be the preserve of the mega-rich?

And god forbid that we should actually desire an education system that did both – exam results AND well-rounded people. Why on earth can an education system not aim for both?

Two words: league tables. “Individual schools deciding to select”? As against the individual schools which decide to offer that desirable low-league-table experience?

Ben Elton once said that he was a socialist because he was selfish: he wanted the best possible healthcare, free of charge, when he needed it, at the hospital down the road. Education, same same. What the rhetoric of choice does is ensure that some people won’t get the best – and it doesn’t take much thought to work out who those people would tend to be.

3A: re grammar schools and ‘choice’, see my previous comment. The kids don’t get much choice in the matter, admittedly – but then, they’re not the ones with the votes.

Of course I am. I’m a political animal and a partisan.

The first generation of general comp-educated kids sees us with unprecedented levels of empoyment, the richest we’ve ever been and the economy doing very nicely.

In spite of our education system, not because of it. And the stats don’t tell the whole truth. Add in the pseudo-unemployed on incapacity benefit, and we have European levels of unemployment in reality. We have to keep importing unskilled labour to keep wages and prices down and to fill the jobs that unskilled Brits won’t do, whilst importing skilled manual workers because we don’t even pretend to train up our own any more. And then we complain about it, because they’re ‘coming over here, taking our jobs an wimmin…’ Crazy world we live in.

There is a lot wrong with the British education system, but I see little that would be achieved from a return to the grammar schools.

Agreed, but the strategy is two-fold. The longer game is to introduce vouchers, and effectively privatise the provision of education while retaining the state as the guarantor of the funding. In the short term, you have to show some improvement in results to placate the tabloids, so you set up a few pilot schools to show what can be done with a different approach to education. That’s where the grammars come in, for me at least. I’m sure Davis has a higher motive in trying to break the grip of the middle classes on decent schools, but for me it’s all about strategy.