The Oli De Botton Education Column
I want to stand up for big government. I want to do this because without top down central proscription and national programmes, we would not have made the progress we have done on literacy and numeracy over the past 12 years. And to be clear, I am not suggesting we nationalise our industries, or even that we try to micro-manage more of the education system. I am saying that if we care about fairer life chances for all pupils, we need to keep some things centrally planned and delivered.
In the first few years of New Labour, we introduced a national literacy strategy - big government par excellence. The centre told teachers what to do and when to do it. Advisors, employed by Whitehall, went around the country supporting and challenging practitioners to help kids read, write and count. We also measured and monitored progress with targets, tests and strict accountability regimes. Since then we have introduced programmes like 'every child a reader', 'every child counts' and one-to-one catch up tuition - all managed by our big government.
And the results? Not scores of teachers leaving the profession, or parents worrying about a lack of creativity, but instead great improvements in standards. By 2007, 10 and 14 year olds in England were significantly above average compared to the rest of the world – reversing historic trends. In Scotland where there was no central strategy, no attempt to drive up standards from the centre, achievement in the basics has gone the other way.
Now David Cameron and his 'progressive' sidekick Michael Gove think government is the problem, not the answer. We are told that in order to transform our schools we need the voluntary sector, parents and community groups to come on board and run schools. But let's be serious for a moment. Even if all these organisations were skilled up enough to bring more diversity and excellence to the system, that would be nowhere near sufficient to deliver the outcomes we need. In practice, sometimes you need big government and national programmes to cajole and judge and assess in order to guarantee the things we care about.
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Why then after 12 years of a New Labour goverment are private schools still doing better than state schools ? As I said before the one size fits all approch does not work , Every child learns different and depends on the suport from family , Also the factt we demonixe young people so young , The energy young people have and the thirst for knowledge they have is something we should be tapping into but instead we call them yobs and want to humilate them , We need to tap into the energy they have a find out how to turn into positive , We need to engage with them not icolate them.
Sorry for the spelling mistakes i didnt do well at school when i was there , Some young people dont like learning in a classroom . One thing i would be intrested in knowing ( if anyone has the numbers) is how football clubs educate there youngsters and what qualifactions they end up with .
Not that I've anything against either Tonga or Nigeria, but they just sprang to mind.
Surely more meaningful comparisons are against those countries with similar levels of GDP only?
Furthermore, the UK was the only country in the top-performing group in 2000 to have slipped down into the lower group by 2007. So while its peers in 2000 managed to retain their relative performance, the UK did not.
Anyway, the full table is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7126388.stm
What's the source for this? According to the OECD, between 2000 and 2007 the UK fell from eighth in maths and seventh in reading in the world to 24th place for maths and 17th for literacy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7115692.stm
The Soviet Union showed how incompetent the state can be in trying to micromanage services that should be devolved down to a lower level. Over-centralisation discourages local activity and participation among ordinary people. As amply demonstrated on a daily basis, governments are just not very good at doing stuff.
A government should have the the decency to respect the British people by staying out of their lives. A big government would misuse our hard-earned money, while presuming to dictate it's cultural norms and "morality" to us.
The government should in fact be doing the opposite of what you say, by keeping its nose out and encouraging people to raise and educate their own children as they see fit.
The most sought-after state schools are only as good as they are because they are composed of children who come from motivated homes. Their success is self-reinforcing as more parents of the same inclination seek them out.
The belief that parent power is dangerous because it helps only the "pushy middle class" is patronizing and motivated by envy: poorer parents (especially from ethnic minorities) are concerned about the quality of their children's education and would welcome some mechanism by which they could save their children from local "sink" schools.
Only by giving schools and parents independence and choice - letting good schools expand and bad ones fall by the wayside - can you get the quality in education that you say you want.
It is a report by the National Literacy Trust about the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" of 2006, published in 2007. This study of 10 year olds in 41 countries showed that England fell from 3rd in 2001 to 15th in 2006. The mean score of pupils in England had fallen since 2001 and the reading attitudes of 10 year olds in England were poor compared to many of their international counterparts.
So it sounds as though Mr de Botton is talking out of his botton.
But please, tell us more, such as : "Although there were major problems highlighted by the PIRLS report, it is also important to recognise that the report does not suggest a crisis in English schools. England’s scale score was far above the international average and while a drop in the rankings appears alarming, a number of reasons unrelated to English schools can help to explain this fall. Perhaps most significantly, the two countries that outperformed England in 2001, Sweden and the Netherlands, saw similar falls in their scale score and position. In fact, Sweden experienced an almost identical drop in terms of scale score and research is currently being undertaken into why this happened in both countries."
I gave the link. I was not suggesting that there is a crisis in English schools, merely that it appears that literacy rates fell rather than increased. Mr de Botton does not deign to give his readers any link or other means of testing his assertions.
I see that Hugh Pettit has chipped in with another link to independent data suggesting that Mr de Botton' piece is wrong: see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7115692.stm to which I would add:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7119511.stm
And it appears from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7117230.stm
that Ed Balls' reaction to the PIRLS study was to blame the parents!
Thanks for the response.
The point I was making (well, trying) was that these reports have nuances and qualifications and the 'headline story' cannot be taken as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
But other commenters are right - Mr de Botton was somewhat remiss in not providing references - for what they may, or may not, be worth.
About thirty years ago, I read an article in The Economist about a study in the US regarding 'what makes a successful school' and the conclusion that was drawn was that, above all other influences (money, facilities, teachers), it was the attitude of the parents towards education. Having said that, I can't remember what was defined as a 'successful' school ....
I think that conclusion was probably right, both then and now. What's the saying - 'give me the child until seven, and I'll give you the man?'
But tens of thousands of teachers wasting hours and hours trying to keep up with endlessly-changing initiatives and inept training. The advisors obviously went down better in Hackney than they did in Yorkshire.
Still, this is a good starting point for the discussion we should be having, ie how to get education funding into schools rather than having 40% of it absorbed in bureaucracy. If if we must have a big centre, then let's get rid of LEAs.
Re the figures, the article is meaningless without sources as masdasa says below, can you supply some?
"nowhere near sufficient to deliver the outcomes we need."
...referring to the fact that selling of our schools to Dixons and Pizza Hut can only be achieved with big government? I certainly can't see any community groups coming up with that kind of plan.
Progress?? Hahahahahaha, oh hahahahah!!! How the left can not only lie, but truly, madly, deeply believe those lies. Wonderful. Bring on President Harman.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7773081.stm shows results from the Timss study - which is I assume the one referred to - and it shows that the English ranking in Maths is unchanged ovr the past 10 years:
MATHS RANKING 1995-2007
England's secondary pupils
1995: 25th place
1999: 20th place
2003: 18th place
2007: 7th place
It would be odd if the author was citing a study on Maths and Science aptitude to argue that the government's literacy study was doing well, but this is Labourlist so you never know.
2007 7th in the world
1995 25th in the world.
So in that twelve year period England has climbed 18 places.
and it shows that the English ranking in Maths is unchanged ovr the past 10 years
How do you conclude that?
The Timms study is available via http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf.
For 10 year olds, England had the greatest improvement of all countries assessed by Tinns over the period 1995 - 2007.