Comprehensives vs neighbourhood schools
by Shuggy, 11 April 2008
Say what you like about Johann Hari, and I do from time to time, here’s an issue he’s right about and he’s one of the few journalists I’ve read who seems to understand the nature of the problem. Comprehensive education has failed? How is it possible to make such an assessment when we don’t have a comprehensive system? What we have, as Johann points out - although doesn’t use this phrase - is a system of neighbourhood schools.
Please be under no illusions: advocates of bring-back-grammars (including the self-styled iconoclast ‘left’), ‘faith schools’, city academies, private education (inexplicably called ‘public schools’ in England), and ‘voucher systems’ like to pretend they’re in favour of ‘excellence’ and making a stand against ‘dumbing down’ or what ever the fuck… Perhaps they’re not pretending and they are sincere but what they really favour is a system that gives plentiful escape hatches for the middle classes - or what is closer to their experience, so that their offspring don’t have to mix with the great unwashed.
This despite the evidence that mixing is good. Faith schools get better results? Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes true. Where’s the evidence? What there is evidence of is that ‘faith schools’ in England are selecting their intake. In Scotland, the picture is slightly different. Faith schools (i.e. RC schools) do slightly better than average - because they have to draw on a wider catchment and are therefore more genuinely comprehensive. But they don’t top the league table - it’s neighbourhood schools that do.
But why consider this when you can cleave to the myth that a return to the notion that a child’s future can be, and should be, determined by a test they do when they’re eleven years old is what is needed to help “bright working-class kids escape the hell of inner-city comps”? Yes, give your Daily Mail prejudices a prolier-than-thou veneer if you can. But before you do so, consider this question: can you explain to me why, exactly, a child has to be ‘bright’ to qualify for escape from a situation you consider to be ‘hell’?
Friday 11 April 2008 at 1:09
“can you explain to me why, exactly, a child has to be ‘bright’ to qualify for escape from a situation you consider to be ‘hell’?”
Fucking excellent point.
To hell with the parasites and scum.
Friday 11 April 2008 at 11:11
There isn’t substantial evidence that mixing is good, only that it spreads benefits a little more evenly (basically demanding that middle class families sacrifice their children’s education for the sake of the rest). It redistributes outcomes rather than improves them, forcing working class kids to be parasitic off the middle class.
There is, however, substantial evidence that schools with more independence perform better REGARDLESS of who is attending them. So the proper answer is to let middle classes have their choices and encourage everyone to use a system of choice as well. If you force people to attend bad schools, you have no mechanism to improve their teaching standards.
Middle class kids won’t suffer too much in any case because they will still do better through having parents that help them (unless you ban parents from teaching their children to read I suppose). Your best option is to encourage others to get out of crap schools (and let crap schools shut down) rather than to punish middle class families for doing what makes them middle class in the first place.
Friday 11 April 2008 at 11:23
Here in Bristol, where we officially have the worst education system in the UK - and have done for years, we’re way beyond simple middle class flight from comprehensive schools. We have authentic working class flight!
I can find you any number of parents on Bristol estates driving or bussing their kids 10 miles across town or out to Somerset or Bath. There’s even one particularly heroic woman on a South Bristol estate who currently takes five kids to church every Sunday!
The fact is a lot of these neighbourhood/comprehensive/sink/etc schools are so crap nobody who doesn’t absolutely have to is using them any more and I can’t see how you’re going to attract people back.
I don’t really know what the answer is but some of these schools need to be put out of their misery for everyones’ sake.
Nick seems to be in tune with reality on this.
Friday 11 April 2008 at 13:47
There is, however, substantial evidence that schools with more independence perform better REGARDLESS of who is attending them. So the proper answer is to let middle classes have their choices and encourage everyone to use a system of choice as well. If you force people to attend bad schools, you have no mechanism to improve their teaching standards.
Good point about independence - but I think you’re mixing things up here. What people don’t seem to realise is that, in Scotland anyway, we already have substantial parental choice - but it doesn’t seem to have delivered the results people claim for it. Part of the reason, I’m convinced, is this problem of central control: is there any real point to ‘choice’ if it’s a choice between a whole bunch of schools that are over-managed from the centre?
Friday 11 April 2008 at 16:25
Absolutely. There is no point in choice if you make all schools have identical policies. Indeed enforcing that would make people only more obsessed with the type of pupils attending the school as that would be the only objective difference between them.
This why there is so much interest in the Swedish school system (although I am far from convinced that the Tories are intending to follow it though). Their independent schools are free and entirely non-selective (admissions are on a first-come-first-served basis). New schools can open wherever their is demand so there is no restriction on choice beyond a few places. It is not perfect but it is far more equitable than the system over here, and actually uses choice as a mechanism to drive up standard rather than a luxury item for middle class families.
Saturday 12 April 2008 at 1:16
Good to see all the rightist scum has concentrated their efforts at Shuggy’s gaff rather than here. Saves me deleting the filth.
Monday 14 April 2008 at 11:14
[terminological inexactitude has rendered this comment null and void]
Monday 14 April 2008 at 18:53
The problem I had with Hari’s article and this post is the idea that we have a system of “neighbourhood schools”. Kids today travel miles to school: either because their parents have enough advantages in the education market to get them into “good” schools on the other side of town, or because their parents don’t have those advantages and only got their kids into the “bad” school two bus rides away.
There is no such thing as a decent local school: the Thatcherite choice agenda has killed it off.
Tuesday 15 April 2008 at 14:36
‘Say what you like about johann Hari’
He’s a twat.