It’s been another frantic week of debate on the future of our education. Private school head and Blair biographer Anthony Seldon has argued that our children are not learning to think independently. The writer Toby Young continues to attract enormous publicity for the ‘comprehensive grammar’ that he and a group of parents are planning to start up in West London, while opposition spokesman Michael Gove has been holding talks with the actress Goldie Hawn.
Hawn’s charity runs a number of schools in north America, based on the idea of Buddhist mindfulness. Apart from the bizarre sight of potential government ministers taking their ideas from Hollywood actresses what’s really worrying here is the suggestion of future fast-paced and uncontrolled change taking us in completely the wrong direction regarding the quality, and equality, needed in our school system. If the Tories win, we could conceivably have an education system in ten years in which every neighbourhood contains a Hawn style school, less academic and based on controlled breathing and creativity, and a Young style grammar, with all the pupils, dressed in boaters, reciting Latin and panting for an Oxbridge place.
How will admissions to these schools be determined, if even more autonomy is granted to schools, which it well might be? Will be see a drift back to secondary modern/grammar style divisions without even the transparent unfairness of an eleven plus? Pre existing local schools will certainly lose pupils and large proportions of their budgets to these new establishments, which can only harm them. Does anyone really believe that the interests of the most disadvantaged will be served by the further segmentation and privatisation of our already diverse and unfair school system?
Already, the middle classes colonise the so called best state schools from the grammars to the more prestigious faith schools to the high performing comprehensives. What we need is not yet more zany ideas, but some simple reforms, firmly implemented, which will benefit all children, wherever they happen to be born and sent to school.
*Class sizes of 20 would be a worthy first aim; Seldon must know perfectly well that the smaller classes found in private schools are probably the key element in the encouragement of the kind of independent thinking he talks about.
*There should be guarantee that every child in the country learns a foreign language.
*We should invest more in pupils who are falling behind.
*And perhaps most important of all, we need to build fairer admissions policies: once you allow schools to choose their own pupils, they inevitably ‘drift to the posh’ with disastrous consequences for the rest.
Seldon thinks our children can’t think independently. But can our politicians? Of course there is room for innovation and excitement in education, but let’s not risk the destruction of the very foundations of our education system by chasing the latest fashionable idea. If breathing like a Buddhist is such a serious element of a mature emotional outlook, let every child in every school be taught to do it.
Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist. Visit her blog at www.melissabenn.com
