education policy

I hope that anyone who calls themselves a liberal of any flavour would regard conscription as anathema. It is, after all, a form of slavery; greater even than the slavery we all participate in to a state whose policies we do not agree with but are obliged to conform. So, whilst I realize that it's a sentiment that does exist within the party, I am a bit disturbed that some amongst us agree with conscription when it comes to education.

See, I don't reckon that Tim Lott makes a case at all. Yes, he makes a series of assertions about how much better state education would magically become if everyone were compelled to go to state schools and private schools outlawed. But it seems to me that it is no more than blind faith. If those parents who current choose private education were to be forced, yes, forced, to send their kids to state schools, he argues, they would magically find their voice, not a voice of idealism and patronizing concerns for "other peoples' kids" but the self-interest of getting the best for their own.

The trouble is, it never seems to work that way. When it comes to government run services, with their one-size-fits-all approach, even if you do wish to change it, it takes a herculean effort, a lot of time and a great deal of persuasion - you are trying to turn around an enormous ship with an Oxbridge punting pole for a rudder - and you still have to settle for what potentially a bare majority decide. If you don't like how things are done at one private school, well you vote with your wallet and go to a different one whose ethos you prefer.

And if achieving change was such a lot of effort, would not someone prepared to pay north of twenty grand a year today not simply buy extra tuition - or are these statist idealists proposing to outlaw that as well - or perhaps rule that if state registered teachers want to offer extra tuition they have to do so for free so anyone can avail themselves of it?

And what of the specialist private schools that offer such specialized excellence that they are simply not replicable across the country - okay so perhaps we could nationalize the Royal Ballet School, but what about Chetham's, or, whilst there are other issues raised by post-compulsory education (assuming 16 remains the school leaving age) what about professional football club academies, and similar such centres of excellence? Are all places to be allocated by lot so there is an equal chance of every state school having its fair share of mouthy middle-class parents demanding change, regardless of how far the child has to travel or where his or her circle of friends are based?

Amongst the very wealthy (who, let's face it, are the only ones who can afford top boarding schools these days with fees approaching £30,000 a year) perhaps there would be a renewed interest in governesses - and at what stage does a group of families getting together to hire a couple of private teachers to "home-school" their kids become itself an illegal school? Or would home-schooling be outlawed as well? Even for our next potential Wimbledon winner whose parents want to support that talent whatever the cost?

No, the exact opposite is what is needed - free competition in the provision of schooling for everyone. It's bad enough that what passes for an education should be compulsory. We ought to see plenty of innovation and choice of styles, specialisms and prices. Frankly I think it is a good sign that, with just seven per cent of the market, you can get private schooling for round about the price that government funds state secondary schooling. Expanding that to one hundred per cent of the market can only bring those costs down so far as I can see.

And yes, Darrell, that includes the possibility that "profit making business" would be involved - and why not? Every business, even a social enterprise, has to aim to be profitable or else it aims to fail - the only difference between a social enterprise and a "profit making business" is whether one distributes the profits to individuals like shareholders or to social goods. After all, if you built a new school, would you expect the builders to do it for no profit; if you borrowed to do so would you expect the lenders to make no profit on the loan, if you have outside caterers do they operate for the love of it, what about the text-book publishers, the uniform suppliers, its IT infrastructure contractor or bandwidth provider? What if the school is a profit distributing teachers' co-operative? Is that any better, morally or ethically, than a Nord Anglia group paying their investors, the investors that made it all happen?

What is sure is that in a genuine free market, unencumbered by the sort of regulation and barrier to entry that government currently sets out for people who want to set up an educational provider, these profits would not be so great as they are when they are protected from other, innovative competition. Such protection, incidentally, would certainly include flogging off current assets to a private provider at some discount that, say, a local start-up provider were not offered - if there is going to be competition, it cannot start with some schools being transferred "on the cheap" to some big corporation simply because it has some kind of "preferred bidder" status.

Then we can start working out how much additional financial support people might need in the current inequitable economic system to be able to afford the appropriate sort of education for their children.

"Education, education, education" the mantra went all those years ago. Nearly a generation of school-children have flown by. Billions and billions have been poured in to state education and supporting services to raise aspirations. And look what they've got...lower so called social mobility, a higher proportion of posh-schoolers taking up more and more of the professional and higher status and paid jobs and the university places to prepare them for it.

The trots are outraged. We must do more they say! More redistribution! Punish the wealthy more to pay for our failings they mean. Even so called liberals have been at it (he doesn't even want merit to play a part through selection in a free service it would appear). Even six-jobs Millburn's report "blames" those top professions for wanting only to take the best. Well I tell you what, when it comes time for my open heart surgery, I will want to be hacked up by the best, not someone who is there because they were put into some class-busting quota scheme.

Look, the state has had decades to get this right. Now it appears that despite the most sustained period of growth in "investment" in education it's all been proven a farce. You know, "investment" usually demands a return. Not this sort of let down.

It's time to privatize the school system. Completely. Clearly the state is utterly incompetent where it matters and only marginally better where they are "good" at it.

I've done the sums. One thing you may not know about me is that I am a closet educationalist. Having been through a private system that failed me academically but which gave me the best years of my life (and as a scholarship boy at that - my parents weren't wealthy) I've always wanted for everyone who could make use of such an experience to be able to do so.

I've done the sums. I could create a private school from scratch, building only the best in facilities, educational, recreational and residential, with tiny pupil teacher ratios (and paying teachers better too), charging top end public school fees for the most wealthy and taking only state level funding for the least well off and still have fully one third of the school effectively paying nothing and everyone else on a sliding scale. In fact, I could pay for half of it out of the annual budget for providing full time care places for difficult kids in the county.

I'm sure there are lots of people who have plotted their own ideas of alternatives to the child-farms we call state schools too. The problem is statists want to fail everyone at once or not at all. Your policies of no competition, no choice, centralized planning, all go into producing a one-size fits all system that is as reactive as the Exxon Valdez as it approaches the rocks when the course needs changing and now the leaks are showing.

Why do "we" ("the people") believe these schmucks when, like Tony Blair in 1997, they claim they can do something about all this to get our votes? Where is he today? Oh, that's right, the failure of his government has given him millions of pounds a year in consultancy and speech fees and possibly even the title and office of "President of the United States of Europe". The rewards of sin eh? Don't even pretend you care, Blair. This is what you politicians do - pretend you are uniquely qualified to bring happiness to everyone and from there you can only spectacularly fail. Morons. Don't pretend Brown gives a shit either - his policy of loose stool money in the early noughties has doubled the number of kids in temporary housing, priced out of your bubble boom and big bust economy.

Screw the lot of you. Leave. Now. Don't come back from your obscene fucking (some of you no doubt literally) vacations. Leave real people to create real wealth; allow real people to work for whatever they can get and with their dignity intact seek to better themselves in one of the many innovative different choices that will spring up in a revitalized education market. Don't patronize them with quotas to plaster over your screw-ups.

God, I'm angry. And sad. Sad for all the poor sods whose lives have been fucked over by trust in politicians. Red, Blue, Yellow or Green - you can offer no better. Just promises and aspirations. Well I'm sick to death of paying fifty per cent of our national income for your failed promises and tawdry aspirations. Leave. Us. Alone.

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement." Herbert Spencer, over 150 years ago, and we still have not learned.

So, we've got another cunning plan from the Balls-up that is our government led education system. This being the government that, twelve years ago, came to power on the mantra "Education, education, education". The sad fact is that for all their central interference 40% of kids born at the beginning of this era of "Education, education, education" cannot read satisfactorily, despite the literacy hour, the special measures and all the money (for I don't begrudge them the fact that they have spent money, just that they seem incapable of spending it wisely) spent on academies and such like.

It seems that change in state provided services can not be incremental change, but complete u-turns. Yet turning around a system of this size and bureaucracy is like turning the proverbial super-tanker around - a long slow process which is, unless you know precisely your destination is behind you a waste of time and money that could have been used to deliver actual teaching to actual children. And all too often we see that once one public sector super-tanker has managed to turn round, another politician has another cunning plan and the process begins again. Well, you can see where that will get you in the long run - nowhere.

This, I am afraid, is the fate of all centrally planned public services. The government has to be seen to be being fair to everyone because it is the main provider. In fact of course it is usually fairer to those constituencies that elect members of the governing party as their representative, or ones they wish to win over next time. So it has to roll out massive change, perhaps even ignoring those who have managed to make good headway despite the dog's dinner of central policy because everyone's got to do things the same way otherwise it's a "lottery" provision or whatever.

There can be no meaningfully functioning market in ideas, pedagogic technique, innovative governance or anything else, because all must be seen to be delivering the same sort of product everywhere. Well this is nonsense. To those who claim that "only the state can deliver essential services like education" I ask looking at yesterday's announcement, and the many other tumultuous changes of direction over the past sixty years, how do you believe such a system can possibly ever be efficient and good at producing its end product - an educated citizenry?

Or, as Prime Minister Hacker said once to Sir Humphrey "do you mean to say that the state of schooling in Britain today is what the education department planned?"

We need change now, "change we can believe in", and the only change I can believe in is to remove schooling from state hands completely and encourage competition, both the quicker to spread the best teaching and learning practices and the better to create efficiencies in the system as a whole that will allow for more specialization and meaningful differences between schools and other training providers so that people can choose for their children the style, environment and outcomes that they, not the government, feel is appropriate.

The past couple of days have seen parents and children around England at least waiting to hear whether they have got into their chosen schools in the annual ritual of place allocations by LEAs. Many will have been disappointed. There are the usual accusations that others get in by paying their way through buying property in the right catchment area. Others, in places such as Brighton, may have thought that was a way to get into their chosen school only to find places allocated by lottery.

This weekend also sees the Lib Dem spring conference in Harrogate discussing its education proposals. So I've been meaning to write about selection in education because I firmly believe that neither the current system nor the Lib Dem proposals go nearly far enough in that regard and I think that it is key to ensuring we have a good education system into the future.

While the state is the effective monopoly supplier as well as the ultimate judge of success or failure by one of its subsidiaries, the schools, and while it effectively measures that success or failure by results of examinations that are set nationwide based on a nationwide curriculum, one has to wonder what the big fuss is. It is interesting perhaps to note also this week that it has been announced that one of the best schools in the country by results is dropping the national GCSE examination.

When the comprehensive system started, its aim was to produce a uniformly good standard of education in every locality; pupils would attend their local school knowing it was as good as any other; LEAs would have reasonably good "market" intelligence on numbers of prospective pupils in a catchment area well ahead of time so that capacity could be planned in advance. That so many will be disappointed this week is ample proof that this aim has not been realized.

And whilst "selection" in the sense of the system or the school deciding who can go where on the basis of ability is largely still anathema to most proponents of state education, the answer to the failure of uniform excellence has been a creeping introduction of selection by parents, by a false "market" in superficially specialist schools neither of which do any more than create an illusion of choice. And sure, if you were simply herded to either a grammar or a comp/sec modern on the basis of an exam result disappointment and resentment may follow.

But by selection I mean a system in which yes, schools may select on a whole host of criteria depending on their individual specialization or unique selling point, but also in which parents and pupils have a wider selection and are enabled to apply to the most appropriate school for their child, with assistance and advice from professionals perhaps. Expectations are managed better. Everyone knows not every child is a genius. Everyone knows not every child is going to be Oxbridge material and may better find their talents in some more hands-on facility like the German Hauptschule.

Every child is different, and the idea that each one's talents can be fully explored and developed in a conglomerate school of 1500 pupils or more focussing on the same curriculum and being judged by the same league tables and examination measures just seems wrong. If opting out of the single public examination system is good enough for the top performing schools, why not for ones that address very different needs?

The Lib Dem paper to be discussed today starts from reasonable principles; that everyone should have a fair start in life and that that means a quality education; that control should not be exercised so centrally from Westminster (I was quite shocked to see on a program about Margaret Thatcher the other day that her favourite Keith Joseph insisted on vetting every course in the National Curriculum personally so the Tories have proven just as bad in the past for centralization for all their talk about more diverse schools); that there should be more freedom in establishing schools.

But from there I'm afraid it is all down hill for me. Why aspire to give per pupil funding in the poorest areas to match the average private school fees? Why not encourage those private schools to compete for the same pool of pupils with vouchers or other incentives to establish branches in less well off areas? The policy paper assumes that the "state" at some level or other, rather than the "customer", is still the only body that can make education work for all. In Oxford, between the state and the private sector secondary level, we have about 9000 places. I realize the private sector takes pupils from outside the city of course but if we were looking, say, at schools averaging 300-ish pupils we could have over thirty to choose from, each with their unique selling points, each competing for a niche in the market to be successful in.

Moreover, whilst education is an important factor in social and economic mobility and therefore in the social liberal aims of opportunity for all, far more important still, even today, are the embedded inequities of land monopoly and corporate welfare. We need to cut education free from the state, but do it on the basis that we have also wiped away those state protected monopolies of land and money that keep people "in their place" more surely than any deficiency of education. For that would also encourage more mixed neighbourhoods - as middle class tax savvy households are more prepared to bring their relative wealth into less well off areas to take advantage of lower taxes - leaving them more money to spend on things like education and further encouraging those with a good reputation for running schools that add value to open up branches in an area that would then be available also to the less well off local households.

We want to ban selection completely so far as I can see. In the future, with our national economy's reliance on financial services likely to be severely reduced in the foreseeable future and our manufacturing still in decline, we need to push our most high achieving children so they invent the things that will give us a production base for the national wealth into the future. If we are to nurture diversity in our children we need to be able to select both ways - just as we do with higher education.

I shall find it very difficult to continue to support a party with such a one-size-fits all education policy. A policy which is apparently not prepared to question whether or not the state is the best provider but just assume there is something unique about the education "market" that means private provision could not be better and more efficient. If only 7% of schools are currently private, and can still produce education with an average cost not far above what the state currently budgets, how much more competitive would they be with the other 93% of the market opened up to them? Such assumptions about the state's ability versus the private sector's ability to deliver are, quite frankly, contrary to our own constitution.

Absolute bollocks! School bureaucracy (and local state protected monopoly) goes bonkers in cold weather...

Cold war over coat policy 6:30am Saturday 7th February 2009 Comments (13) Have your say » By Hayley Cover » Children had a freezing walk home after a school confiscated their coats because they were not official uniform. Last night, John and Shirley Cooper said they were outraged King Alfred’s Sports and Community College, in Wantage, had not let their son Sean, 14, have the coat back to go home. The school confiscated the coats of four other children on Tuesday. Sean had to walk half a mile to his home in Dean Butler Close without his plain black hooded windcheater. [From Cold war over coat policy (From The Oxford Times)]

Surely it is a given that we are all different? Size, shape, gender, colour, intelligence, personality, practical ability... So surely the human brain, and mind, are also infinitely variable. So why then do we have clothes, shoes, accessories, food, gadgets, literature, music, art, newspapers, all sorts of media, cars, houses, gardens, holidays, hobbies and pastimes of every conceivable colour, shape, size, sophistication, individuality to suit our needs and tastes and yet, when it comes to nurturing minds, especially young ones, in other words education, the state seems always to want a one size fits all, or nearly all solution we must all be dragooned through?

_{Scary kids from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video, copyright Columbia/CBS. Is this how we see education?}

Even the current advocates of increased "choice" in education are generally not calling for the sort of individually tailored schooling that might cater for a near infinite combination of aptitude and need in different subjects. No, squeezed onto the cattle trucks of the "skills agenda" at an increasingly early age, our children's precious formative minds are driven through National Curricula, SATs, Literacy Hour, regurgitated standardized lesson plans and a plethora of targets till they get an OFSTED stamp on their forehead to say they are ready to be part of Britains fast changing economy. Or at least, the fast changing economy that was being predicted by, yes, you guessed it, government, a decade ago when they started.

On Saturday I was having dinner with friends who either have children going through this system or looking to have soon. All of them, I think it would be fair to say, would be termed "left of centre" and would never have considered private education or home-schooling previously but are all actively considering it now or would if they had the money. They feel patronized by the system, and treated with varying degrees of contempt by the school and its staff.

But most of all they feel helpless when they can see that their child needs extra help or a different approach in one subject where they may thrive in a totally different subject with little struggle. Such different approaches may not be available in the one school. And the lesson plans used don't vary a great deal from school to school so there isn't a great deal of choice anyway. If they wanted to change schools - as one is trying to do now as a result of their experience - the bureaucracy is stifling.

Oh, this all sounds incredibly expensive doesn't it? How can we satisfy that nearly infinite combination of needs and aptitudes? Turn it around and ask, if we can satisfy a near infinite appetite for different trainers, baked beans and holidays, why can we not produce individualized education - surely one of the most important human needs, even for those of us who tend towards Herbert Spencer's view that the state should not be dictating or providing education at all.

I think we need to consider how to personalize education, from the earliest age; we're not going to achieve any step change in attainment just by adding a few extra teachers armed with standard lesson plans, just by putting a little extra money in the direction of the least well off - though that will no doubt help, assuming they can actually find the package to suit them.

Localism is certainly a part of the answer, as perhaps are things like "free schools" on the Dutch model and an idea expanded on at Regno del fines blog. Why not return the provision of schools much much closer to the families using them - at parish level or something similar sized. Parents could decide amongst themselves in a mutualist structure whether to get in a teacher who's going to teach the children proper grammar or to learn their times tables.

And we should not be so squeamish about the corporatization of education. By which I don't mean the mish-mash of schemes to get token private money into the current system. I mean that education, or at least the "skills agenda", is already a subsidy to business (or it ought to be if the education system produced people business can use). It is corporate welfare. So why not instead expect business itself to contribute directly to nurturing the skills needed in an area - perhaps paying for particular teachers is specialized subjects related to the local economy? It would be more transparent at least than corporate lobbyists persuading a few politicians far away to spend our money on providing them workers, and probably more reactive to changes in the economy.

A quantum leap in the amount of flexibility and personalization of education is what we need. And for government to butt out as much as possible. For surely, we have pretty well reached the situation Spencer predicted:

I'm sure there are probably a good few people rubbing their hands with some relish at the thought that private schools might feel the squeeze from this edict from the Charities Commission that they have to prove the value of their contribution to the wider community to retain their charitable status.

But before they get too excited, perhaps they might want to think about the numbers. I read that independent schools have about 600,000 pupils. If we accept the figures put forward by Nick Clegg, I think, when he was talking about the "pupil premium" in which he said, if memory serves, that the average cost was about £9,000 per year per pupil - which allowing for endowments and so on is probably a bit more than the average fees - it is an "industry" with a turnover of nearly £5.5 billion per year.

The statements about the level of charitable benefit they receive suggest that it amounts to about £100 million. This is therefore just under 2% of their combined turnover. Hardly insurmountable if they decide to stick two fingers up to the Charities Commission. But there's another side to it, isn't there. If we accept government figures that they spend about £6,000 per year on average on each state school pupil, then the 600,000 pupils whose parents are often scrimping and saving to put them through a private school are saving the state sector just over £3.5 billion.

It seems to me that whatever you think of private education, the charge that they do not contribute financially to the state sector through their customers' taxation cannot be upheld. Of course, since most of the charitable benefit is presumably in the form of reclamation of VAT on some expenses and I would argue that nobody should pay VAT, the most iniquitous tax on production we have, they would not have such a benefit in my fiscal regime anyway!

There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist.

I had an early meeting yesterday of a governors' committee where someone mentioned this Guardian article from Monday about how Oxford and Cambridge Universities have proven lukewarm or downright icy towards the idea that they should sponsor New Labour academies.

Oxbridge snub to government on academies

Polly Curtis and Patrick Wintour
Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian

Oxford and Cambridge universities have turned down ministerial attempts to persuade them to adopt a city academy, the Guardian has learned. Their decisions deliver a fresh blow to the government, which is trying to raise the academic profile of the schools by wooing top universities to sponsor one. Confidential documents, seen by the Guardian, reveal that Cambridge has vetoed the idea to avoid any negative fallout should the school fail or receive bad press. Sponsoring a school could also present a "conflict of interest" over admissions for pupils at the school, it says.

Which is interesting, and something itself of a turn-around on several hundred years' history. Some of the existing "Oxbridge Academies" may only take pupils to 13 years old - St John's or King's in Cambridge, New College or Christ Church in Oxford. Another, Magdalen in Oxford, is a leading feeder school to the universities' colleges. Others not necessarily located in the same place have direct, often founding, links with colleges - such as Winchester and New College or Eton and King's College. Then there are innumerable local schools the colleges of the two universities have effectively founded through their ecclesiastical benefices.

The formal recruiting links may have been broken with the demise of closed scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge but there can be no doubting that "conflicts of interest" were built into the Oxbridge system from the start. Now, that's not to say that it would be a good move to set up a new possible conflict of interest. As noted in that article the decision of my own university, Oxford Brookes University, to participate in the new Oxford academy that will replace The Peers School next year, was not without controversy. And some of my own qualms were similar to those of the head of the PGCE course at Oxford - that our school of education has links with many local schools, that our widening participation and outreach programs work with all local schools, and how would all this be affected if we had a founding stake in just one local school.

Another issue I'd have with the country's two leading universities starting academies is precisely that academies cannot select on ability. It seems to me that this is one case where selection could be justified, and probably boarding too - two national schools run by the two leading universities, able to pull in the brightest and the best who would benefit most from being taken up a level in their studies to equip them for the academic rigours of the world's best universities. And why not? Public money funds things like national sporting academies which are selective on a different sort of ability.

Neither of us are large cities where our universities' local connections could provide a base for such an academy - unlike perhaps Imperial or UCL who have the huge and still growing "market" of London schools to mix in. Though I suppose there is an argument that more people in our respective counties should be helped to get into Oxbridge because we should benefit more from the presence of those universities in our midst. Could you ever find a fair way of sticking a pin in the map somewhere and saying that only kids in this catchment area/city/county have the chance of an Oxbridge partnered school?

But how about another idea altogether - that they set up a virtual academy. Just as Oxford and Cambridge are, along with Imperial, in a different league of universities worldwide, so their prospective students need to be brought into that different league as early as possible. I know that in my case, my hopes of an Oxbridge education were probably dashed by the time I was about thirteen or fourteen, when my interest at school "peaked", for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I was not driven or permitted to go as fast as I could go academically and as a result became the disinterested teenager in many lessons - coasting on previously acquired knowledge and skills.

One of the great advantages of private school was that I had lots of teachers who were academics and not just educationalists. This made it easier to place me with a mentor for S level subjects for example which were much less related to the curriculum of the day and more to "added-value" academic skills and disciplines like historiography instead of just history, the study of literary criticism instead of just literature and so on. I just don't think that state sector teachers have the time, after all the paperwork and so on, to indulge their academic fancies in the same way somehow - it's not to do with their skills and abilities but the sausage machine system of state schools. So an Oxford University "Virtual Academy" could work like the Open University for bright kids, to add value to the knowledge and skills they gain from their existing state school. To run summer camps and crammer camps for the brightest and the best to keep them that little bit more stimulated and their learning skills on top form.

Every state school has to have a program now for dealing with "gifted children" in their Special Educational Needs strategy. Many I know from school governors discussions struggled to define "gifted" fairly to all sorts of gifts. But here would be one way of targeting a particular sort of academic giftedness - you could tie up an academically bright child whose talents were not being fully realized because of being thrown in with the mix of average pupils with a real life academic, or even an undergraduate student who could mentor them through extra tuition. They could create online courses, like the Open University, that schools around the country could be encouraged to send their brightest pupils on to add to their in house education.

And in return, those schools that use the services of the Oxbridge Virtual Academy would have the benefit of retaining their brightest and best locally, keeping them as an example to younger kids and perhaps even filtering down their enthusiasm and additional skills to others in their "home" school. It seems like a win-win idea to me. No doubt both universities would say that their existing widening participation activities already do much of this. But I think actually harnessing it as an identifiable "virtual institution", part of the Oxford or Cambridge "brand", would take it that one step further, make it, and them, more visible and perhaps even widen the opportunities beyond the schools they already choose to co-operate with in their W-P programs.

The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.