Labour and Education: It’s the Middle Classes who Suffer January 22, 2010
Posted by Garibaldy in British Labour Party, British Politics.trackback
The Righs of Free-born English (middle class)men in peril
Yep. You read the headline right. Someone has had the audacity to claim that Labour’s education policies are hurting and belittling the English middle classes. And not just any someone. It was Richard Cairns, head of Brighton College, which had the “best A-Level results of any co-educational school in England”. Brighton College, unsurprisingly, is a fee-paying institution (and therefore benefits from Labour’s decision to preserve its charitable status), and its schedule of fees for the current academic year can be found here (I particularly admire the fact that things like music and support from its dyslexia centre cost extra. Clearly the sort of forward-thinking we need in education). Quoted in the Daily Telegraph (where else you might ask),
Mr Cairns said: “We do need to raise working-class aspirations but at the same time we need to celebrate the success of middle-class children and celebrate that fact that we have so many parents out there spending their time instilling the necessary soft skills and values and in their sons and daughters that they need to do well in life.
“The Government seems to think that the only way to raise aspirations in the working-class is to have all sorts of quota systems that, in turn, damage the middle-class children. That’s muddle-headed.
“There are only 12,000 places at Oxford. Instead of finding more extravagant ways to engineer admissions we should be expanding our best universities and raising the aspirations of all pupils to get into them on merit.”
In fact,
The threat of “quotas” to dictate admission to leading universities risks blocking the chances of hard-working children from relatively wealthy homes, said Richard Cairns, head of fee-paying Brighton College.
He called for the brightest working-class pupils to be given “elite” training – outside ordinary state comprehensives – to allow them to progress at the speed often reached by more affluent peers.
In other words, middle-class and upper-class parents can afford to pay for their children to go to exclusive schools where they get more attention and better facilities and resources, and it’s only right that their ability to pay gets rewarded in the universities their little darlings attend. Not that we might see any irony in the head of a boarding school talking about how middle class parents spend their time to instill their children with the necessary skills to succeed in life. Lest we be cynical about the headmaster’s philanthropic intent, it’s important to bear this in mind
Currently, Brighton College provides free sixth-form places to bright pupils from Kingsford [community school]. Five are currently at the fee-paying school and another three have already been through the scholarship programme.
I had a quick look round the Brighton College website but didn’t see any total student numbers, so I am unsure what proportion this is. It might be a very large proportion. Or it might not.
I would certainly agree that there is some muddle-headed thinking on display in this article. But I might place it somewhere differently than he does. I might of course be being unfair. It could be his speech included a long analysis of the relationship between class, money and educational attainment, and of how by the time you get to university level it is too late to try and even out the differing educational chances caused by economic inequality. I have my doubts though, especially given this remark.
Speaking before a conference in east London on Friday, Mr Cairns said: “India and China have a middle-class that seems to have doubled in size over the last 10 years, yet here we have a political system that seeks to reduce and diminish the ambitions of children born into middle-class homes in an attempt to raise the aspirations of the working-classes.”
Hmmmm. I wonder if the rapid economic development from a comparatively much lower base in those countries over the last ten years might have played a part in his gaining an impression of a rising middle-class compared to the UK. As for the children of the middle-class in often over-priced and over-rated fee-paying schools, I’m fairly confident that the 7% or so of children from fee-paying schools will continue to dominate access to the UK’s elite educational institutions (at a rate of about 7 times their proportion of the school population). I’m think they’ll manage to muddle through into the same types of well-paid jobs and lifestyles that their parents have envisioned for them, even if a few who have been well drilled to over-achieve in exams and interivews miss out on Oxford and Cambridge because of the nasty lefties trying to even out the advantages that the money of the dedicated and caring parents of the English middle class in no way provides.
Hate to agree with the Man, but quotas are a cheap and nasty approach.
To really attack inequality, you need to invest heavily in early-years education. Target the funds at the disadvantaged groups. But thats costly and slow and hard to do right.
Do we know that there are quotas? I very strongly suspect there aren’t any currently. Many, perhaps all, UK univeristies will have a “Widening Participation” policy 9maybe mandated by the govt) which is not the same as quotas and is highly desirable. This may involve looking at a student’s background (deprived area, poorly performing school) and making an offer which you might not otherwise do. The offer (a place conditional on obtaining certain A level grades) could well be the same as all other sudents get (although some institutions MAY lower the requirements a tad I suppose – I don’t know – we don’t, so standards for entry aren’t lowered). So really – it’s not much, arguably not enough. All this outrage from the likes of private school heads etc is just scare mongering to the (upper) middle classes. They are scared parents won’t send their kids to such schools if they they think it won’t get them into university (especialy Oxbridge) and are pissed off that the old, cosy, relationship with Oxbridge is going/gone.
Bristol University got some flak some years ago for suggesting they wanted to increase the state school students coming to them. They have quite a high percentage of private school students. They justified this policy by saying their studies had shown that state school students did better at university than private school students – and they want to recrut those that will do well. Oh the outrage from the Tories and the private school sector!! Seemed perfectly reasonable to me and you can be sure that whatever measures Bristol took they will not have been draconian and they will still seek to recruit the best students they can.
Knowing who is going to do well at university isn’t necessarily straightforward – especialy for courses such as medicine. An academically gifted person may not make a good doctor – that issue raised another burst of outrage from the usual suspects a few years ago when an AAAA student didn’t get an Oxbridge place to study medicine.
I think all universities agree that there are many aspects to widening participation. Part of it is encouraging students from working class backgrounds to aim for university. A lot of what UK universities do in widening participation is aimed at that. My own is also involved in a local school in a deprived area and we various “outreach” activities. But the main “problem” will be with the environment in their schools and in the home. Difficult nuts to crack.
I was an undergraduate at Bristol when private school students were very numerous. Me, newly arrived students, mouthing off to a group of us waiting for lab books “Honest to God, there are so many private school toffs here, don’t you think?!” – well yes, there were, all around me!
AFAIK Fergus there are no quotas, although there may have been some suggestion of introducing them. I think that the quota argument is a red herring myself.
When people talk of results and league tables consider how well non fee paying schools do in Cork.
Then it must be a relief that O’Keefe and the teacher unions agree that there is no need fot the days missed in the snow to be made up.
“There are only 12,000 places at Oxford. Instead of finding more extravagant ways to engineer admissions we should be expanding our best universities and raising the aspirations of all pupils to get into them on merit.”
He got this bit right at least. If you look at the CAO/points system in this country, you have to admit the reason such courses as medicine have such ridiculously high points is the dearth of spaces. Business minded university heads would much rather take fee paying non-EU applicants then government funded students.
Whle somwhat of an elitist myself I think University is not the only game in town. We need technicians, craftspersons etc. They should be educated to, can I say, German standards. In a survey I read it was assessed that what the Anglosaxon world did with say the top 2 thirds on an academic level was roughly the same. But the Germans did much better in developing the bottom third. I would advocate bringing in a replacement for the old Group Cert. A sort of applied Junior Cert. amongst other reforms.
I . also. think the standards of a lot of FETAC stuff is fairly suspect.Those who go to third level thrtough the FETAC route have very low levels of achievement.