Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

We don't need no education

An interesting question raised on Stumbling and Mumbling.

If the benefits of staying at school until eighteen are so great, why don't we just advertise them to GCSE takers and leave the decision up to them?

Alice Fishburn

Should David Irving have been invited to Oxford?

Should David Irving be a guest of the Oxford Union?

He has been invited to appear at the end of November together with the BNP's Nick Griffin. Alexander Lukoshenko, the Belarussian accused of human rights abuses, has also been invited.

This is the comment of Luke Tryl of the University debating society:

The Oxford Union is famous for its commitment to free speech and although I do think these people have awful and abhorrent views I do think Oxford students are intelligent enough to challenge and ridicule them.

I fear he misses the point.

I have defended the free speech of David Irving myself. He ought not to have been incarcerated in an Austrian jail.

But nor ought he to be invited to dinner and debate at Oxford. Extending an invitation to such a man, indeed to such men, is giving their views a legitimacy they should not be accorded. Both Irving and Griffin crave the respectability such invitations provide.

There is a vast moral difference between acknowledging, say, that Irving should be allowed by law to publish a book and being Irving's publisher. This is the difference the Oxford Union has failed to appreciate.

In place of spin

Yesterday saw a classic example of the Brown method. In place of spin - stealth.

Having re-appointed Andrew Adonis and apparently committed himself to Blair's city academy scheme, quietly the new Prime Minister has moved to neuter the bodies.

City academies will now be under much greater local authority control, and as The Times put it this morning:

Academies would have to work more closely with local authorities at every stage, suggesting that they could not simply be imposed in an area without local agreement.

So what we get is a policy that looks like one thing but is, in fact, something else. Instead of using spin - pressuring the press to report favourably on news, manipulating media announcements and so on - Brown uses stealth - hidden policy details, unannounced taxes.

It's a different working method. Personally? I prefer spin. It's easier to see through.

What's in a (school) name?

Are school names becoming too green? That's the debate in America initiated by a new piece of research for one of my favourite think tanks - the Manhattan Institute.

It's a lovely, eccentric piece of work that illumunates the way the culture is changing.

The researchers discovered that fewer schools are being name after presidents these days and more after natural features:

Of almost 3,000 public schools in Florida, five honor George Washington, compared with eleven named after manatees.

In Minnesota, the naming of schools after presidents declined from 14 percent of schools built before 1956 to 3 percent of schools built in the last decade.

In New Jersey, naming schools after people dropped from 45 percent of schools built before 1948 to 27 percent of schools built since 1988.

In the last two decades, a public school built in Arizona was almost fifty times more likely to be named after such things as a mesa or a cactus than after a president.

In Florida, nature names for schools increased from 19 percent of schools built before 1958 to 37 percent of schools built in the last decade.

Today, a majority of all public school districts nationwide do not have a single school named after a president.

What's the best British school name you've come across?

A fiasco that is destroying physics

A new Civitas report bemoans the way that the curriculum is being stripped of content in state schools.

Anyone who doubts their conclusion should read this extraordinary, passionate open letter from physics teacher Wellington Grey:

The thing that attracts pupils to physics is its precision. Here, at last, is a discipline that gives real answers that apply to the physical world. But that precision is now gone. Calculations — the very soul of physics — are absent from the new GCSE. Physics is a subject unpolluted by a torrent of malleable words, but now everything must be described in words.

In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence.

The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.

It is, he says:

A fiasco that is destroying physics.

The full text contains some brilliant examples.

Fisking Tim Montgomerie

The headline of Tim Montgomerie's post reads Fisking Finklestein, but, to his credit, its contents are more polite analysis.

Which doesn't mean to say I agree with him.

Can one Fisk a Fisking? I am not sure of the etiquette or even the correct font, so let me take his points one by one and reply.

He doesn't believe that grammar schools is the Tories Clause Four

Neither do I. This is why I wrote that "Grammar schools isn’t Clause Four. It’s only one issue among many where the Tories will have to change. But what does Mr Brady think – that in an election, schools policy won’t come up? "

He says that "there are aspects of the 1997 Settlement....that we have to accept as a party"

Aspects? Aspects? This is a wonderfully polite understatement. It is simply not enough to isolate a few policies - minimum wage, (and to his credit) civil partnerships - and accommodate to them. The defeats were way, way too big for that. The Tory Party has to pick itself up and move to a different place, closer to the centre. 1997 (and 2001 and 2005) was not an ordinary defeat.

More positively, Tim's later list of changes the Tories need to make - on arms sales, and a less Hefferesque tone - was spot on.

He argues that the policy of a grammar school in every town did not lost the 1997 election. Leaving the ERM was the day that election was lost.

This may sound pedantic, but actually it wasn't the day we left the ERM that saw Tory poll ratings plummet. That happened shortly afterwards, when the Chancellor put up taxes.

There is a reason for my pedantic insistence. On that Budget day people stopped believing that any party, especially the Tories, should be believed when they promised tax cuts. They also began to fear that the Tories were not the party of economic stability. For these reasons George Osborne's promise to put stability before tax cuts is extremely popular with voters. Yet, just like grammar schools policy, it is resisted by critics like Tim.

So, yes, grammar schools policy was only one reason why the election was lost, but resistance to the principle of moving towards the centre goes well beyond schools policy.

There is one further point. At the next election I think schools policy could easily be at the centre of the debate. It simply isn't an option to go into the fight with an unpopular policy on such a key issue.

He says my assertion that the Brady policy is unpopular is based on a skewed Times poll. Populus added in bits of policy - the eleven plus, having grammar schools everywhere - that wouldn't have been part of the Tory plan, even if Conservativehome was in charge.

The Times poll gave a more realistic impression of public opinion because the question was put to voters as it would be by Labour and the media in a political campaign.

"The danger is that the Conservative Party becomes a tight little party on the centre if it doesn't keep its traditional supporters happy.  It's no good appealing only to Waitrose voters and their quality of life worries if we don't talk to striving voters who worry about crime and tax and the standard of living." 

The danger of failing to win over new voters is far, far greater than the danger of losing "traditional supporters". Some activists have a problem with moving to the centre but don't confuse them with the broad mass of Tory voters. Most traditional supporters understand exactly what Cameron is doing. Look at the local election results. After all the "I'm off to join UKIP" nonsense in the Conservativehome comment section, how well did UKIP do? And how well did the Cameron Tories do?

Neither Portillo nor Brady are convincing on grammar schools

On Sunday Michael Portillo addressed the question of grammar schools and made this observation:

Graham Brady, the party’s Europe spokesman, produced compelling evidence that on average all pupils in areas that have grammar schools do better than others elsewhere. Even those who fail the selection exam, and therefore go to comprehensive schools instead, do better.

He refuted the Tory leadership’s argument that this is because grammar schools are found only in more affluent areas. Pupils in Trafford, where there are grammars, outperform those in Bury, where there are none, even though the cities are socially similar. Children “in leafy Oxfordshire”, wrote Brady (a dig at Cameron’s own constituents), “fail to reach the national average”.

“Two brains” Willetts had been defeated on the evidence (but not necessarily the politics) by Brady, who always struck me as one of life’s plodders.

Let's leave aside the fantastically Portilloesque and fantastically unnecessary description of Mr Brady as a "plodder", shall we? Instead let's concentrate on the argument that Michael finds so persuasive.

Was the evidence produced by Mr Brady indeed compelling? Er, no.

The mistake he has made is a fairly simple one. Trafford grammar schools do not only contain children of parents living in Trafford. Children living in neighbouring areas go there too, depressing results in Bury and raising them in Trafford.

Pay attention at the back: a lesson on free speech

Can members of the University and College Union do joined-up thinking?

This morning they voted against Government plans to instruct lecturers to report students with extremist views to the police. Their reasoning was this:

Universities must remain safe spaces for lecturers and students to discuss and debate all sort of ideas, including those that some people may consider challenging, offensive and even extreme

Quite right, freedom of speech must prevail.

But then they unanimously agreed to this motion this afternoon:

All negative characterisations by teachers of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, identity and lifestyle should be outlawed and classified as an act of discrimination and an incitement to hatred based on sexual orientation

So challenging, offensive and even extreme views deserve to be aired, so long as they don't happen to be the sort of challenging, offensive and even extreme views that the union disapproves of. I'm not quite sure that these lecturers have quite got the hang of this free speech thing.

Robbie Millen

Janet responds and so do I

Janet Daley returns to grammar schools with this remark:

Team Cameron, meanwhile, sinks deeper into utter confusion and incoherence. On the one hand, it insists that the past week's political nightmare (including the chorus of attacks from critics like me) has been just what it wanted; on the other, it bursts into floods of tears and accuses me of being nasty and unhelpful for pointing out the potholes in its own road to the future. Conservative spokesmen are apparently allowed to say vindictive and merciless things about the way middle-class parents raise their children, but those who take the assault personally must remain constructive and helpful in their response. OK, this is me being helpful.

I think she means me, ladies and gentleman.

I realise, with a bit of a sigh (I often find myself moved by oped columns, naturally, but rarely to floods of tears, I must confess), that I am wasting my time here, but I should point out that her suggestion that Conservative spokesman said "vindictive and merciless things about the way middle-class parents raise their children" is twaddle. The merciless things Janet objected to she first span up before objecting to them.

And I didn't say that arguing against Conservative grammar schools is nasty and unhelpful. I said that calling David Cameron's advisers "juvenile idiots" was nasty and uncalled for. Which it was.

Janet Daley is able to make intelligent and worthwhile arguments without resorting to such nonsense. I don't like tangling with her particularly, since I like her. But I felt her invective was such that it would be cowardly not to respond.

I've read many, many excellent columns by Janet. The original grammar schools piece wasn't one of them. I didn't think that printing the same points again improved it.

Nelson's column

Fraser Nelson gets it.

His Spectator column this week is an excellent survey of the Tory policy leap that has been lost in the debate about grammar schools:

The system Mr Willetts seems to be proposing could become a more potent force for social mobility than a reimposition of grammar schools ever could.

Mr Cameron appears inclined toward a version of the voucher system that transformed Swedish education when it was introduced in 1992. The dynamics are as simple as they are powerful. Any qualified teachers can set up a school, as long as they prove there is a demand and meet minimum standards. The state pays them a fixed amount per pupil: about £5,000 per year. State education would be open to any school, or community, that wanted to participate. And that’s it.

He continues:

In Mr Blair’s system, new schools can only open once they have a found a sponsor willing to part with £2 million in areas that fit ‘deprivation criteria’. Academies usually replace failed schools, thus adding nothing to the number of schools. Negotiations often take two years. And if the organisers want to open a second school, they must start this whole process from the beginning — and run the dispiriting gauntlet of the LEAs yet again

Mr Willetts is proposing to correct each of these defects. There would be no sponsorship criteria, new schools could open wherever there is a demand, and multiple school licences would be granted. Mr Cameron said on Monday he would ensure the ‘LEAs cannot strangle new schools at birth’. Mr Willetts envisages a large number of smaller, boutique schools rather than a new Grange Hill with a cast of hundreds in every neighbourhood.

Or we could continue arguing about a half a dozen selective schools in Kent.

Do Cameron's critics really want grammar schools?

Are David Cameron's critics really in favour of introducing a grammar school system? This may seem an odd question to ask, but reading their words carefully, I am not sure that they are.

So what, exactly, is this argument all about?

David Willetts' speech, arguing against the creation of new grammar schools, made some people very angry. But not really because they want grammar schools everywhere. Ben Brogan has it right:

His densely-argued speech, as always elegant and interesting, has terrified MPs who believe he has passed a death sentence on the existing 164 grammar schools by making a strong case for their abolition. If, as he suggests, grammar schools are no longer justified, why should they be allowed to exist? The fear is his assessment will be used by campaigners to launch a fresh wave of referendums for closure.

The activist anger about the speech is strongest where people already have grammar schools, not where people want to have them.

On Saturday, for instance, the Daily Telegraph, whose columnists have been strongly critical of the Willetts/Cameron position, set out its position in an editorial. And did not argue for a grammar schools system to be introduced.

Here's what they said:

Mr Cameron has never been keen on the old model of secondary education: the words "grammar school'' may work wonders in Tory seats, but folk memories of the brutal 11-plus have the opposite effect on crucial Lib Dem swing voters. So if David Cameron wants to criticise and change the old "sheep and goats'' system, that is fair enough.

What is not fair enough is for the Tory education spokesman to appear to trash the ethos of aspirational education. The Conservatives should come up with a new model of state school, offering maximum parent choice and streaming at all levels.

As they must surely be aware, this is exactly what David Willett's has announced.

Fisking Janet Daley

Janet Daley is angry about Tory policy towards grammar schools. Fair enough. But I wouldn't want her to think she has a monopoly on anger.

I found her column this morning about the Tory grammar school policy infuriating - insulting and cheap in places, entirely ridiculous in others. I like and respect Janet, but I think she really let herself down.

Here's the opening sentence on the Tory's grammar school : 

Well the Tories certainly have stolen the limelight from Labour.

How incredibly self-absorbed some Conservatives can be. The idea that last week's speech by David Willetts stole the limelight from Gordon Brown's ascension to the Premiership is ludicrous.

She continued:

Conservatives presented the commentariat with a target to die for by flinging their party into a perfectly executed suicide mission.

This is an interesting manoeuvre. I have never seen anyone present anyone else with a target by committing suicide. Let alone a target to die for. But I'll take it from Janet that this is physically possible. She then caps off her mixed metaphor with this:

And their leader - or the clique of juvenile idiots who advise him - still doesn't get it.

How dare you, Janet. What a pathetic, rude thing to say. Just because you disagree with their position on school selection doesn't justify your remark. David Cameron employs some very able people, a number of whom have been independently successful. I don't always agree with them either, but such a personal attack is lamentable. It is worth noting, in passing, that the political advice of these "juvenile idiots" hasn't done Mr Cameron much harm so far.

Now they are reduced to silencing Michael Howard, who has been a generous patron of their Brave New Party, when he threatens to erupt publicly over the abandonment of a policy which he regards as sacred to the Tories' meritocratic credentials.

If Michael (who incidentally is an honourable person who would not stoop to the insults used in Janet's piece) does regard being in favour of grammar schools as sacred, and perhaps he does, then it is surprising it wasn't his policy when he was leader. The party wanted to allow schools to set their own selection policy while simultaneously arguing that it was against the 11 plus. This wasn't a coherent policy and was always going to need to be changed.

And if reintroducing grammar schools is sacred, it is also surprising that it hasn't been the policy of any Conservative Government since 1964.

By rejecting Clause Four, New Labour was seen to be embracing public opinion and throwing off ties to its own vested interests. By rejecting grammar schools and the principle of academic selection, which are overwhelmingly popular with the public, Cameron's Conservatives are doing precisely the opposite.

So proposing selection is popular, is it?  Let's see. Is any politician ready to get up and announce that they are in favour of secondary modern schools? Thought not. But secondary moderns are the other 75 per cent of the policy, aren't they. School selection became unpopular because 75 per cent of people don't go to the grammar schools. It's interesting that everyone calls the selection policy a policy to bring back grammar schools. No one ever calls it a policy to bring back secondary moderns.   

What else, pray, could David Willetts have meant when he implied that grammar schools had effectively been rendered useless to the cause of social mobility by the selfishness of middle-class parents who will insist on ferrying their offspring to "tennis coaching or music lessons" and even - good grief - arranging for private tuition to fill in the gaps left by appalling state schools?

If it were not for all those greedy middle-class (boo) families out there bunging up the few remaining grammar schools with their over-privileged darlings, there might be a chance for poor, disadvantaged (hooray) children to get a fair crack at them. So tainted is the notion of selective schooling that we must embrace a system which cannot be corrupted by the self-serving bourgeoisie. (Never mind that the favoured system - selection within schools by streaming and setting - would be just as corruptible by parental help and support.)

So let's get this straight: it is now the official Conservative view that parents who struggle and sacrifice their time and money in the interests of helping their children to get on in life are a problem. No, Mr Willetts, it will not do to say that that was not quite what you meant. It is what you damn well said. And it is not just morally objectionable, it is logically absurd from your own point of view.

Not only did David Willetts not quite say this, he didn't say it at all. The things that Janet calls "morally objectionable" and "logically absurd" she made up before attacking. David Willetts did not describe middle class parents as selfish or wrong for wanting the best for their children. He simply said that because they do and act upon it more these days, the 11 plus is no longer as good a test of pure ability as it was and that  grammar schools don't work as a driver of social mobility as well as they used to.

All the stuff about the self-serving bourgeoisie is a figment of Janet's imagination. It wasn't in the speech or anything anybody said about the speech. I have no idea where she got it from.

If you genuinely wish to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, then you cannot want the poor to remain in poverty - and yet by saying that it is only the poorest (those families in receipt of free school meals) whom you deem to be worthy of support, you are effectively branding all those who climb out of poverty by their own efforts as unworthy of your help. So staying poor becomes virtuous (deserving) but pulling yourself out - or pushing your children out - of poverty becomes a vice (undeserving).

Uh? Maybe I am a juvenile idiot too, but I don't follow. David Willetts used free school meal numbers as a useful measure, in the absence of a better one, of seeing how well the social mix in grammar schools matches that of the local population. Nobody said that being poor was virtuous or otherwise

The fate of the underclass and its dire educational prospects is a national tragedy for which some remedy may or may not be possible. But it will certainly not be found by automatically ruling that anyone who is not permanently, irredeemably disadvantaged is ipso facto undeserving.

Again, no one said this.

Mr Willetts is, famously, a very intelligent man: surely he understands that not all advantages are "unfair advantages".

Yes, you are right, Janet. He is intelligent and therefore does understand this.

The Cameron project has, at a stroke, restored patrician condescension to the heart of Conservative philosophy. Apparently oblivious to the sinister aspect that their own upper-class, public-school backgrounds would inject into this debate, they have revived a species of class war that prevailed in this country long before the Marxist version: the aristocratic loathing of the middle-class upstart.

The destitute are sympathetic because they can be patronised and "helped": the real enemy is the striving, overly-conscientious burgher who insists on helping himself.

Of course the striving middle class, who want to improve themselves, should be given every chance and it is vital that the Tories be on their side. But in practice it is these people who turned against grammar schools hardest and quickest. They found their children going to second-class schools, and labelled failures.

I understand that many Conservatives believe in re-introducing grammar schools. There is certainly a case that can be made. And Janet is within her rights to make it and dissent firmly. But a combination of rudeness and attacking arguments that you first put up yourself can't be allowed to go unanswered.

Grammar schools are an electoral loser for the Tories

Can I ask a question?

If support for grammar schools is a litmus test of a truly Conservative policy why didn't the Thatcher and Major Governments reintroduce them?

Introducing grammar schools has not been the policy of a Conservative Government since 1964. Since 1997, when a rather odd pledge was made in the manifesto, the Party has argued for the re-introduction of some selection, but always half-heartedly. It denied that it was in favour of the eleven plus. The policy, in truth, has always been incoherent.

There is a good reason for this reticence. The Tories worked out about 30 years ago that grammar schools were a vote loser.

There is a robust intellectual debate (see here, here, here, and especially here) going on about the impact of selective schools on mobility and long may it continue. But the politics shouldn't just be ignored. The Tories have never won an election advocating the re-introduction of grammar schools.

Margaret Thatcher understood this. Should David Cameron be expected to ignore it? David Willetts is trying to find an elegant intellectual way off an electoral hook.

What difference does "good" parenting make to kids? Not much

Magnus Linklater in his column this week referred to an article by Judith Rich Harris in Prospect magazine. She is a truly original thinker who in her books, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, has turned the prevailing wisdom about how children develop their personalities on its head.

Crudely put, she doesn't believe that parents, other than through the genes they endow their offspring with, have that much effect on their child's character and personality.

Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse—the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference. The child who grows up in the orderly, well-run home is, on average, no more conscientious as an adult than the one who grows up in the messy one. Or rather, he or she will be more conscientious only to the extent that this characteristic is inherited.

Her argument is compelling. It should cheer up parents that their ability to f*** up their children is pretty limited (the screwing up can be left to their peer group). Therapists wouldn't like it if her thesis became the prevailing wisdom; it's easy for them to coin money from saps who want to blame their own unhappiness and failings on Mum and Dad.

Robbie Millen   

Rewarding naughty kids won't work

The Government's eccentric plan to reward bad behaviour provide rewards to badly behaved children who do better than expected has come in for predictable, but basically correct, criticism.

However, one important criticism of Alan Johnson's handiwork has been notably absent - the ample psychological evidence that such a scheme won't work.

In his book Irrationality Professor Stuart Sutherland draws on experimental work to give a useful guide to the impact of rewards and punishment on children.

What happens when, for instance, two groups of children are asked to use magic markers, one with a promise of reward for their effort, the other just for the fun of it? The answer is that the moment the reward is withdrawn, the fun group keeps drawing while the rewarded group stops.

Sutherland provides a simple explanation for this. When you voluntarily pursue a course of action you become committed to it, you like it more intensely because you chose, freely, to do it. If you do something for a reward, on the other hand, you tell yourself that you are only doing it for that reason. And when the reward stops, so do you.

The only upside to this analysis is that the same applies to rewarding idiotic educational schemes with the provision of support for the Deputy Leadership.

Ordinary people don't exist

The Guardian is doing its bit to stoke up class envy. Last week Peter Wilby wrote an absurd article about David Cameron, cannabis and the now infamous Bullingdon Club photo.

Roy Hattersley has returned to the theme:

That does not mean last week's tittle-tattle left Cameron unscathed. He suffered what the Pentagon would call collateral damage. His problem was not the pot, but the picture... The question it provokes is obvious. "Understands ordinary people?"

I don't doubt that some voters will be turned off pictures of sneering toffs (though, let's remember, the Bullingdon Twelve were posing for a photo and - my God, perhaps, playing up to the camera knowing that much of Oxford thought they were tossers), but my question is who are these "ordinary people" that need understanding?

I consider myself to be from a pretty typical background (lower middle-class, suburban) but then I went to Cambridge, where I met lots of privately-educated people, and then to work in newspapers, where I met even more. I'm sure that their attitudes - because we all know posh people have exactly the same views - have rubbed off on me: so does that now disqualify me from understanding "ordinary people". Heck, I'm a top-rate taxpayer, so does that disqualify me too? Also, I'm a childless gay so that must remove me even further from the concerns of ordinary people... so perhaps we shouldn't have gay MPs.

Now, what about the children of immigrants from, let's say, Bangladesh. Their family life, their experiences and the values that they are taught  are quite different from their white neighbours. Do they count as "ordinary people"? Can they understand the concerns of the white majority? And what about a steelworker from South Wales - his life is pretty different from a retail worker from Crawley? A council-house tenant doesn't have to worry about mortgages, so he doesn't know much about the woes that face homeowners. And... you get the picture. The "ordinary voter" is a pretty rare thing.

The class baiting of David Cameron is plain dumb. It presupposes that we are all prisoners of our background, incapable and unwilling of making the imaginative leap and learning about other peoples' lives. After all Roy Hattersley and Norman Tebbit are of a similar vintage, both grammar school boys from unprivileged backgrounds, and both with a good schtick about speaking-up for ordinary people - so how come they have radically divergent views?

That's not to say that Britain doesn't have a class problem. I can chunter with the best of them about the nepotism and cronyism. It's just that a few rich Tory kids at the Bullingdon aren't the issue (sorry Clive Davis). The real damage to meritocracy and social mobility is the shambolic state of Britain's education system. Fewer children from the state sector go to Oxbridge now - Oxford and Cambridge have been brilliant institutions for giving a leg-up to people from humble backgrounds - than they did in the Sixties. And why did that happen? The abolition of grammar schools in favour of Roy Hattersley's beloved comprehensives.   

Robbie Millen

Why I don't agree with Simon Jenkins on education

I have linked to Simon Jenkins's column in the Daily Fix, but I also want to comment on it.

The money paragraph is this:

Banning parents from seeking private education is an intolerable curb on liberty. Yet if half of all parents were taking this route, I would take active measures to discourage them. I might insist that anyone who wanted subsidised higher education should have spent at least two years in a state school. Just as taxpayers should not subsidise social segregation through state schools, so they should not subsidise such segregation through tax relief to private schools. Such places, noble as they may be, are not charities but agents of social apartheid.

Extraordinary.

First, the idea that people who send their children to private schools are being subsidised by the state is ridiculous. These parents are paying through their taxes for a schooling they don't use. The redistributive tax system also ensures that they pay for the schooling of others too. There is no subsidy involved.

Second, Simon has been a spirited advocate of localism. So does it stop at the school gate? Shouldn't local authorities be allowed to choose if they wish to hold 11 plus exams? What does localism mean if they can't?

But this is not an easy question for a localist to answer. For, if one authority decides that it wishes to have grammar schools and the next door one decides against, an exodus of middle class parents might follow.

If you believe that social apartheid must be eliminated, if that's the first aim of your policy, then you have to abandon localism.

In defence of Ruth Kelly

Hypocrite! That's the Evening Standard's headline this morning. The word is accompanied with a picture of Ruth Kelly.

But is she? The minister would only be a hypocrite if she opposed the existence of public schools or had advanced the principle that people shouldn't send their children to such schools. Has she? I don't believe so.

Oddly, it would be hypocritical for a former Labour Education Secretary to send their child to one of the few remaining state selective schools, since they have acted to make selection almost impossible. But their policy towards private education has been, essentially, live and let live.

Ruth Kelly and her husband are making a difficult (and expensive) decision about the schooling that is best for their child. I think their decision should be respected.

So, in short, Guido and I concur.

Quiz question: what do ITV's programmes and educational standards have in common?

Graeme Archer produces this witty rant about the quality of ITV quiz programmes. He regards the failure of participants to cope with simple probabilities as a sure sign that educational standards are declining.

But surely, Graeme, having a sample size of two quiz programmes and no comparison group.....

A creditable idea

Alan Milburn gave an important speech yesterday on the reform of public services.  It was a  well-argued, heavyweight contribution that went far beyond the usual boilerplate "we need a debate about the future" stuff. I was impressed.

A good deal of the speech was devoted to making the argument for consumer choice, which you might feel you already knew. But there was also an important policy proposal to help parents with children in failing schools:

I believe that parents with children in those schools where performance has not crossed these thresholds for two or more years should be given a new right to choose an alternative school.

They would be given an Education Credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150% of the cost of educating the child in their current school. This would give a positive incentive to the alternative school to take them and to expand their intake numbers. Indeed, for children holding an Education Credit the alternative school would be free to go above its planned admission numbers.

So far, so good. But then Milburn says this:

The Credit could not be topped up. But it could be used in any state school.

I know the argument on topping up. But why just state schools? I can't believe, from everything else Milburn has said, that he really believes this restriction to be essential. I suspect he has included it just to help make the idea viable on the left. Which is something I can no longer be bothered with.

What happened to being rad, man?

Students are supposed to be revolting, aren't they? What is the point of students without radical or unorthodox or even silly views? Spiked has an interview with Wendy Kaminer, a leading American civil rights campaigner, about freedom (or the lack of it) on campuses.

Far from being a site of free thinking and free exchange of ideas, the university seems to have become a laboratory for new forms of censorship and conformism. "Kids come to college, and for the first couple of weeks of freshman year they’re in a sensitivity course, where they’re told what they’re allowed to say and what they’re not allowed to say", says Kaminer. "They are subjected to thought-control programmes the minute they arrive. That is not a very good start."

It's a depressing read. But the good news for free-thinkers is that Kaminer is speaking at the Battle of Ideas conference this weekend. It promises to be a lively event.

Robbie Millen