Middle-class parents would be unable to guarantee their children places at the best state schools by buying houses nearby

[mrz]

Middle-class parents would be unable to guarantee their children places at the best state schools by buying houses nearby

Dh, laid back sod, is an outstanding teacher of a core subject in one of those schools you'd sell your granny to avoid. He is charged with making some of the weaker teachers better by intensive support and training, because part of the problem is getting the calibre of people to work there. The classes he's got would challenge me for sure. The intake reflects the immediate area, a largely white underclass, mixed w/c and immigrant. Battling poverty of expectation and poor parenting is a big factor but he believes education can make a big difference to children's lives.

Dh's issue is that whilst the top 30-40% are capable of taking and passing exams, the rest aren't, but they still have to jump through the hoops and ultimately fail. Redistributing these kids to fail elsewhere is just a numbers exercise but designing an education - a largely vocational one - that meets their needs, he believes, is the answer. This tinkering at the edges is just a means of massaging figures, probably to the detriment of all.

It's all about Cultural Capital. Having the knowledge to use the resources that you have to get what you want.

I'd post a link but I'm on my Bb.

I'd like to see the link if you hav etime later?

"Seems fair, but how do they select within the band? Lottery? If they're doing that, then they might as well just do a lottery in the first place without the banding, they'd get approximately the same result."

Exactly the Heathen. The fair banding process just adds complexity, requires pupils to sit an unnecassary test, and, ironically, provides scope for canny 'middle class parents' to cheat the system (by getting their dc's to underperform ). Bad idea Grove.

Dinah - a very good post. We need more people to say how it really is.

My Dad hated school. Truanted when he could.

He had a vocation. It happened to be farming. He failed 11+ along with the other 60%. He would have been a much better farmer had he had the chance to go to Agricultural College but was just labelled as thick because he was dyslexic, not intersted in academic subjects, etc.

There must be 60% of kids like that in the system now.

It distresses me that so many Eton etc educated people are willing to reveal themselves as being so simplistic and naive. Especially Eton etc. alumni who will be sending their DCs privately thus have no incentive to Get It Right regarding state education.... in fact, the cynic deep within me believes it might be in the interests of the wealthy and upper middle classes to see state schools become yet more mired.

As someone recently said, every difficult and complex problem has a simple solution.

And it's usually wrong.

Eton educated? Or, alternatively, the adopted sons of Aberdeen fish processors.

"Gove was born in Edinburgh. At four months old, he was adopted by a Labour-supporting family in Aberdeen, where he was brought up.[2] His adoptive father ran a fish processing business. His mother worked as a lab assistant at the University of Aberdeen and with deaf children for Grampian Regional Council.[3] He was educated in Aberdeen at state, and private schools, having won a scholarship to Robert Gordon's College."

There are all sorts of reasons why Gove may be wrong about education, but the idea that he's the privileged scion of the aristocracy is preposterous.

There's naught so fanatical as the converted.

There are all sorts of reasons why Gove may be wrong about education, but the idea that he's the privileged scion of the aristocracy is preposterous.

I see where you are coming from, but he is operating within a government where the majority of the ideology and policies have been made by Etonians (or equivalent), so he must have conformed in order to have been elected minister. No?

He doesn't strike me as working class, (despite his origins) and his demeanour and ideas are certainly far removed from the "masses".

"but he is operating within a government where the majority of the ideology and policies have been made by Etonians (or equivalent)"

As opposed to hypothetical governments led by Clegg (Westerminster) and Blair (Fettes)? The recent Prime Ministers with state educations are Brown (state grammar), John Major (state grammar) and Margaret Thatcher (state grammar). Amongst those who failed to become Prime Minster are Harriet Harman (St Pauls), Viscount Stansgate, sorry Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, sorry Tony Benn (Westminster), and Ed Balls (Nottingham High School, which he attended whilst his hypocrite father simultaneously campaigned for the abolition of grammar schools, so being a shit is obviously something he inherited from dad).

I seem to recall that in the nineties, the Labour front bench had a better class of public school than the Tory. Further back, a friend of mine was at grammar school with Shirley Williams' daughter, whilst Shirley was abolishing grammar schools for everyone else. And who can forget Diane Abbott and Ruth Kelly, both of whom talked loudly about state education for their constituents, but went private for their own children because they didn't think state schools were up to it. Kelly was education secretary at the time, and played the "as a mother" card, which was especially noxious.

If you want to find people who think that state education is a matter of little importance as they won't be using it as it's nqoc, Labour are at least as bad as the Tories. If you can find a Labour front-bencher whose child attends a state secondary school, let us know.

tokyo It does indeed appear that the age of the state educated PM died with 'tripartite' system. William Hague came closest to being our first comprehensive school educated PM. Maybe a Miliband might do it - but the pickings are pretty thin!

Back to the OP. I have just read the original Barnados Report.

The report finds the greatest bar to the poorest children getting into the better schools is their parents not applying (or just applying to the most local school). These parents find the complex admissions processes too confusing.

Can anyone explain how the solution to this complexity is 'fair banding'?

To be fair, tokyo, I never mentioned political party, Tory or otherwise, or Gove personally. He didn't dream this one up all by himself, you know! As far as I'm concerned, it's 'same old' in many ways- I mean, one reason Labour kept the Tories 'out' for as long as they did was because their policies were so right wing!

My issue is how many politicians, of any hue wade in to put state education 'to rights' having never engaged with it personally or having been selectively educated within it or having been secondary modern educated themselves, then choosing to send their own DCs private....

Then engineering state schooling to create a charade of equality, safe in the knowledge their own children will never darken the doors of the latest Education-Think disaster.

"Maybe a Miliband might do it - but the pickings are pretty thin!"

They went to a comprehensive in the same way that Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess.

tokyo -

"My issue is how many politicians, of any hue wade in to put state education 'to rights' having never engaged with it personally or having been selectively educated within it"

Indeed. It's why Ruth Kelly isn't fit for public life.

Relative of mine keeps falling over the Millibands and Una King, London mayoral candidate, visiting their state school alma mater, the 'Eton of the Labour Party', snort!

Oona, sorry, not Una

Sorry if this has been asked before but what happens with sibling in either a lottery system or a banding system. Do they get priority for the school that an older sibling was given a place at or do they end up at different schools because of the allocation system?

and this works how?
out in the sticks where there is only one school , 5 miles away, with a bus service to a set of villages.

Rural comprehensives have to be properly comprehensive, they have to serve all the kids in catchment because there is nowhere else and no real choice.

This article on the Miliband's school Haverstock is the most balanced article on a comprehensive school I've seen in the Guardian. The picture it paints of a tough environment where survival depended on strength of personality and family support chimes with my own experience.

Oona King is refreshingly honest. ".. it was quite a tough school. Kids did get bullied and the middle-class kids tended to exist in different groups to the working-class kids."

Another ex-pupil states that "The middle-class kids usually did OK academically because they were streamed into the O-level classes from Year 10 and taught separately"

And the article concludes "students such as the Milibands and King would have succeeded wherever they went because they had parental support."

Oi Tokyo
Don't diss the Benn

"Rural comprehensives have to be properly comprehensive, they have to serve all the kids in catchment because there is nowhere else and no real choice."

No need to worry about banding then .

"Rural comprehensives have to be properly comprehensive"

Unfortunately, it's very difficult to run anything remotely like a full comprehensive with fewer than a thousand pupils, and ideally you need more than that. Otherwise you can't offer decently sized groups in anything other than popular subjects, and minority subjects are either taught mixed-ability or not at all. It's smaller comprehensives that lose language teaching, separate science provision, etc.

The catchment areas in low-density rural areas make that very difficult. And the argument used to counter this, which tends to involve words like "relevant" and "appropriate" tend to assume that children in rural areas aren't entitled to an education that offers the same opportunities as those in rural areas.