Class and Education - Lampl

[Xenia]

In today's FT:

Break down the barriers in English education

By Sir Peter Lampl

English schools are undergoing another major shake-up as Michael Gove removes them from local authority oversight and introduces a broader range of providers. No wonder, then, that the first fortnight of the new school year has been a turbulent one. Many headteachers are angry that Ofqual, the exam regulator, regraded GCSE English papers downwards midyear. Teaching unions are threatening a work-to-rule protest over pay and pensions. And many more schools have become academies, with more control over funding, governance and the curriculum.

This is the battleground of English education. But another piece of news this week was even more significant. On Tuesday the OECD reported that our schools were the most socially segregated among advanced economies. This underlines the biggest problem facing England?s schools: the close relationship between family income and how good a school a child goes to. The result is that children from poorer backgrounds have fewer opportunities to move up the ladder.

English education has improved under successive governments. Standards of teaching, and especially school leadership, are better. There have been significant improvements in London schools, particularly for some ethnic communities. But this is not good enough. We have to outpace other economies, particularly in Asia, that have improved faster. The UK languishes in 25th place in the OECD?s league tables for reading and in 28th place for maths, where Shanghai is now the best in the world. This does not reflect the position of all our young people. Rather it is a stark reminder that levels of social mobility have worsened since the 1960s and remain very low, despite government investment and reform in education.

I believe one reason for this is that governments have focused on structural reform, such as creating academies or free schools, rather than on improving teaching. Yet it is good teaching that really matters. Teachers? salaries account for four-fifths of a school?s costs and this reflects the value they deliver. Research by McKinsey has shown that the world?s best-performing education systems are those with the best teaching. The OECD now rates leadership in English schools highly, but we still have much more to do to improve teaching.

First, we need to attract more of the best graduates to the classroom. Ten years ago I helped establish the Teach First programme in England, modelled on the successful Teach for America programme. Teach First is recruiting almost 1,000 graduates this year from top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, to teach in inner-city schools for a minimum of two years. Approximately half then leave to pursue other careers.

It has been a great success. But with 36,000 teachers recruited each year, it is only a part of the solution. In Finland and South Korea there are 10 applicants for every teaching place. Here we regard it as a success if every place is filled.

Even more important will be to improve the quality of the existing 440,000-strong workforce. Sutton Trust research shows that English schools could move into the world?s top five education performers within a decade if the performance of the least effective 10th of teachers were brought up to the average.

While improving teaching is crucial, we also have to address inequality in our education system, which has a substantial cost to society and the economy, since it prevents many of the most able children from non-privileged backgrounds from achieving their potential.

The best schools in England are world-class. But they are also socially exclusive. Seven per cent of English pupils go to fee-paying independent schools, which are out of reach for the rest of the population. Another 4 per cent attend the remaining selective grammar schools, which draw just 2 per cent of their pupils from the poorest households. The top-performing comprehensives ? mainly faith schools and comprehensives in well-off areas ? take just 6 per cent of their pupils from the poorest households. This compares with a national average of 16 per cent.

We should address this inequality in three ways. First, we should use random ballots to determine admissions to our urban secondary schools, rather than basing admissions on how close you live to the school or how religious you are. This would ensure a good social mix. Second, grammar schools should select more fairly, attract able students from poorer backgrounds and provide them with the extra help that better-off pupils get in prep schools or from private tutors.

Third, we must open independent day schools to all. Their students are 55 times more likely to win an Oxbridge place and 22 times more likely to go to a top-ranked university than a state school student from a poor household. The absence of poorer students from these universities is a shocking waste of talent.

My independent day school was totally funded by the local authority. Indeed, seven out of 10 independent day schools were principally state funded until 1976 through the direct grant scheme and local schemes.

Between 2000 and 2007, I co-funded a pilot scheme at Belvedere, an independent girls? day school in Liverpool, replacing fees with admission based on academic ability. Parents paid according to means. As a result, a third of pupils paid no fees. Academic standards improved and it was a happy place for pupils of all backgrounds. Moreover, the cost per pupil was less than at the average state school.

More than 80 leading independent day schools would back such a state-funded scheme, which would benefit more than 30,000 able students, whose parents could not afford full fees. It would require selective admissions, which political parties oppose. Yet far from creating new selection, such a scheme would democratise existing selective schools and break down the barriers between the independent and state sectors.

Taken together, I believe that these measures to improve teaching and reduce inequality would transform social mobility and unleash a wealth of talent to fuel our economy. And they would put England in the education premier league.

The writer is chair of the Sutton Trust and of the Education Endowment Foundation "

happygardening - as you say, those who treat immigrants like savages have probably been treated like savages themselves. Society gets what it deserves and if you treat people nicely when you meet them but actually don't want to mix with half of them at school, you are really encouraging the belief that some people are incurable savages and the best thing to do with them is avoid them. You are leaving the savages to be savage elsewhere and not providing them with yourself or your children as an example of civilised behaviour, and then dumping the immigrants in with them and acting surprised by what happens. Nobody really wants to have to lower themselves or put themselves at risk in order to tame the savage, they would rather the problem just went away without them having to get involved. In fact, they suspect that rather than cure the savage, they will join him.

"Shagmundfreud, your reaction is not the common one - see my above comment regarding the opposite effect on racism and predjudism"

I speak as I find in my own community, where children from a HUGE range of backgrounds mix happily together at school.

In my ds's class there are children whose fathers are senior lecturers at good universities; the children of lawyers; the children of teachers and social workers; also children of unemployed Somali migrants; children of white working class mothers (who have never worked); African and West Indian children, many newly arrived in the UK; children of Albanian builders. This is TRUE social homogeneity. The children get on fine. There is no conflict. The parents get on fine.

Sadly the picture changes drastically at year 6, when the children of the middle class families get hived off to private, grammar and church schools. Parents who can move to the prosperous parts of the borough. The (now primarily disadvantaged remainder) stay at the local secondary schools, which are all hard places to teach and learn because the mix isn't 'leavened' by the inclusion of the brightest, best behaved and best motivated children.

I wish, wish, wish my children go continue on to secondary with the cohort they are learning with in primary. To me it seems like a vision of a lovely future - children of many races, religions and nationalities, AND abilities, learning well in the same institution.

"but actually don't want to mix with half of them at school,"
this of course applies to both the millionaires child at Eton and those children of the underclasses in Peckham.
Most who I meet who guard the illegal immigrants are working class with little education and seem to have had an empathy bypass. I also see very similar people "caring" (well give them the benefit of the doubt on that one) for our many elderly and again many seem to have had an empathy bypass.
On the other hand many although not all with good educations both state and private are more compassionate and caring.
Are we lowering ourselves in order to tame the savage I hope not have we as a society become so complacent that we've forgotten that there but for the grace of God go I, what about treat others as you wished to be treated ourselves. Nothing stops you from being the elderly person with dementia or maybe even the illegal immigrant.
Is this what our so called wonderful education is doing for us? I hope that my DS's (the one at Winchester) education is instilling in him a sense of responsibility towards society as a whole and what pleases me perhaps the most about it is that it encourages him to be himself and not follow the crowd it is acceptable to be different. I don't see the same thing at my other DS's comp Im not sure why maybe its the children there, its not exactly ethnically mixed or maybe its the families the children come from nice safe middle class homes.

But post-primary, the differences between people are more striking - they aren't just vulnerable little children tugging at your heartstrings any more, they are beginning to show the signs of the damage which the school couldn't cure. Even if you kept the same cohort all the way through, I'm not convinced you would be able to retain the same sense of a haven that some primary schools achieve - the outside world gets in more easily as the children get older. Unfortunately, schools alone cannot cure all of society's ills, although they can help entrench them.

I agree, happygardening. But the problem is, this society doesn't respect how rare a quality it is to be utterly compassionate and, dare I say it, looks down on people who are "carers" and provides them with hardly any money or support - it's hard to be caring and make a profit at the same time, and in this competitive society, which apparently isn't competitive enough, profit is vital for the economy. Unsurprisingly, therefore, whilst caring attracts a some wonderfully caring, trusting, kind, beautiful people, it also attracts an awful lot of people who can't get any other work, because they are the savages that nobody could educate. And we let them take the jobs, because otherwise there aren't enough people to fill them . Compassionate, clever people don't want jobs which pay that badly - they wouldn't be able to support their clever, compassionate children properly if they did... Frankly, it's not really surprising that in the past, it wasn't considered possible to be a caring, devoted nurse or teacher and a mother of your own children at the same time.

I think the word we are looking for is selfless... We expect carers to be selfless... which is quite a big ask when you are caring for someone unrelated to you who can be violent and unpredictable, produce dangerous, messy and smelly excretions, whose own family can't cope with them, and who can't afford to pay you a living that will provide you with a particularly good quality of life. Few people are cut out for this, and even fewer people with relatives of their own to support at the same time.

I can't help thinking that selfless, or at least deeply compassionate, people are in limited supply, but that when women started to complain about being expected to selflessly give up their own identities to care for husbands and children and not be respected or rewarded for it, resulting in no parents being at home to care for the children more often than used to be the case, the requirement for deeply compassionate people increased exponentially. We all want to find someone who would be as kind, compassionate, caring, etc, towards our children as we would be, but who isn't actually us. It's a bit silly, really. We shouldn't be surprised at the lack of selfless carers - we've all opted out of the role for a "more important" and valued one.

These comments about immigrants. On why/who treats them badly. I really do not think it is class dependent. Just look at our recent history. Why did so many Germans help kill the jews? Were all the Germans working class?! Were all the Jews polite immigrants?!
Not all immigrants are polite and not all working class are thinking that immigrants will take away our jobs. Not all immigrants are asylum seekers.
You will find that there is a higher proportion of immigrants who send their children to few paying schools than the immigrant population.
Even within the immigrant population there are working class and middle class as well as old money. Really!

Interesting thread though. I think the answer is not so complicated. Good teaching is all that is required from our education system. There has always been and always will be dregs of society. There will always be someone who is top. But of the correct opportunities are there, motivated people will move up, no matter what their class.

Silibilimili my experience is primarily limited to the treatment of illegal immigrants who are detained. I would hope out in the community these people experience better treatment from all classes.

happy, in my experience, it is more about power. Possible evolution showing its traits where the powerful rule. Whether it is a middle class middle manager being horrible to his employees or a immigration officer being not so nice to the immigrants in his charge.

You lot are all racist if you think you can spot an immigrant.
NOBODY ever spots that I am a first generation economic migrant
but then I look and sound white English

And the point of the original article was flawed and rubbish too.

I don't believe anyone on here has claimed they can spot an immigrant. Mind you, if someone can't speak your language, or speaks it with a very heavy foreign accent, you tend to assume they aren't from around here.
As for power, in a way that is my point about compassion being so rare. It is frightening how many people are capable of de-humanising anyone a bit different from themselves in order to excuse demeaning, beating or killing them. There are fine lines between competition and power-seeking, inquisitiveness and exploitation.

And whether you like it or not, there is a greater number of working class people and therefore a greater number of working class people who lack empathy, simply through force of the fact that there are more of them in general... It is probably also likely that there are more working class people who have had experiences that have been damaging to them. It's easy to take for granted and therefore not notice that this may also, nevertheless, mean there are far more nice working class people than there are nice upper middle class people... and that upper middle class people have the capacity through their work to harm a much larger swathe of people than an individual working clas person may have, but without ever having to get their hands dirty.

Part of the power play of the upper middle classes is that some of them have been known to confuse their rarity with superiority in all things and to equate surface behaviour with greater inner heavenliness.

No o ne has said they can spot immigrants. In my daughter's class at Habderdashers she was only one of two girls who had 4 English born grandparents. It is a huge advantage if you pick children by brain power alone and when many of the class have moved heaven and earth to get to the UK to get a good education and when every spare penny in the family is going into the education of a child. It's a great environment for my children to be in at school.

I don't understand why it is being said that there are more working class people in the UK now. In fact there are fewer surely?

On superiority that depends on the issue. There areo bjective rights - cultures which damage and discriminate women or bomb you because you have a view which differs from yours are very wrong and need to be shown the errors of their ways. Differences in terms of food eaten or what time you go to bed are obviously things where people simply differ and no one is right or wrong over it.

Xenia
My point was that people were being VERY snide about migrants - and as somebody who was born outside the EU - I know that the generalisation is that they can be identified visually - which is racist.

You are right, there are far fewer "working class" people now if one terms it as manual labour
BUT there is a much, much larger underclass of those who live in third generation unemployed families - lots and lots round here ; depressing.

It's amazing how many people think what time your children go to bed and what they eat is an important difference. Unfortunately, fix one prejudice and it normally seems to be replaced by another one. This includes the prejudice that brain power alone is the only way to pick people. I would say there have been an awful lot of clever, horrendous dictators ruining peoples' lives and that intelligence alone is not a good method of choosing who to give priority to.

There is certainly a culture of discriminating against people of below average intelligence.

I tend not to read anti immigrant comments as they are usually just rather b oring.

Yes, there is of course what you might call the Polish issue. Someone I had lunch with yesterday said London hotels are better now because they have Polish staff. Those people who like Poles (Catholice and blonde) but not say Somalis or who make comments which are racist to Boris Johnson (part Turk) or India Knight (part Pakistani) because they look white often show their true colours as it were.

It is the white working class male who has been doing worst in English schools not immigrants. One reason London inner city state schools have been doing so much better - 2 GCSE grades higher than say state schools in Hull is I suspect because of large numbers of immigrants who work hard.

Bringing in Poles to work in the hotels doesn't fix our white, working class male problem, though, does it? I guess we could always starve them into submission?...

rabbitstew
Here in Southampton we have one of the highest percentage Polish populations in the UK. The local paper is printed in Polish. Their arrival has not pushed many English people out of work. Just they have taken the newly created jobs.

The indigent families often have historical links to the docks where once there were huge numbers of unskilled highly unionised excessively paid jobs.
In the days of the Titanic, tens of thousands of men worked in the docks.
Now it is a few hundred stevedores.
And they get paid just over £46,000 for a basic working week where they are actually 'doing' for about 18 hours.
Yes really - I've seen the P60's - I nearly quit accountancy!
BUT
The families of the former stevedores seem to think they are entitled to ask for such T&C's or not work.
So the Poles take the jobs.

The poster who said that middle class people are treated better than same number of working class people is again a wrong assumption. Abusive treatment is hidden in middle class families. That's the only difference.
Some of these statements are so pompous only the middle classes wanting to show they are middle class will make them.
For me, motivation is key. An intelligent working class person will do better in life than the middle class intelligent person who can't be bothered.
If class is all that mattered, the organisations who try to grow countries through education would not bother at all.

I agree with xenias 1553 post. Anti immigrant talk is boring.

To add to my last post, generalisation on basis of class is also getting boring.

Nobody said middle class people are treated better than the same number of working class people. What was said is that if there are more of one class of people than another, then there will be higher numbers of such people who are treated badly even if the proportion of such people treated badly is the same. Who said you had to be treated badly by your family to be treated badly, anyway?
Besides which, in today's society, I think the people who still think they know what class they are in are the ones who think that class is still important. Yet lots of people do appear to think they know what class they are in, including the underclass.
And given the number of lovely people who have apologetically said to me that they are really rather thick and couldn't ever have achieved more in life than being a nursery worker or dinner lady, I would say that there is a lot of very nasty discrimination against people who are not naturally bright and firmly putting them in their place. Why should someone be made to think that they are only doing what they are doing, and doing it very well, what's more, because they are thick? (you seldom hear the bad ones telling you they are doing what they are doing because they are thick). Is this sort of discrimination really kinder and softer than discriminating by class and putting people in their place that way? Who is it that is telling these people these are jobs only fit for thickos, as though that is the defining requirement for the job?