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 "

xenia, you are stereotyping so much it's ALMOST funny.

Italians are entrepreneurs. If they were not, you would not have Prada, Missoni, ferrari, fiat, Lamborghini, Armani, benneton... Agip,

See my point, I could go on and on.

It's actually the British who like to undermine Europeans as it serves their purpose. What ever that is. Re. Germany, now, I am sure you know where the Germans are compared to us.

I am not saying every child in Britain should go to university. However, every child who comes out if schools should end up with a rounded and good level of basic education, including general knowledge.

How many British companies can you name that the world still covets and admires?!

I think our rigourous O levels gave us at a much younger age the subjects the US study much later though and it is rather nice at 16 to give up subjects you don't like and really get into the few you love in detail for A level. As long as before 16 you do the main core subjects very thoroughly which most of us try to ensure our children do the fact you are not messing around for years doing subjects you will not use later and waste extra years at college as in the US before getting into work I think our system is fine.

I think you seriously underestimate the rigour of American education and seriously overestimate the rigour of the British curriculum, Xenia.

What if the school instead of inspiring a 13 year old to like science as it would be useful in later life and math, they put their hands up and let the non-interested just muddle along?

Silibilimili -- This is a huge danger, I agree.
In the case of girls and maths and science, how much of the decision about subjects to drop is conscious and how much is subconscious?
How many girls have been allowed to shy away from maths and science subjects when they decided that this wasn't their thing and how do you tease out the cultural conditioning from genuine difficulties when it comes to those subjects?
How do you tease out failure to tackle a challenging subject when it becomes difficult from cultural conditioning to not bother a pretty head with complicated numbers?
How do you tease out cultural conditioning from genuine ambition when a teenage girl is deciding at 15 or 16 what path she will want to pursue in life? That is effectively what teenagers are asked to do in Britain when they are asked to choose the 3 or 4 subjects they will carry to 18 and beyond.

You do not take academic subjects in school in order to learn things that you will need in your everyday life. If that were the case then many, many people would have spent hours in school trying to get babies to sleep, learning latching techniques, figuring out how to get a meal on a table with only a packet of spaghetti, four eggs and a jar of marmite in the kitchen. You learn various subjects in order to train your brain to think in a disciplined way, and you learn a variety of subjects in order not to foreclose options that might become open to you at a later stage in your life, options that you probably can't even imagine right now. How many people now in their 40s would have foreseen the advent of the digital world we now live in?

Britain is going to be left behind by pretty much every other developed country because it produces graduates who do not have transferable skills/education and do not have enough advanced knowledge in a wide variety of subjects to inspire or fuel R&D in the areas where development is most likely to take place. When graduates have focused on a narrow range of subjects from age 15/16 there is very little likelihood of the kind of cross fertilisation of ideas that is possible when individuals have a broad education, and various experts in disparate fields have a hard time finding common ground for discussion when there are vast blanks in the experts' education. This is going to hold Britain back.

Why do people lump maths in with sciences? I did maths A-level with English literature and languages and saw it as a very cunning way of getting to be both logical and verbose.... Had I been able to continue more subjects for longer, though, I might well have ended up doing something more scientific, rather than opting for law (probably engineering, as I had a preference for studying a subject at university that led in a particular, obvious direction, but which was respected in its own right as a good academic discipline if you changed your mind about your end career). I felt I was being asked to choose at a very young age and changed my A-level options several times, because I didn't really want to trap myself into doing all sciences, or limit myself to arts subjects. Maybe more women would opt for sciences if they didn't have to drop more arty subjects in favour of science so d*mn early (although I guess these days, some UK schools do offer the IB and UK universities are more used to getting applications from students who have not done A-levels).

rabbit, maybe because you need Maths to explain the science? All those formulas and theorems.
Good point you made there re. Arts and women.
My first day of university, first lecture, there were atleast 50 or so guys and me alone!
I really doubt that a university would have accepted you to read engineering with just Maths and no science based subjects. For any engineering (except for computer possibly and biochemical engineering), physics is a must.

I suppose it depends on the individual - there are clearly some,as above, who do not have a particular interest or too many interests and for them focusing on one area limits options or leads them to choose the wrong option. But there are others - I'm one - who know that certain things interest them and they are good at them and others don't or they aren't - why should these people waste years on something they'll never need and be able to do?

math, I think the cultural conditioning begins at a very early age with a pink Lego set.
I have also observed that a lot of the mums in my dds school seek out other mummies with girls for play dates. Why can't my dd play with boys?! At 5 surely both would be about the same and not 'conditioned'.

Agree with all your points. So well put.

Specially one about cross fertilisation of ideas.
Here are some trivial things I know about that surprised me:

1. The human ear grown in labs was grown on a structure designed by a chemical engineer and not a biologist.
2. The de-fibrillation unit (those electrical things which are used to zap people having heart attacks with) was designed/concept developed by people studying chaos theory which is mainly all mathematics.
3. Neural networks.
4. Paint industry helping the pharmaceuticals with coatings

Etc etc

Fast innovation is the key. We won't get it if we keep putting people and disciplines into boxes or not give them enough encouragement to learn the basics.

bread, then to people like you, I would say tough. You are studying these subject as you are still 15 years old. Don't care if u don't think they are fun. It's a rough life, get used to it.
Or something like that in a nicer way.

It will ensure that you know the basics and have a grasp of basic concepts. I nothing, when yiu grow up, and your dd/ds is struggling with maths or science or literature or history, you will atleast know how to look it up.

We all have to do things that do not I interest us when we grow up.

You certainly need maths and physics for physical science degrees, and I include chemistry in there too as well as maths, physics and engineering.

If you want an example of a school giving stupid advice, mine forcibly changed me one week in from doing maths, physics and chemistry A to maths, further maths and physics, as I was sure I wanted to do physics. And I gullibly listed to them. (I had wanted to be a physicist or astrophysicist since I was 11, and recall sitting down in my first single-subject physics lesson thinking I had better concentrate as it was what I wanted to do forever. Still glad I did.) FM was wasted as over half the time one teacher wasn't there (she had to stand in for the retired Head till they go a new one) and the other half of the syllabus was taught by a succession of teachers who didn't seem to understand it. We all did badly. So I wish they'd left me in chem!

However, Uni re-taught us all the further maths in the first year (admittedly at the gallop) but I never got the chance to learn the missed chem. Have regretted it ever since.

They also had a policy of only two langauages: folk who could 'do' languages were shoved into Latin and less-so into German. Then changed their mind and let the top of the German set do Latin, but refused to let the Latin folk do German! I was annoyed at that too. I eventually got a GCSE in German at nightschool but that was more than a decade later.

The school did insist also on everyone taking the 'wasted' A level subject, General Studies. But it did mean we had to keep up a lot of dropped subjects for a while longer. I was always a good all-rounder and am academic so it was easy, but a lot of others hated it as it meant they still had to keep doing subjects they loathed.

Now as a senior scientist, I find multidisciplinary meetings very rewarding, I've learned a lot of biochemistry and biology and pharmacology through these (I work on monitoring new cancer drug trials). And the different points of view are invaluable.

Each to his or her own! (woops bit long sorry)

Languages seem to be split male and female as well. I did German as my module language but was in the minority at Uni as most were male and all the girls did French with very few doing that. At A'Level German was the language chosen by more science-orientated kids. Personally now I would not choose a pure language degree as you can pick up a language by living in the country but add it as a module to another degree. I also did other languages at night school after graduating and they are relatively easier to pick up, although that is my natural inclination. My DH did Physics but when he was doing A Levels FM was considered a fourth A Level rather than a main one so did Chemistry as well. He struggled with General Studies and only got an E because he did not have the literature, and social science general knowledge. The solution may be to choose your main A Levels in the subjects you love and you know you are good at but to keep basic instruction going in Sixth form for English, Maths, and science. If it is too high level, alot of great scientists, historians, politicians my have failed to get through sixth form. It also means people could switch to different A Levels through their sixth form. I dropped Physics at 14 and my teacher told me I would regret it in later life. I am 44 now and not once have I ever though, do you know what I wish I had carried on with Physics. I did do Biology and Chemistry though.

Being aware that engineering generally required at least maths and physics and would probably favour chemistry and further maths, my A-level choices vacillated between physics, chemistry and maths, possibly those three plus English or history, but that didn't fit in with the school timetable and I would also have liked to do a language... to the, oh well, if I really wanted to do maths and English and a language, did I REALLY want to do physics with it - oh no, that would also clash with the school timetable, anyway.... did I really want to do engineering that much? I didn't know I wanted to do it so much that I would give up subjects I loved for it - if I decided I didn't enjoy doing all sciences, I would then have spent 2 years doing A-levels that were not my preferred subjects, would never be able to do an arts degree at university and would have felt I'd missed out on 2 years of genuinely loving what I was doing, and I could do law with pretty much any A-level selection (and was always told I could argue the hind leg off a donkey, so maybe it was a good option...)...
If a school doesn't offer the IB, you are trapped into deciding "what sort of person you are" very early (and in those days, it just wasn't offered outside international schools - I could have gone to a boarding school to do the European baccalaureate, but I REALLY didn't want to do that and besides, I wasn't convinced that I wouldn't be regarded sniffily by universities looking for engineering or science students for still not having done physics and maths at a high enough level). I really don't think universities looking for engineering or science students took a very flexible viewpoint themselves on what they were looking for, tbh, and think that is unlikely to have changed. If scientists still think you have to be a scientist through and through by the age of 16 or you'll never make the grade... then they shouldn't wonder why they don't get enough students. My father did one extra year of medical school, having done arts A-levels (note, he didn't need to spend 2 years doing more A-levels, or get turned away for having done the wrong subjects....). Not many places offer that sort of thing...

rabbit, good point you raised there about your father. I think that in those days, in mine and your fathers generation, fewer people went to university. Because of this, competition was not so high. I recall even when I did my a levels, universities were happy to take 2bs and an A for a level grades for medicine if you could prove in other ways that you were capable enough to do medicine. I recall also a friend who had not done physics or chemistry getting into med school. But he did have a HUGE learning curve in the first year.
I doubt if this can happen now with a higher % of students churning up all As at a level.

As for languages, our culture is rather shy/afraid of and maybe lazy to teach them at a young age.
My children are bi lingual. Even as recently as a year ago, these are the comments I have had from various people (from various walks of life):

1. Did your child speak really late as she must have been confused when she heard the two languages. (no, she was talking in sentences

on her 1st birthday. She did not know the difference between the two languages and used words from both in the same sentence initially. Now that she is 5, she is fluent in both and can without teaching her differentiate words from each.)

1. Don't teach her your language first as this will confuse her and she will struggle at nursery. (no, when she went to nursery, he spoke mainly my mother tongue, he was speaking English fluently within a month of joining nursery at 1 year old).

Different languages open up different parts of the brain. It does no harm to teach them early. Children do not get confused, if they did, so what?

Silibilimili - on the whole I agree with you about languages. I am very jealous of my siblings who have bilingual and trilingual children, whereas I just have children who have been learning a foreign language from a young age to try and keep up with their relatives. However, if you had a child with speech and language difficulties or mild dyslexia, you might feel a bit more stressed about the impact of them learning two languages at the same time from babyhood and might be more worried about whether there might be some negatives to the situation. I know that one of my dsis's children got quite anxious about learning to speak, read and write in more than one language at the same time and it did dent her confidence, whereas the other two appeared to thrive on it.

Well all my children are bilingual too, but with my firstborn it was a terrible experience. People love to believe that all is smooth and easy with bilingual children, but it is an entirely subjective experience, like rabbitstew said.

My DD1 had severe language difficulties and had to undergo intensive speech therapy. She couldn't speak properly until the age of 4. The speech therapist, a very experience professional who wrote books on the issue, said it was directly linked to the dual language. When she did eventually speak, she constructed english sentences with my mother tongue's structure and it was virtually incomprehensible. We got there in the end but it was very very painful.

And before someone says it, she isn't dyslexic and has no learning difficulties, she is in fact in the top set for everything now that she is 8. However, with my son it was a completely different experience and he was completely fluent age 1 in both languages. With my other two I changed the approach and introduced my mother tongue a little later.

I received huge criticism from my community because of this, they made me feel like I was close to a child abuser, to the point where I really distanced myself from it. I really resented this because after all one approach does not fit all and they did not have to live with a child who was mute aged 3 and stuttered every time she attempted a word as her brain just got totally confused.

Having said all of that, I am for introduction of languages in primary schools, but with no pressure to have to learn it, it is an opportunity for children the same as sports and music.

Hi Orange. I am sorry to hear about your experiences and the effect on the community but dont worry. I am second generation English and the product of Italian, Irish grandparents. Whilst they both had a different mother tongue, they spoke in English so they could understand each other but separately used to sing to the children in their own languages as they did with us, although it was more swearing in the case of my Italian grandfather. I did know how to sing Humpty Dumpty in Gaelic from a very young age. Also I was very lucky at primary school to have a French Canadian teacher who taught some French in the lessons. Although, therefore I was not raised in the home completely with a foreign language, I was introduced to foreign languages from a young age. As a result multi-lingual and can pick up any language easily. My elder sister was also a language teacher in secondary school. I still believe your children would have benefitted even with a small amount. When my youngest was little I took a couple of years out of my career to teach languages, French in primary and German/Italian to adults. I also started a class for toddlers in Italian purely singing and did a lot of research into the effect of languages as I was interested and there is a windown between up to 12 months, when children can remember sounds that they hear and will be able to reproduce them easier at a later age. Unfortunately for DD she was my guinea pig at the time and I played her and sang Italian songs just while we eating etc and now she is 8 she picks up the sounds of other languages much easier than DS. I now feel guilty because I did not do the same with him but we live and learn. She spends some time in Sweden and has picked this up very easily and also Spanish as she does this in primary. Therefore even singing to a baby in another language has an affect and not necessarily having to speak all the time in your mother tongue. At 16 I only chose one language A Level as I thought it would be limiting to do two (going against the advice of the school) but voluntarily attended AO French lessons and now use the French far more in business than German so it has not hindered me not choosing it and have gone on to do other language A Levels. I do feel without an introduction at a very young age I may not have been so interested. My DS has the chance to do Mandarin in Year 9 as at his school which is a science and language school, they believe an introduction to three languages in Year 7, specialist in one with lots of lessons in Year 8 and then a second in Year 9, very different from when I was at school and I took some persuading but having seen the results in DS who does German, he is so good even at the beginning of Year 8 and was a level 4a in MFL at the end of Year 7 that this may be a better system of teaching. I would say all the feeder schools offer French or Spanish (some both) and therefore nearly all of the kids would have had language before. Sorry bit long but it is the linguistic science in me that makes this quite an interesting subject. Perhaps I am more into science than I thought!

orangeberries - I am about the advice your DD's speech therapist gave you. From everything I read (and I read extensively about bilingualism) and have observed, bringing up a child bilingually cannot cause speech problems, only reveal them.

orangeberries, I think the speech therapist doesn't know much about logic. Your dd1's difficulties may have been caused by something other than bi-lingualism. Just because she had speech delay and also has more than one language spoken at home, does not mean one was caused by the other. Even experienced professionals can get things wrong sometimes - there's a strong human tendency to ascribe agency where none exists. As a species, we don't like things that can't be explained, so we come up with explanations. We like them, even when they are wrong or there's no evidence for them.

Glad to hear she's doing so well now.

But what is a speech difficulty or delay? Everyone develops differently. If you can get a child to the point, with therapy, that nobody would know they ever had difficulty acquiring a skill, was that "just a delay," or is it a hidden and continuing difficulty, or have you managed to rewire their brain so that what could have been a lifelong difficulty is now just classified as a delay, even though it would have been more than that without help...? And when it comes down to it, you can no more say that being bilingual didn't slow down a child's speech development than you can that it did, surely?

You are hypothesising, rabbitstew, but science has all the answers to those questions. Humans do not in fact develop language differently - it is on a timeline, like motor skills, and remarkably similar from child to child. Whether they have one, two or five languages around them.

rabbit, it is possible to show that an assumption (that being bilingual causes speech delay) is wrong, and the research has been done to prove that. You can also examine an argument - in this case, the one proposed by Orange's dd's speech therapist - and spot the flaws. Look at the logic of her argument. On examination, it falls apart. She's (the therapist) taking two un-related things and trying to turn them into cause and effect, without any evidence that they are either related or have a causal relationship.

People do this all the time - it's called false attribution, or a load of other things. It's a known human tendency, to assume that one thing caused another without any evidence or logic.

But my ds1 has ongoing problems with his motor skills - what's his "timeline"? That he will never be able to motor plan, but will have to learn motor skills by rote and will therefore only learn as quickly as people can teach him? Or that he will learn the most basic skills, but will never learn some things at all if others don't put in extra effort for him???? And what of children who do have speech and language difficulties? Are you really telling me that having two languages to learn at the same time when you can't even learn one effectively without additional support is not going to slow the process down when compared to only having one language to struggle with? Or are you saying that some people with severe speech and language difficulties still had a timeline, but that society said that learning to speak clearly at age 10 was not good enough, so they interfered????? Not sure I really understand you about timelines and science having all the answers - scientists, frankly, seem to have exceptionally limited understanding of learning disabilities. Maybe because they are so obsessed with the norm.

Nobody can even agree on whether dyslexia exists or what its many possible causes may be. Science has all the answers, my eye...

So, I go back to the point of my question... might orangeberries' child have had fewer difficulties and delays learning to talk if she had grown up in a monolingual household, given that she clearly did have difficulties and delays in learning to talk? Would she have learnt to talk clearly at age 4 regardless of the number of languages she was attempting to learn? Or might she have learnt at a socially more acceptable age if she were only struggling with one language? How can you really assess this, when a child either learns to talk in a monolingual household or they don't, so you can't ever really compare identical children with identical brains? Even using twins isn't helpful here, since it is so common for one twin to have a learning disability when another twin doesn't. Not sure I see how science can be so supremely accurate, tbh.