Grown up discussion about improving equality in education (hopefully)

[BeRoseBee]

I know everyone is tired of all the VAT on school fees threads - this isn’t one of them. Lots of threads on that if you want to discuss that.

Can we have a grown up conversation about how to improve equality in education for all? I’d like to keep it free from party politics if possible, genuine policy suggestions only please.

The Rest is Politics has a phrase I like - let’s disagree agreeably. Debate is good. Different opinions are good. Personal attacks or attacking a political party are not helpful.

I’ll start - personally I think buying educational privilege is rampant in the state sector. Wealthy parents buy houses at inflated prices in order to get their kids into the “best” state schools.

Wouldn’t equality be improved if we did away with this? If we could work out the logistics (mainly transport) why not have a random selection of state school within your local authority area? Buying a pricey house no longer guarantees your kids go to school with other wealthy kids, you’d get a genuine mix of kids from different backgrounds.

Anyone have any (constructive) opinions on this?

SEN friendly classrooms. I know SEN is broad but there is no reason why a white board has to be white. Yellow is a better colour if you have certain VI, other colours are better for dyslexics.

That tech is already in most classrooms.

My pet hate, progress 8. Why are we forcing virtually all children to take 8 or more GCSEs when some students will leave with 8 grade 1 GCSEs but with more teaching could achieve grade 4 in fewer subjects.

Bring back a range of non GCSEs subjects.

You can go to college at 14 but most parents don't know that. Schools should be able to recommend a college course and not worry about losing funding.

Some subjects could be customised to local populations. Things like animal care if the major employers in the area are sheep farmers. I know people leave their home areas for work and or uni but why can't they be prepared for local employment?

An earlier poster hit the nail on the head when they commented that state schools are ran as private establishments anyway but we just don’t see it. With the introduction of academies/MATs etc, huge amounts of money is paid out by schools for things that were previously covered by central teams in LEAs. Finance, payroll, assessments for SEN children are just some examples. Our local school a few years ago spent £100k on consultancy and legal fees to set up their MAT. A firm of accountants I know has a team of staff who only do work for schools (payroll/year end accounts etc). This is money that is meant to be spent on the education of children. Multiply that across the country and a huge amount of the education budget is not being spent on pupils.

I would be interested to see what effect scrapping academies and bringing schools back under LEA control would have on the school budgets. No requirement for audited accounts, central HR team for all schools, SEN specialists employed by the LEA rather than schools paying external consultants for assessments are just a few examples. Would this change result in funds being there to support SEN pupils more, offer alternatives to academic subjects which were removed as they cost more to run, able to add other extra-curricular activities etc?

Lots more money. Surestart back. Admissions by a combination of fair banding and ballot.

I'd quite like a ban on MPs using private education too.

That's basically what the grammar system was when it was first introduced, and so hated these days.

The grammars served the academically able, whilst hte secondary moderns were geared up to help the less able get ready for the working world with trades and secretarial skills etc. They did City and Guild qualifications.

Unfortunately, the investment in secondary moderns didn't continue, and they became bad schools and the grammars became the home of the wealthy families.

I really think this is a system worth looking at again, as long as both streams were equally funded.

I've posted before that our grammar area has sink schools as a result which is why we went private. DD passed 11+ but had been bullied by the group of girls going who had been intensively tutored because she is dyslexic and not tutored.

I know all of the group of bullies' parents and know the cars they drive, houses they live in - they are all far better off than me. Their school is selective and very few on FSM and SEN. Considering the issues it creates with house prices and the social divides it fosters as well as driving sink schools I do think the grammars either need to be scrapped or we have to admit the parents are able to afford to help support the state sector financially. Means testing perhaps, then asking for some or all of what the state pays to selectively teach their tutored kids would add a lot (£7.6k pa per kid) back into the pot for Sure Start/primary/nursery support for the other side of the town where people are having to work 2 jobs just to survive. I think specialist schooling can exist but we need to accept that it is in fact a form of private schooling. You are choosing to exclude others for whatever reason and therefore it should not be paid for by the state.

@Wetellyourstory to set against that, the LA still has to pay a lot of the costs (the SEN ones for instance) and due to the current financial problems across the board that LAs have, they are already "top slicing" the "dedicated schools' grant" (money the LA gets from the DfES e.g. central government and then doles out to schools often via an academy trust) by removing a small percentage from the "high needs block" (which is meant to support SEN). It may only be a small percentage of the total but it is millions and impacts some areas disproportionately.

Here is an article which explains:

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/send-high-needs-revealed-councils-slice-67m-from-school-budgets-to-prop-up-deficits/

What I am saying is be careful what you wish for. Multi academy trusts have their issues and expenses, no doubt, and the CEOs are arguably very overpaid, but let LAs have more control and you likely wouldn't get any more money into education because it would vanish back into the LA black hole created by social care and other financial pressures on the system.

There were reasons why so many state schools were taken away from Local Authority control! We've had "failing" schools for as long as I remember, and that's a long time! I suffered a "failing" school back in the 70s which "failed" within a couple of years of it being converted from a successful, highly regarded grammar to a comp! That was under LA control! From what I remember, the transition was a fiasco and teachers were constantly complaining about "the council" for everything that was going wrong.

@Seeline The problem with grammar/Secmod is splitting the children at 11 with no thought to children who just missed out, or late bloomers, or skewed profiles, or undiagnosed SEN.

I think the comp system can and did serve a variety of abilities well under one roof. However the Michael Gove reforms removed/reduced options for the lower ability children, eg DD's old school used to offer a BTEC Food Prep, but then switched to a more theoretical GCSE in Food & nutrition.

And we have run out of teachers for the practical subjects just like with the academic subjects -- not helped by them not "counting" for things like Progress 8.

DH and DD toured a well regarded local secondary last year (affluent area) and the DT and Food facilities were shut because they have no-one to teach those subjects.

Make university free for state educated pupils and triple the price for those in independent schools.

Have more small schools rather than huge schools you have to commute to.
Every town to have its own special schools with easy movement between them and mainstream.

Personally when I see threads like these, it astonishes me that not more people complain about the most obvious, legal, inequality in state schools - allowing intake to be dictated by whether or not you subscribe to that state school's religion. It frankly amazes me that this is still allowed and has not been abolished long ago. Even in Northern Ireland this never happened.

My DC went to early/primary years school in Ireland. The uniform was trainers for all children. A million times more practical.

brilliant - this should be the norm

Nail on the head. Yet, we never see the same kind of "faith school hate" on here that we get with the grammar school hate. Presumably, that means a lot of MNs users have pretended to find "faith" for a few years to get their darling offspring into a better faith school rather than the nearby crap comps!

@TomeTome ,

Neither of those suggestions make any sense.

Children go to school, adults go to university. Parental means should have nothing to do with university admissions or support. In the old days, when I went to uni, we got means-tested grants. Some parents from wealthy backgrounds with mean parents had a very rough time of it. And some ‘poor’ children who got grants just had parents with capital rather than income (which wasn’t well assessed). In addition, people always game the system. Even now, some private school pupils switch to the state sector at 16 (with additional tutoring) so they get lower uni offers. If uni fees differed too, that would happen a lot more.

Small schools are good but don’t make economic sense. The cost of SLT, finance, HR is spread over more pupils in bigger schools. Even in the well-financed private sector, successful schools try to push pupil numbers to between 500 and 600 to gain the economies of scale.

Faith schools are selective too though, so presumably would be charged and means tested too.

If you want aspirational well to do but not enormously wealthy people to send their children to state schools then you have to make it advantageous to do so. Making university free if you’re state school educated is a massive carrot. You won’t attract those whose children are destined for other things, but the vast majority of those expecting their children to go to uni will jump.

Smaller schools are better for children and families. Centralised HR isn’t impossible and the sharing of other resources but fundamentally you’d have happier children, families and staff. There’s a reason so many of our children are not coping with secondary when they were fine in primary. If we want better we have to do different.

Let's also not forget that schools are educating future voters and when the kids grow up, it would benefit everyone if they have at least some understanding of history, geography, our place in the world. They will be making decisions and making choices - but making a choice should involve some general wider knowledge, rather than reading something on the side of the bus and agreeing with it. It would be very disappointing to stop teaching general subjects at 14 and go purely applied route. Covid proved that certain concepts in math/biology/geography/econimics need to be taught, as many did not have any understanding of probabity, risk, immunity, tax system etc.

You would actually create an financial incentive for universities to favour (more than they do already) the privately educated, much in the same way they are incentivised to accept more international students now.

never mind the fact that the vast majority of ambitious but not incredibly wealthy children are already in the state sector, so not clear to me why further incentives required.

Do you think? I think that it would be better if state schools were better and offered what people actually want. People send there children to independent schools for a variety of reasons (some of which are not particularly sensible). Myself I would rather see smaller schools, and free tertiary education for all. In lieu of that I’d say that those that choose not to participate in state education should pay all the way through.

@CurlewKate ”Lots more money. Surestart back. Admissions by a combination of fair banding and ballot.

I'd quite like a ban on MPs using private education too.”

Would you like MPs kids banned from private healthcare too if they get cancer?

In case you hadn’t noticed, people are not clamouring to stand as an MP and endure public and press abuse constantly. The talent pool is shrinking as a result, more and more. The last thing you need to do is ban their choices on top of that. It’s a hard job and the salary is crap compared to what most of them could earn (or should be able to earn, given the brain power you should really require to be an MP”.

How about an IQ test to stand? Might be a better way forward!

Universities today are admitting more international students as they are free to charge them more, and rely upon that extra income to fill gaps left in funding due to the government cap on domestic tuition. If private school students become much more valuable in terms of income per pupil, why wouldn’t these same universities find ways to increase their numbers at the expense of students on the lower state subsidy?

i don’t get the argument that it has to be a trade off between state and private - there are more, better options for increasing state funding and improving state schools. The needs of the state sector are vast and the number of privately educated is small (and rapidly shrinking), so constraining your thinking in this way isn’t going to address the problems.

@Araminta1003 "Would you like MPs kids banned from private healthcare too if they get cancer?"

I find it a little difficult to equate going to state school with getting cancer. But hey ho.

I did say I'd quite like MPs kids to go to the schools 90% of their constituent's kids go to. Call it blue sky thinking. Interesting that you didn't respond to the rest of my post. Which is perfectly doable, given the will.

Oxbridge alone have lost 130 million plus per year of research funding after we left the EU. Government decided not to replace that. So there is that too.

The reality is that we probably do have too many unis now, not everyone has to go to uni, some students are not getting enough value for money, many academics are underpaid and dissatisfied, they all require more Government funding etc etc - it’s very complicated just like state education. We have an ageing population and the NHS and social care costs a bomb, but in reality, pensioners because many actually have proper pension schemes, are paying more income tax currently than lower and lower middle earners who are younger.

@CurlewKate - OK I apologise. I agree with this part ”Lots more money. Surestart back. Admissions by a combination of fair banding and ballot.”
But banding and ballot can only work in cities with excellent public transport all over, like London. Just won’t work in many other places.