Education and social mobility - John Humphrys is coming on for a discussion, Fri 29 Jan, at 11.30am

[GeraldineMumsnet]

John Humphrys is filming a documentary about education for BBC2. He is embarking on a journey around Britain to meet parents, teachers and students.

His task is to examine the relationship between education and social mobility - why is it that education cannot close the attainment gap that exists between children from the poorest and wealthiest backgrounds?

Government education advisor David Woods has accused parents of being prejudiced against their local state secondary schools. Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, calls the current independent sector an apartheid system. Professor Stephen Ball, from the Institute of Education, concludes that grammar schools, parental choice and faith schools have all been responses to middle-class concerns.

John is coming to Mumsnet this Friday (29 Jan) at 11.30am to hear your experiences. Are you benefiting from parental choice in education? Is it at the expense of others? Does the current system put too much responsibility on parents to make the right choices? Is it too stressful? Do you feel you have to top-up your children's education eg home-tutoring, learning an instrument, employing a lawyer? Are they worthwhile investments, or necessities that cause resentment?

Please post your thoughts here. Thanks in advance.

Mr Humphrys, have you read this excellent book "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell? One of the chapters towards the end covers an interesting social experiment in the US (ongoing maybe because of its success), in which state schools in a deprived part of iirc New York were opened for much, much longer hours and the kids did much better. The conclusion being that the kids were learning at school but that if their home environment was not supportive to learning then they regressed a lot when they left the school gates. Their net gain in learning was very small with regular school hours.

(The rest of the book is very interesting too!)

Oh, and how about a documentary about Lenni who sounds like a true hero.

State school with longer hours?

Don't we have the same thing with Thomas Telford School.

We could all do with being more idealistic, I think, and see education as a good in itself

My great-grandfather was a Welsh miner, who with so many others would spend his time off in a group, learning together. They weren't learning because they would then leave mining and then get a job in a bank! They learnt because they recognised that their lives were improved by learning. Purely idealistic. But then he encouraged my grandfather to learn well at school, learn English and become a teacher. His son became a teacher. His children all became professionals...

I find that even my (very educated in the "very qualified" sense) laugh at learning for learning's sake. We are so damn blinkered by the "must learn to earn" philosophy.

There is also a lot to be said about promoting self belief. I am the first person from my family to go to uni, as is dh. We both went to Oxford.

My family were fairly supportive, his weren't at all. However, both of us believed absolutely that we were good enough and we would get to wherever we wanted to go. That self belief carreid us past all of the people who thought that we should "know our place".

Yet we seem to live in a society where we do not want children to appreciate that they are clever or may be able to achieve more than their peers. It is seen as a virtue to down-play ability and to be self-deprecating. Self confidence (at least in young children) is discouraged. Is it any wonder therefore that children do not feel that they can aim for much or discuss with schools or peers what they think they can do?

No idea, never heard of Thomas Telford. I live abroad and kids go to French international school so I don't know much about UK schools. I enjoyed that book though and it seems relevant.

stickylittlefingers,
exactly right, the key to it all is good teachers who can inspire children. Learning is of itself fun, you don't need this trend of doing fun activities in order to learn (although some of it is good). Good teachers stretch their pupils' minds and let them peer into a world that they never knew existed. Put the soul and wonder back into education, aim high don't dumb down

I agree, stickylittlefingers, this govt (and I think it's been a trend for at least a couple of decades now) wants us all to be useful, economically-helpful worker bees and education is all about what's going to be 'useful' for the workplace - even though workplaces seem to complain a lot about the quality of applicants they get. We don't seem that interested in creating rounded, curious people - and I think that comes from the top down.

www.teachers.tv/video/25546 very interesting video about raising achievment. The KIP school part is particularly inspiring.

GooseyLoosey,
agree entirely. When you look at reports of 10 year olds at school in Africa and see the keeness in the classroom, and when you hear the little 10 year old speaking great English, or when you see the eager slum dwelling children in Mumbai offered education on the mobile school buses, it makes you ashamed to see what is happening in this country. I agree with you it is this negative attitude, this culture of low attainment, this corrosive dumbing down that is failing our children.

My utterly Stalinist idea would be to cap the number of GCSE and A levels children are allowed to gain before they reach 18. Clearly this is dictatorial and so I doubt I'd actually support it in real life but it seems to me that there is far too much pressure on children to get 10+ GCSEs and 4+ A -levels.

This is wrong because:

1. It means teenagers don't get the chance to be teenagers and demands of them a level of maturity that, quite frankly, I don't think is strictly desirable.

1. It disadvantages children from many state schools.

8 GCSEs and 2 or 3 A'Levels are enough for anyone.

Regarding league tables, I want to know how many children in a school are prevented from entering exams. I have a suspicion that some of the "best" schools put barriers in the way of pupils who might mess up their stats.

Bloody hell - I sound even more barking when I read that back

I think that with all this competition choice we may be striving to help our children academically, but are we doing the best for them emotionally?

There is more to life than achieving huge academic success, and IMO academic achievement is to a large part, a 'state of mind' (fostered by a supportive family, work ethic and positive attitude).

None of the problems we have in society such as obesity, violence, depression, are IMPROVED by the current 'choice' system - in fact many of them are CAUSED by it.

My DD goes to the local primary school, because it is the LOCAL PRIMARY SCHOOL. Amazing! She gets to play with her school-friends as they all live nearby, she gets to walk to school, she gets to keep the relationships with her peers that she formed since playgroup.

The local secondary school that the primary school feeds into is not a good school, but I refuse to do what people I know have done and send DD to a school miles away, outside our fairly close-knit community, to mix with children she doesn't know. If the secondary school has not improved by the time she starts there, we will do everything we can (join Governors, PTA, support DD with homework etc) to support the school and ensure DD reaches her potential.

If more people supported their local school, rather than competing with others, and encouraging their children to jump through hoops, then the system would be considerably improved. When I look back on my childhood, I don't remember whether I had good teachers or equipment. I remember that I felt HAPPY and SAFE!

The Government (and previous governments)should be ashamed of the current system IMHO.

For romanarama re Thomas Telford:
recent press article.

One of the school's initial main aims was to help relieve the under-performing schools in the urban areas of Wolverhampton.

as the exams have become easier to pass, their worth has decreased, which means children need to get increasing numbers of them just to stand still

Indeed, Undercova. Those of us that think there's more to education and life generally than attaining a bunch of certificates at 16/18 are under a lot of pressure to force our children through a depressingly set series of hoops. It's no wonder children who feel they can't conform are turned off education entirely.

I also think that there is too much focus on competition. Child A needs to be better than B to get into the right school or get the right exam grades.

I have taught at post grad level and found that young people are all too focused on exam results and not nearly focused enough on learning.

I think if we stopped everything being results driven and moved to more continuos assessment (not coursework though) people from more diverse backgrounds might be more successful. We would also have more children who are educated beyond the superficial.

We shoud also focus on exactly what it is that we want schools to deliver. They cannot produced perdectly well rounded adults - they do not have the time or the resources to do so. The moral and "practical" (ie how to open a bank account) education of children should not be the responsibility of schools - that is for parents and society as a whole.

Schools need to focus on accademic and vocational skills. We should encourage a realistic assessment of what children are capable of and where their strengths lie and educate to those strengths.

All children cannot achieve the same things and indeed society does not need them to. However, sadly we have become so results focused that we only celebrate exam success and those who have more practical skills are sidelined.

However, above all, we need to feel able to encourage and celebrate drive, determination and success, whatever the endeavour, instead of feeling uncomfortable about it and that the individual is too pushy/ full of themselves etc.

My children are at a grammar school. These days they are expected to work with the local schools to try and improve the quality of education in those schools. Certainly the other schools here are of higher quality than many of those I hear about in other parts of the country.

What bothers me about the apartheid in the system is that at the grammar the children are encouraged to see themselves as "better" than the other children. I imagine this happens to an even greater extent in independent schools. They are not taught to value people for who they are or how well they do in their chosen field but by which school they went to and what holidays they take / what possessions they have. This is justified as "creating confidence".

Education can have only a limited effect on social mobility because it does not give children the benefits of other experiences. They are not the same social class and that still matters a lot when looking for employment. "Not one of us", "not clubbable", not "a team player" - all ways of saying they aren't a clone of the person who is recruiting.

Those in power will fight tooth and nail to ensure that the positions of power and influence are kept not for the intelligent but for their offspring. Grammar schools do permit some social mobility and te numbers should not be restricted. Instead there should be more emphasis on support for the poorer children who go to them.

Saddest comment here is the remark that a bright, eager-to-learn child is by definition bully bait in a lot of schools. Is this why home ed works so well for underprivileged children? What is wrong with the children who tease or bully another child for performing well in school?

The government educational agency BECTA admits that parental involvement in a child's education is the biggest factor in educational achievement. If that is the case then obviously schools are not as influential as they would like us to think. In which case the only way to help the poorest to achieve is to get this generation out of poverty and to give those poor communities the funding and support and opportunities to enable the next generation to have a better chance of success.

As the gap between rich and poor has not gone down significantly under this government I think that in trying to decrease the educational attainment gap between rich and poor, without actually properly dealing with the poverty itself the government is deluding itself and trying to have it's cake and eating it.

mathanxiety - it is a school culture issue, and is the one thing above anything else that I would look for in any school (state or independent) - is it cool to be seen to work hard? In some schools it is, but in a surprising number (including high-achieving independent schools) those who are doing well have to maintain the illusion that it is effortless and that they don't care in order to fit in . My DB worked hard but gave the impression of breezing through in order to remain 'cool'. I was just not cool and ignored the barbed comments.

"What is wrong with the children who tease or bully another child for performing well in school? "

Jealousy. The child performing well stands out from the crowd and becomes an "outsider", this child has raised its head above the parapet and needs to be brought down a few pegs, so that the inadequacies of those in the crowd do not become apparent

Disagree, rexer. It's not 'poverty' that is the problem, as several on here who have achieved social mobility have testified. It is 'poverty of aspiration' that is the problem.