SNP want to force Universities to widen access

The SNP today announced that it intends to widen access to Universities by forcing Universities to accept more students from poorer backgrounds.  This seems like another badly thought through publicity stunt from the SNP, there policies are based on good intentions but they don’t always have the means to implement them.  An example of this is the SNP’s plan to double spending on childcare despite not being clear where the money is coming from.

Moving back to the original issue of the SNP forcing universities to accept students from poor backgrounds, and sound like they may potentially introduce a dreaded quota.  This is flawed policy for several reasons, under Scotland’s policy of free tuition the number of Scottish students being allowed into university is capped.  The SNP has not said it would raise this cap, so middle class students with better grades look like they might have to study somewhere in the name of wider access.  This policy also ignores the reasons why students from poorer backgrounds fail to get into university, and that is largely down to grades and the reason for the poor grades is poor schools.  Rather than fixing the underline problem Nicola Sturgeon has instead chosen to ignore it despite there being a clear problem.  3.9% of students from Scotland’s poorest areas managed to get 3 A’s in their higher exams compared to 24% of students in wealthier areas.  Rather than raising the standard of schools in Scotland’s most deprived areas the SNP has instead chosen to just lower the standard of Scotland’s universities which already suffer a funding gap due the Scotland having no tuition fees for Scottish or EU students.

This is a loony left policy that promotes unfairness and tries to solve a real problem by lowering standards rather than fixing the problem. This is the sort off policy that makes people use the saying race to the bottom.  It is a policy that sounds nice but if you look at it a little bit you see that it is a seriously unfair policy and a seriously bad policy and it is a policy the SNP need to fix or drop.

An argument for Grammar Schools

An argument for Grammar Schools

Currently in the UK four private schools and one college send more students to Oxbridge than 2000 state schools.  The Government is aware of the social mobility problem but for years has struggled to find a solution to it.  New Labour tried to open up universities to a greater number of poorer students and had reasonable success in this, however this is only half the job.  Many Schools fail to give their students the grades to access University leading to many potentially talented individuals getting no opportunity to climb the social ladder.

This is where the Grammar School comes into the picture.  Grammar schools in the UK are oversubscribed parents send their children miles away to get to one and the question is why?  The answer is simple if your child can make the grade a Grammar school offers them a world of opportunity that the local comprehensive may not.  The problem is there are only around 164 state funded fully selective Grammar Schools in the UK meaning the majority of children don’t have access to one.  The argument for expanding the Grammar school system in the UK is a simple one, social mobility.  Nothing has more impact on social mobility than a quality education, everyone who reads this will be aware of a school near them in which hardly any students will get GCSE’s and no parent wants to send their child to these schools, but many have to due to financial reasons.  Currently in the UK if your local school is poor your child will get their opportunities restricted unless the parent is rich enough to pay for a private education.  However, by increasing the numbers of Grammar schools children have the opportunity to go to a good school even if their parents are not wealthy.  Grammar schools end the postcode lottery that exists with comprehensive schools, some comprehensives are very good schools, my secondary school was very good however many fail their pupils.  Comprehensive schools in middle class areas tend to be better than those in working class areas, there is one huge reason I can see for this.  Culture, in middle class areas children are expected to do well both by their family and the school this expectation reduces disruption in classrooms and puts pressure on children to achieve.  In working class areas, there is usually less expectation by the school, there are also other social problems in these areas such as family break down and poverty which can seriously hamper a child’s progress at school.  Grammar schools like private schools and good comprehensives expect their students to do well they enforce the idea that if you work hard you can do anything you want, it is this expectation combined with the best teachers and brightest pupils that make it easier for Grammar school pupils to succeed at school. 

If Grammar schools were to ever return in force, the problems with the old system would need to be ironed out.  Although I think Grammar schools are excellent for social mobility, the old system did have some major flaws, mainly the underfunding of all other schools and selective testing at such a young age.  Grammar Schools should not take funding away from other schools as most of the population will still go to a comprehensive and they cannot be forgotten about.  This means that Grammar schools should only get the same funding as comprehensives and students at local comprehensives should still be able to sit the same exams as those at the Grammar school to prevent a restriction in opportunities.  As for the selective testing at 11, I think you should still have the selection tests at 11, but also at 12, 13 and 14 so there is the opportunity to get into a grammar school for those who develop later.  Of course Grammar schools will not fix the UK’s education system by themselves, they are a way of allowing everyone who is capable enough to have a high quality academic education.  It is important to also allow everyone choice which is why free schools could potentially be a fantastic addition to the UK, but we also need to look at improving opportunities for those who don’t go down the academic route as they are also an essential part of the economy and are currently being let down by our current vocational courses. If countries such as Germany can run a selective schooling system but also support vocational trades why can’t the UK?

An argument for longer school day and shorter holidays

An argument for longer school day and shorter holidays

Michael Gove has recently unveiled in a speech that he would like a longer school day and a shorter holidays.  Although this plan may sound radical, is not as radical as it may first  sound in fact many academies already implement these policies, and Gove says our current system was designed around an agricultural economy in which children would help with with the harvest during their school holidays.  Whether or not this is true matters very little, as school timetable reform is practical and can offer a stack of benefits to students and parents. 

One of the strongest arguments for these reforms is to help working parents, your average full time employee will work 9 till 5 but the school day starts at 8 and finishes at 3:30. This can lead to parents having to look for after school care or having to work part time or not at all.  Increasing the length of the school day would save parents child care costs, and getting a young child to and from school will be less of a hurdle for parents who want to work.   This is mainly a benefit for parents off young children as this is less of a problem for parents of older children who are more capable of getting themselves to and from school.  Importantly the reforms would also have a positive effect on the education of the child, after all this is the most important aspect of any sort of education reforms.  A longer school day could be used in several different ways to benefit a child, one suggestion is to use the extra time to make sure students can get at least one hour of PE a day.  This would help tackle the countries childhood obesity problem and relieve pressure on the NHS by giving children a daily dose of exercise, and installing an exercise ethic in children.  Extra time in the school day could be employed to help older children with their studies by making it an enforced study period, or use it for support sessions to help struggling students or use it for other extra-curricular activities. With the new reforms schools could provide all sorts of extra-curricular activities in the additional time rather than an extra lesson, however schools could increase their lesson length from 1 hour to 70 minutes.  This additional 10 minutes in each lesson can facilitate late students, allow students time to unpack, and give teachers time to settle the class down while still having a full hour of teaching.   Some of the academies that already run longer days put forward the argument that longer 9 till 5 days better prepare children for the world of work.  This is because it’s as long as a day of work so when students go to work they will not face the additional challenge of longer days.  Longer school days will face opposition from both students and teachers that does not however make it a bad idea as almost every reform to education faces opposition.  As for shorter holidays I think there may be much more resistant than a longer day, the argument for shorter holidays is that children's academic performance dips if they spend too much time away for school, so if they had shorter holidays then they would not suffer this dip.  However if holidays are to short students particularly younger ones are likely to suffer a dip in performance due to fatigue.  Again childcare costs are an argument for shorter holidays as parents can rarely schedule their holidays to coincide with their child’s school holiday which means childcare costs, shorter holidays are unlikely to solve this problem but they will reduce it.  Personally I like the idea of longer school days, but although I can see an argument for shorter holidays I would rather see half-term holidays removed and keep the main holidays the same length.       

 One of the best things about academies is the freedom they enjoy; they are testing grounds for new ideas to improve education.  The department of education needs to cherry pick the best reforms and apply them to local authority controlled schools, this would improve the every school in the state sector.  It is important that local authority schools are not neglected due  to the rise of academies and that the department of education actively helps them to compete with academies and try to make them an attractive choice for parents to send their children.  The whole idea of academies was for greater competition in education.  So it is important that they are not just competing with each other but are also forced to compete with local authority controlled schools and that local authority schools are not left behind to become relics of the old education system.