School costs, but it isn’t all about the money.

Last summer, around the time Andy Murray was winning Wimbledon, a study on the cost of education in Britain was released. The Aviva School Sums index showed that, compared to five years previously, the cost of sending a child to a state school had risen by over six thousand pounds. Assuming a child stays in the state system from the age of four through to eighteen, school now costs £22,500 per child.

Education Secretary wants all children to sit the Common Entrance. Latin for the masses then? (Image: The Telegraph)

While averaging out the cost of lessons on a ‘per child’ basis might upset educational purists (after all, you can’t ‘put a price on education’) it is a fairly useful metric when trying to understand the inverted world of the British school system. If the cost of a nominally free education is rising we need to understand how this effects those at the sharp end of schooling in modern Britain, namely children and their parents. It also allows one to compare state sector schools with their more fancied private (or should that be public?) school cousins. Which is, of course, where things get even more confusing.

Eton College, probably the world’s most famous school, currently charges £32, 000 a year to the families of pupils without a scholarship or bursary (as an aside, roughly 20% of boys at the school receive some financial assistance from the school). One year therefore costs nearly ten thousand pounds more than an educational lifetime in the state sector. Pause for a moment and run that through your mind again. Could this possibly be why private/public schools have such an advantage over their state funded cousins?

Well yes, but money is by no means the whole story. Of course, hard cash will buy you many things. More contact hours, smaller class sizes, better resources, a wider (and less regulated) curriculum, a plethora of sports and after school actives and better paid teachers. However, even without these advantages, a school that can select its pupils based on their academic performance is always going to outshine one that cannot. Public, private and grammar schools all have this advantage. Indeed grammar schools show just how much of an edge selection can give in terms of academic performance, mostly out performing state schools despite not charging any fees. Money can help buy you an education but passing, or being taught to pass, the eleven plus seems to work fairly well too.

Does all of this mean that state schools are simply full of ill educated, unintelligent, no hope cases? No, emphatically not. They’re full of children who haven’t been fortunate enough to be born into a family where paying for school or taking the eleven plus is a possibility. There is a vast swathe of children, from many backgrounds, who are being shut of the upper echelons of British education. This is not just because of the financial and social gulf between the state and private systems but also because they really are two fundamentally different ways of going to school.

While the state sector is a broadly identical, national curriculum driven machine that children can enter at any stage, the private sector operates with a completely different set of rules. If, for example, a child was to enter one of the great British public schools at the age of thirteen he or she would be required to take the Common Entrance, a battery of exams that includes a test of Latin proficiency and a level of mathematical knowledge not taught to most twelve year olds in state schools. In other words, to take the Common Entrance, you already have to be at a private school, where such mysterious subjects such as the past participles of Latin verbs are taught. The private sector then is a bit like the Eurostar, very pleasant and easily assessable if you get on in London but not so inviting if you try to jump aboard in Kent.

How do I know all of this? Because when I was twelve, going on thirteen (in fact, on the day of my thirteenth birthday), I sat the Common Entrance Latin paper. Indeed between the ages of about five and thirteen I spent my days in the warm embrace of the private sector. I was incredibly lucky to have parents, both of whom had been educated by the state, who worked stupidly long hours to pay for my education. You’ll never catch me saying private school did me any lasting damage, it taught me a lot of valuable things and a few Latin verbs as well, but looking back it was a very strange place and I’m fairly sure that moving to the local comprehensive did even more for me. I am at least in the position of being able to judge both systems fairly equally, not as a political or education professional but as someone who enjoyed and endured both. Which is why Michael Gove’s pronouncement last week that he wants state schools to become more like their private sector counterparts and everyone to sit the Common Entrance was deeply confusing. He clearly hasn’t done the maths, because unless the government is willing to invest tens of thousands of pounds per pupil in the state sector then there will always be a gulf in resources and results between the systems. But more than that he seems to have missed the, fairly apparent, differences in how the different school systems in Britain operate and failed to ask, despite their excellent  record in sending young men and women to universities and high paid jobs, do we really want all our schools to be mini Harrow and Etons?

The Bedroom Tax, a lesson in not giving up.

Call me a cynic, something I undoubtedly am at times, but it often seems that campaigning against something after it has become law is a waste of time. Once Her Majesty has signed on the dotted line there is very little protest or comment or even civil disobedience can do, unless it is carried out on a truly massive scale. Nearly six months ago the Bedroom Tax, the cutting of housing benefits to those living in a property that is deemed to have more bedrooms than needed, became a reality. Since then a lot of column inches and a lot of airtime has been devoted to arguing against this particular piece of cold hearted austerity. Yet given the government’s Sisyphean attitude towards reforming the welfare state would it not be better just to sit tight and wait for the next government to come around?

The Bedroom Tax is a vile piece of legislation. It disproportionately affects the poor and those with disabilities, who need housing benefit payments to survive and are unable, as some government figures have suggested, to ‘downgrade’ to a property  with fewer bedrooms. Considering the shortage of housing in much of Britain, especially housing association or council properties to which the Bedroom Tax exclusively applies, it amounts to little more than the taxation of those who are least able to cope. The Bedroom Tax also does next to nothing in terms of combating the ‘culture of entitlement’, that has been one of the main excuses used by the government for dismantling the benefit system while simultaneously implementing tax breaks to the richer portion of British society. So unbalanced is the Bedroom Tax that it is almost as if King John and the Sherriff of Nottingham are running treasury.

So, despite my cynicism about the ability of anyone to change this government’s mind over the Bedroom Tax, I have spent a significant portion of the last five months hoping something miraculous would happen. This week, largely hidden by the growing turbulence surrounding the ineffectual universal credit system, there was a brief glimpse of hope.

It began with the announcement of a UN inspection. While Syria may be the nation most associated with UN inspectors of late, there is currently a UN inspector touring Britain. Raquel Rolnik is not investigating the use of chemical weapons but rather how the Bedroom Tax affects the human rights of tenants. Specifically the section of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights concerning the right to an adequate standard of living. As Rolnik herself has pointed out ‘The UK has voiced its commitment to human rights on repeated occasions…’ and the right to adequate housing is ‘…one central aspect to the right to an adequate standard of living’. In short then, when the full findings of Mrs Rolnik’s visit are presented next March it may turn out that the Bedroom Tax is, as many of its critics have suggested, a violation of human rights.

The second development came from within the government itself. The education secretary Michael Gove, while speaking about planning reforms and the need for more housing, unwittingly attacked his government’s policy. Showing surprising common sense, he stated that ‘There are children, poor children, who do not have rooms of their own in which to do their homework, in which to achieve their full potential’ and went on to suggest (less lucidly) that those opposing planning reforms were also standing in the way of children’s educational achievement. How does this attack the Bedroom Tax? Under the current law children under ten of either sex and children of the same sex under sixteen are expected to share a room. To follow Mr Gove’s logic the Bedroom Tax is also standing in the way of poor children’s education.

Of these two developments the first is perhaps the more immediately exciting. Whatever the practical power of the United Nations it is still a body seen as one of the world’s ultimate authorities. The EU (which has far more practical power over and economic benefits for the UK) would have little or no impact on public opinion or policy making should it decide to criticise the Bedroom Tax. However should Raquel Rolnik, in her preliminary findings at the end of her visit or in the full report in 2014, condemn the Bedroom Tax as a breach of human rights the damage to the government will be very large indeed. Would such an event have any immediate effect on the government’s stance? One can only wait and see.

The accidental condemnation of the Bedroom Tax by Michael Gove, along with the ever increasingly likelihood that the Labour party will pledge to repeal the Bedroom Tax if they win the next election, may have as much of an impact. Gove’s words expose another, highly emotive, issue upon which the Bedroom Tax can be attacked. Should Labour come out of its shell and campaign aggressively against the tax being able to use the words of a cabinet minister in their argument would be highly embarrassing for the government, potentially leading to even more awkward questions about who else the Bedroom Tax leaves worse off. While such political machinations may not be as high profile or high minded as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it is the reality of politics that embarrassing your opponent over an issue is often more decisive than the overall questions of right or wrong.

What then should those who have campaigned against the Bedroom Tax take from this week? While neither Gove’s political self-immolation or the UN’s interest in the Bedroom Tax are the direct result of all those column inches they do refute the idea that all is lost once a bill becomes law. With no certainly of a more inclusive, pro-welfare government come 2015 waiting for the changing of the guard might not be the best of policies. Maybe if we shout loud enough someone will start to listen.

Calamity Clegg?

In just over two years’ time, with the ashes of a general election gently smouldering in the background, Nick Clegg may look back on February 2013 and allow himself to think ‘this is where it all started going wrong’. The shortest month of the year has given the Deputy Prime Minister a long list of headaches, mostly concerning the action of his own party rather than his erstwhile coalition allies.

Chris Huhne, the man who nearly beat Clegg to the Lib Dem leadership, has been found guilty of perverting the course of justice. As one senior Lib Dem parliamentary figure faces jail, another member of the party top brass, this time a Lord, is being pulled into a separate police investigation. The allegations of sexual harassment against Lord Rennard are still just that, but the Did you know? Didn’t you know? questions that Clegg has been dancing around in the last few days are creepily similar to the questions still shadowing the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Saville affair. Even if the allegations against Chris Rennard prove to be false, the mere possibility that they were ignored by the party hierarchy is damaging, and will need more than a garbled answer about unspecific allegations and a refusal to give a running commentar’. Aside from the high profile character politics there is also the matter of Britain’s loss of its AAA credit rating, a brewing fight over the welfare system, a symbolic bye-election in Chris Huhne’s old parliamentary seat and, as we approach the half-way point of the Lib-Con era, a policy report card that documents more failures than successes for Nick Clegg’s party.

Of course, if the expected happens and 2015 sees the Lib Dems unceremoniously toppled by the electorate then Clegg would be wrong to cite a few particularly bad weeks in February as the start of the his fall from grace. While recent events may typify the way the Liberal Democrats now operate, lurching from disaster to disaster with occasional bouts of faux-governance in between, it didn’t all start here. Everything first turned sour way back in 2010, when Clegg abandoned the students.

In the halcyon days of 2010 the Lib Dems were champions of the poor, the young and the underrepresented. The heady mix of a new political force (finally) on the rise and a youngish leader who, although not charismatic, was intelligent, presentable and as far removed from the scowling polit bureau-esqu Gordon Brown as possible, was an alluring prospect to the student. I should know: I volunteered for the Lib Dems despite living in a seat as Tory as can be. When the socks and sandals brigade didn’t quite sweep to power there was no gnashing of teeth but, rather, a calm, quiet optimism (a very Liberal type of hope) than in coalition Clegg would be able to steer the Tories to the political middle ground at least. Perhaps, given the unusually balanced nature of Parliament, we might even get some real Lib Dem policies on the environment, welfare and education if Labour came on side.

For a short while this dream seemed plausible; the absence of any real domestic politics in the post-election summer meant that we could do nothing but guess wistfully about what our new Deputy Prime Minister would do. In the end, the first meaningful thing Nick Clegg did was to turn on the group of people who, you could argue, got him elected.

Of course you know all of this already, but in light of the ever decreasing popularity of out Deputy PM, it is worth taking a few short moments to asses just how badly the tuition fee role reversal hurt him and his party.

The most immediate consequence was that it guaranteed that the majority of the ‘youth vote’ will steer clear of the Lib Dems come 2015. There was also the near-endless highlighting of Clegg’s hypocrisy, more than any photo of a politician in recent years, the image of Clegg standing next to a sign pledging not to raise tuition was gold for the opposition; it even lead to a grovelling video apology that did almost as much damage to Clegg’s image.

More seriously it alerted the British voters to the fact that the Lib Dems were not, as they rabidly insisted, equal partners in the coalition and that their leader couldn’t stand up to David Cameron. It was never suggested that the Lib Dems had changed their mind over tuition fees, but rather that they had been forced to change their position. As the physical damage of the student protest was being scrubbed from Parliament square an uncleansable political wound had been dealt to the Liberals in the coalition. No one was going to trust them again.

Since then there has been no Conservative-Liberal Coalition of the willing but rather a ball and chain dynamic, with the Tories wearily dragging the Lib Dems towards 2015 when they can finally be unshackled by the prospect of a Parliamentary majority. There are now less Liberal Democrat MPs in cabinet positions than after the election and, despite the result of the Eastleigh by-election (which was largely fought on local issues the pundits tell us), the Lib Dems are as unelectable as ever. Whatever Cameron offered Clegg in return for his rolling over on tuition fees it wasn’t worth it, because abandoning students was the first stone in the avalanche which has buried the Liberal Democrats alive these past few years and which shows no signs of stopping.

When is a U turn not a U turn?

It is a puzzling aspect of modern politics that the more persistently a minister is entreated to change their mind on an issue, the greater the crowing if he or she does indeed perform an about face. This week Michael Gove was the subject of some well-rehearsed newspaper headlines, although for once their chosen pun, ‘EBacctrack’ was mildly amusing.

Small class sizes taken too far… (from winchesterwhisperer.blogspot)

But how much of a U-turn was Gove’s announcement? While GCSEs will remain, they will be based around a more ‘old school’ end of year exam rather than modules taken at intervals during two years of study. There will also be a change to the way school league tables are calculated, with a school’s ranking based in future on how pupils do in eight core subjects. So, while the EBC has been dropped, there is still going to be a fundamental change in the way children are tested at sixteen.

Teachers, it is reported, while not leaping for joy are happy that the original proposals, that would have almost certainly created a two tier educational system as seen in days of yore, have been changed. The government is describing their changes as a simple ‘tweak’ while Labour  are leading the charge in getting #EBacctrack all over Twitter. Meanwhile the Conservative element of the coalition are reported as being ‘furious’ that Lib Dems may have leaked details of the policy change to the press. The left is gloating and the right is in duck and cover mode. Debate over the substance of the reforms is ebbing away like a fast tide and an issue that is as important as the Marriage Bill has, through an average pun and the passage of a few days, been turned into a political football.

To quote Sam Seaborn, education is ‘the silver bullet’ to a plethora of society’s ills. A lack of education leaves a vacuum into which young people of all backgrounds can fall and a good education can transform the prospects of even the most disadvantaged child. While Gove’s original plans were rightly ridiculed by teaching professionals, the political bullfight his change of heart has created is obscuring everything that is still wrong with the government’s reform plan.

Changing the curriculum and the way students are assessed is a superficial move. At the heart of education are the resources and time at the disposal of teachers. Class sizes need to be smaller; more money needs to be available to schools for facilities; and extra-curricular activities and teachers need to be better prepared for the rigors of the classroom. It is no coincidence that countries such as Sweden, whose education system is far superior to Britain’s, hold teachers in much higher regard then we do. A study in 2009 found that around 40% of university-trained teachers drop out of the state system within six month of starting. There isn’t a lack of well-educated people taking up teaching as a career but rather a problem in keeping them there.

As someone who has been lucky enough to see both the private and state systems in the front line as it were; the main differences between the two are all linked to the issues mentioned above. The teachers that taught me in the state system were neither less intelligent or less inspirational than those in the private sector, in fact in many cases the opposite was true, however they lacked the tools to convert their obvious skills into ‘results’. Chemistry A-level classes of over 30 pupils all having to share equipment or English lessons where there aren’t enough copies of the GCSE set text to go round are hardly conducive to educational excellence. Where the private sector excels is in its resources and small class sizes as well as the ability of public and private school to be selective in their intake. The idealist might dream that one day non-selective schools will reach the same lofty educational heights as the likes of Eton and Harrow but if such a goal is to be achieved it will not be through Michael Gove’s new curriculum (especially as it cuts the provision of arts and music, subjects proven to boost student performance) and will certainly not be solved by a new approach to exams alone.

In all of the debate over whether the government is reversing full throttle or simply affecting a minor change of course, no one seems to be talking about how this will affect the teenagers who are at the heart of any change to the education system. It doesn’t matter whether a U-turn is or is not a U-turn, it matters that the government gets this right.