Schools still failing to bridge the class divide.

Class is the last great taboo in British political discourse. The left daren’t talk about it for fear of sounding envious; the right worry that doing so will draw attention to their largely privileged origins.

As a result we’ve ended up in a situation where New Labour bent over so far backwards to prove they were relaxed about people becoming filthy rich their spine had fragmented long before Northern Rock went to the wall. As for the Tories, the ever more desperate efforts of Citizen Dave and his chums to show us they’re ordinary blokes only serves to convince sceptical voters that if they do eat pasties then they probably have them served up on a silver salver.

Even though her comments about indulgent parents turning their children into ‘spoilt little Buddhas’ provided an easier quote for the media to hang its coverage on Dr Mary Boustead of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) deserves praise for raising the issue of class, in particular the ‘toxic’ effect it has on the education system.

Speaking to the ATL annual conference in Manchester this week she said the UK currently has ‘schools for the elite, schools for the middle class and schools for the working class’, what it doesn’t have, she went on to say, is schools with a mixed intake where children from all backgrounds can learn together ‘those intangible skills of aspiration, effort and perseverance from one another.’

This, Dr Boustead said, created a situation that was ‘toxic for the poorest and most dispossessed’ students. She hit out at the impact government ‘austerity’ policies were having on the educational chances for students from poorer families and the claim that schools weren’t doing enough to tackle underachievement.

It was, she said, ‘a lie that conveniently enables ministers to evade responsibility for the effects of their policies’ and that schools were ‘straining every sinew’ to help disadvantaged students get the best out of their time at school, but were fighting a losing battle against the effects of ill health, poverty and deprivation, problems she accused Education Secretary Michael Gove and the government as a whole of wilfully disregarding.

A spokesperson for the Department for Education told the BBC that although schools ‘couldn’t be expected to solve every problem’ related to deprivation they should do more to challenge poor performance rather than ‘defending a culture of failure.’

Issues of class, even though it makes us nervous to talk about them, are at the heart of the current chin stroking debate about what schools are for currently occupying so many people who, allegedly, are the owners of first class minds. The one thing they aren’t , Michael Gove tells us with finger wagging certainty, is engines of social engineering, even though he has had his own oily overalls on since taking office.

This, after all, is the Education Secretary who has driven the process of turning schools into academies at breakneck speed; downgraded vocational education to the fury of the business sector and only last week endorsed plans to hand over writing the A Level syllabus to the Russell Group universities. He has also backed endless inane plans to bring back Latin lessons and to make teachers dress up in gowns and mortar boards that serve no real purpose other than to get his name into the papers.

If all that isn’t social engineering then I’m the Easter Bunny.

It is certainly part of a plan to turn the educational clock back to some idealised vision of a Britain where everyone knew their place and the people who worked with their brains were kept separate from the people who got their hands dirty by a Berlin wall of prejudice and thinly veiled snobbery. If reversing at full speed is your plan for the future you’ve got serious problems.

To stand still never mind compete in the twenty first century the last thing Britain needs is to maintain the current situation where intellectuals look down on rude mechanicals; that way lies disaster. What we need is a society where whether they do so with their hands or their brains, or in many cases a bit of both, people work together for a shared aim.

One of the most powerful tools for creating such a society is the education system, the experiences people have at school like those they have in the family home shape the rest of their lives. If that means taxing the rich a little more to make sure children form poor families get an education that allows them to achieve their full potential so be it, in the long term even the people who complain about being squeezed until the pips squeak will benefit.

Being obsessed with class is as much a part of the experience of being British as queuing, warm beer and inventing sports the rest of the world is better than us at, we shouldn’t though hold back from doing all we can to minimise its effect. The most efficient way of doing so term is through schools policy, however for that to happen we need a more sensible engineer at the controls of the educational machinery.

Gove wrong to downgrade vocational courses

At the risk of sounding like a latter day Mrs Dale I’m worried about Michael; Education Secretary Michael Gove that is.

Since he took office in 2010 he seems to have approached the project of reforming Britain’s schools at something like ramming speed. Free schools, bringing back Latin lessons and even sending a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the land all hovered up valuable publicity for the ambitious Mr Gove.

Perhaps this is all par for the course, education secretaries tend to flash across the political hemisphere like meteors, but now he has moved out of the realms of self publicising eccentricity into an area where he could cause lasting damage to the life chances of millions of students.

Michael Gove has given his support to downgrade the value of 3100 vocational courses, previously courses in horse care and hairdressing were counted as being equivalent to four GCSE’s, from 2014 though only around 70 vocational courses will be treated in this way.

The rationale behind the move prompted by a report on vocational education in the UK prepared by Professor Alison Wolfe is that the old system created ‘perverse incentives’ for schools to use vocational courses to boost heir position in the league tables. As a result many schools may well cut back on the number of vocational courses they offer even though take up has grown exponentially in recent years from around 15,000 in 2004 to575, 000 students in 2010.

Professor Wolfe told the BBC this week that too many students were taking qualifications that were ‘getting league points, but which when they went out into the labour market they found nobody actually valued’ schools were, she said, ‘essentially lying to kids and that’s a terrible thing to do.’ Revising the number of vocational courses that can be counted as equivalent to GCSE’s would, she went on to say, mean they would have exactly the same status as other more academic forms of study.

The report, according to Education Secretary Gove has ‘laid bare’ the ‘weaknesses of the current system. He goes on to say that ‘for far too long the system has been devalued by attempts to pretend all qualifications are the same.’ So with the sort of logic that deals with a chip pan fire by burning down the rest of the house Mr Gove has decided to ‘solve’ this problem by devaluing every vocational course; way to go Mikey.

The ink was hardly dry on the report before criticisms of its conclusions began to pour in, engineering employers were unhappy that the popular and well respected Engineering Diploma, previously worth five GCSE’s will now only be equivalent to one. Christine Blower of the NUT said the proposed reforms ‘are likely to exacerbate the vocational academic divide.’ Chris Keates of the NASUWT questioned the wisdom of downgrading qualifications taken by so many young people saying that doing so would ‘remove qualifications employers value, narrow the curriculum even more and lead to disaffection amongst young people.’

Even the Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg, not exactly a socialist firebrand, got in on the act saying that whilst he agreed with government attempts to improve the standard of vocational education on offer saying that ‘we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.’ Quite so, although in this case Michael Gove seems intent on throwing out the baby, then the bathwater before sending the bath itself clattering down the stairs after them both for good measure.

It would be unwise to suggest that all vocational courses are either perfect or equal, often when they are designed by educationalists with little experience of industry, but this assault on vocational education as a whole is nothing short of vandalism. Not least because it fails to address the real problem; the idea that schools can or should be ranked in a league table.

This week Michael Gove branded opponents of academies as ‘trots’, implying they put ideology ahead of common sense. I can’t help but feel there is more than a little projection going on here.

If anybody is gripped by an inflexible ideology it is Mr Gove, and like all ideologues he alternates between a smug conviction that he is always right and hysterically paranoid denunciations of anyone who dares to question him. Time and tide have moved on, vocational and academic learning aren’t opposed armed camps, they are parallel tracks to success with the connecting door between the two propped open.

That Michael Gove either can’t or won’t accept this and persists with an attempt to return Britain’s schools to some imagined golden age of mortar boards, Latin prep and Victorian hymns is a shocking dereliction of his ministerial duty.