A Two-Tier Education System?

There's a much debate in the media about Michael Gove's proposed free schools. Now, I've no particular axe to grind on this policy. After all, why set up a school with all the capital expenditure and systems and contracts of employment that this implies when you can really individualize your child's education by stepping outside of the system altogether? It seems unnecessary to bring in yet another type of education factory, even if it is a tiny bit more small scale and artisanal.

But I am absolutely stunned by the sheer hypocrisy of the likes of Ed Balls in suggesting that the creation of these schools will "create a two-tier education system". What planet is the man living on? Oh, sorry: he's living on the planet where his family are safely within a decent catchment area, where schools might not be exciting places which encourage genuine learning but at least you're likely to get through to the age of 18 without having been beaten to a pulp for being ever so slightly different.

The reality for those of us in the real world is that the education system is already deeply tiered. There are lots of wealthy people who can happily tout their egalitarianism by keeping their children in the state system because they can afford to buy a house close to decent schools. The rest of us have to put up with education factories which fail 50% of their pupils. DD could have ended up in a comprehensive where the proportion of pupils gaining 5 or more A*-C GCSE passes is 43%. The school down the road, nearer to the more expensive houses, achieves 84%. Now, meaningless as GCSE league tables are in the wonderful world of home education, for a large sector of this country passing the requisite number of exams is the definition of gaining an education. In that case, I'd reckon a system that permits one catchment area to achieve almost double that of its poorer neighbour is already two-tier.

For real equality of opportunity, we could look at the implications of Paula Rothermel's research, which highlights these two surprising features of home education:

Socio-economic class is not an indicator of achievement levels: whilst the home-educated children outscored their school counterparts, those from lower socio-economic groups outperformed their middle class peers. Figures indicate that at least 14% of the parents in the home-education sample were employed in manual and unskilled occupations.

In this study, parental level of education did not limit the children's attainment. At least 38% of parents in this study had been educated at comprehensive schools and at least 21% had no post-school qualifications. Whilst 47.5% of parents had attended university, at least 27.7% of parents in the study had not.

So children with parents of lower social class and lower parental education levels (children who everyone knows tend to have lower attainment in schools) actually do NOT suffer any lower attainment when educated at home.

In which case, I can see there's only one way forward for those who'd like to see the end of a two-tier education system: get the children out of the schools which have become hothouses for accentuating social difference.

Getting my blog mojo back

I've had a bash at redesigning this blog in the hope it'll encourage me to blog more. Time will tell whether or not it's worked. For now, I'm enjoying the brighter colour scheme. Apologies to those of you who (unlike me) aren't colour blind ;-)