Saturday, May 06, 2006

SOME EXPERIENCES OF BRITISH EDUCATION TODAY

For the past four years I have been writing a novel about two schools that form an unlikely partnership: one a rich, wildly successful boarding school, the other a fast-failing urban comprehensive. As my husband and I and our two children had all attended private secondary schools, I was familiar with independents. But the heroine of Wicked! A Tale of Two Schools is battling to save her comprehensive, so I needed to research the state sector, and in particular state school heads.

And what an inspiring bunch I found them. I was constantly bowled over by their compassion, their courage and their humour, and appalled by their vast workload, lack of resources and the stranglehold of red tape against which they struggled. I took out a subscription to The Times Educational Supplement and found a brave and beautiful deputy head called Katherine Eckersley who, when her school in Derby was closed, managed to chivvy the local authority into giving her a building and funding to "save" year 10, who would otherwise have been uprooted and transferred to other schools to take their GCSEs. It seemed to me that a miracle had happened.

All the older teachers at the Village Community High school, who'd been demoralised trying to control large, unruly classes, came back two or three days a week and, as Mrs Eckersley's "golden oldies", taught these 60 children in small classes. The teachers were free to teach and the children, previously regarded as no-hopers, were able to learn and have attention and love lavished upon them. The result was a happy school.

On other occasions I was appalled by the brutality with which schools were shut. Virginia Frayer, the marvellous former head of the Angel primary school, in the London borough of Islington, misread the privately controlled education authority's request to visit her thriving and successful school, hoping she would have a chance to ask for more funding. When told the real reason, she gasped: "But you haven't seen over my school; we've all spent weeks making it beautiful." Back came the deadly reply: "I don't need to see over a school to close it down." I only hope the designer flats built on the site of the Angel are ever more haunted by the weeping of children.

I also detested the way schools that shut have to endure the humiliation of other schools descending like vultures to appropriate desks, books, computers and lab equipment, though I rejoiced in the story of the enterprising school that flogged off the girls' uniforms to the local sex shop.

In other schools I encountered extraordinary poverty. Tactlessly teasing an enchanting little girl for wearing a long-sleeved winter shirt in the summer, I was hissed at by the head that her family couldn't afford two shirts. Then there was Danijella, the asylum seeker who was put in charge of the school bird table. She was discovered tipping bird seed, stale cake, discarded fat and broken biscuits into her school bag to augment her family's rations at the holding centre.

I was frequently moved to tears by the heroism of pupils who were determined to get an education in the face of daunting odds. One child was single-handedly looking after three younger sisters, as her mother lay in a drugged stupor on the living room floor. Such children face a wall of indifference and cruelty beyond the school gates: no food in a freezing cold house, drunken parents waiting to knock them about, or worse. But they love their parents and won't sneak because they're so terrified of being taken into care. One of the heroes in Wicked! is Paris, who has been in care since he was two, and who regularly goes missing as he travels the country searching for his mother.

I know it costs a fortune to keep a child in care - far more than to send them to Eton or Harrow - and children like Paris get only 10 pounds a month clothes allowance, so someone somewhere is doing nicely out of the arrangement.

I was horrified too by the vulnerability of teachers who are accused of abuse: arrested, named and shamed, allowed no contact with anyone from the school until a court case comes up often months later - their lives, too, are truly blighted.

My husband claims he can play the piano with only one hand because he was always using the other one to fend off a music master at his Yorkshire prep school. Perhaps schools were once dens of vice, but the pendulum has swung much too far when you can't give a pupil a lift home in a snowstorm, or cuddle a sobbing child who's just been taken away from her parents.

I was depressed by the creeping erosion of freedom and fun. No more conker fights, detentions if you chuck a snowball, no playground slides, experiments in science being phased out for fear of litigation. Half the joy of physics was seeing teachers emerging from a cloud of black smoke with their eyebrows singed, wailing: "But it worked with the other division."

Consider too the poor jack russell cast as Bill Sikes's dog in a Stroud school production of Oliver!, then sacked for health and safety reasons, an experience that his owners said had left him much saddened. He might have been cheered up by the dreadful but hilarious statistic that, in a survey, 80% of secondary school children thought Winston Churchill was the dog in the television advertisements for an insurance company. It makes one wonder if English history is still taught in schools.

On my travels around schools I also learnt how to converse with teenagers of either sex. "What football team do you support?" or "I've actually met Colin Firth," always breaks the ice. (Although, interestingly, the character that girls most frequently cite from Pride and Prejudice is Mrs Bennet: "Because she's soooo embarrassing - like my mum.")

To return to Katherine Eckersley. I was proud to be invited to the end-of-school prom, but I goofed. Imagining it meant some kind of promenade concert, I arrived in a crumpled pink suit only to find all the children, ravishing in ball dresses and dinner jackets, spilling out of limos. My embarrassment was soon dispelled by lashings of "teacher's lemonade" (bottles half full with Fanta and half vodka) as we danced to a splendid band in a hall transformed by hundreds of cut-out gold stars. When the prom king was crowned, one of his mates yelled out that it was the "first time there'd been a poof on the throne since James I", so they had learnt some English history after all.

When the balloons came down, the girls burst them with their stilettos to symbolise the end of a fantastic year. Outside the night was lit up by fireworks, culminating in white stars spelling out "Goodbye Village High". The words I heard over again as sobbing children flung their arms round Katherine were: "Oh, Miss, I'm going to miss you, Miss."

The children's GCSE results weren't spectacular by beastly league table standards; only a handful had gained the magic five. But so many who had been expected to get none notched up several Bs, Cs and Ds and, fired with new confidence, went off happily to sixth-form colleges, or to learn to be hairdressers and carpenters, or take up places in sports academies.

I was unable to celebrate with them that year, but I did spend a wonderful results day at another favourite school, Barnwood Park in Gloucester. Most schools e-mail their results, or pin them in envelopes to the noticeboard. Gill Pyatt, Barnwood Park's inspiring head, broke the good (and bad) news personally to every girl and was so good at praising and comforting them all. Summoned by mobile and text, excited parents were soon storming the playground, bearing flowers in cellophane tubes and cards in coloured envelopes. One girl, flabbergasted to get the magic five, rang the factory where her dad worked and made them broadcast her results over the PA system.

Looking back, I am touched that so many heads trusted me enough to let me wander round their schools, where I saw marvellous and imaginative teaching. "Macbeth was a killing machine on a fantastic high having routed the terrorists who were trying to overthrow King Duncan," wrote Claire Matthews, an English and drama teacher at Archway School, Stroud. "For homework," she had added, "if you were a costume designer, how would you kit out the weird sisters? Or imagine you're a war correspondent, like John Simpson, and write a script telling the viewers at home about Macbeth's first victory."

Wandering along the corridors at Archway, I found a touching poem written by a year 10 pupil: "Love is like rugby football, it can get a little rough." On the staffroom wall was a sign saying: "Thought for the week: chewing gum. We're gumming down." Then I remembered a postcard attached to the filing cabinet in the general office at Village High: "One man gets run over on the roads every five minutes and he's getting very fed up with it."

What I loved about schools is that despite the tragedies, cheerfulness always breaks in. Having my photograph taken with the girls at Barnwood Park, they told me that while eating their packed lunch in the playground, they'd been bombarded "by ginormous killer gulls", so they'd put a pretend owl called Ernie up on the roof to terrify the birds. As I left, however, two gulls were happily perched on Ernie's head and five others were noisily queuing up for a turn. It seemed to sum up education.

Source






Australian Leftist leader calls for tax breaks for private school parents

(More support for the view that Australia is the world's most conservative country)

Parents who sacrifice their lifestyles to send their children to private schools should be thanked and supported with tax incentives and childcare support, says Labor Party national president Warren Mundine. Just a day after Labor leader Kim Beazley discarded his predecessor Mark Latham's class-war policy of cutting public funding to the nation's wealthy private schools, Mr Mundine said his party should consider offering tax breaks on school fees and direct subsidies for parents using the private school system, similar to the childcare rebate.

Mr Mundine called for an end to the ideologically driven debate that has dominated the ALP's education policy for the past two or three decades and for debate instead on the best ways to support families in their choice of education. "I think they're great parents, I take my hat off to them," Mr Mundine said of people who sent their children to private schools. "These families are contributing on top of their taxes. They're paying for education twice. "They're paying $4 billion (in private school fees) on top of their taxes to provide the best education for their kids. Not all are wealthy people, they're just ordinary, average Australians trying to do the best for their kids."

Mr Mundine, a father of seven, said his own children attended both public and private schools. His two children still at school include his daughter, Garra, 14, who attends St Scholastica's at Glebe, in Sydney's inner west, and son Yawun, 17, who attends St Joseph's College in the northern suburb of Hunters Hill.

Despite confirmation yesterday that wealthy private schools may not secure real funding increases under Labor's plan, Mr Beazley's pledge that no private school would be worse off won support from elite school principals unhappy with the current funding system. Melbourne Grammar principal Paul Sheahan said the Howard Government's funding system for private schools was unfair and said it had entered into too many special deals with different schools.

The federal Government's funding model - known as the socio-economic status (SES) model - does not take private school fees and income into account when determining funding. Instead, it links enrolment details of where students live with census data on average income and education levels.

More here

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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