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Free Schools, Exams And The Battle For Britain’s Education

Interview in the Huffington Post

I’m back….

The book, on education, is done. The cover is – nearly – finalised. The plans, for publication, are shaping up. Don’t let anyone tell you that a writer’s life is an easy one, particularly not for a book like this, commissioned, and executed, in double quick time: three months of interviews and school visits – helped, I have to say, by an excellent researcher, Dominic Self – followed by several months of intensive reading and then what felt like a lifetime of intensive drafting and re-drafting. As my head filled with ideas and arguments – and internal challenges to what I thought I thought – I wrote more and slept less. For the last few weekends, I was working sixteen, seventeen hour days and barely out of my dressing gown. Neighbours who met me on my regular walks around the block ( 6 turns several times a day) later compared me to a caged animal!

But it is done. And I am proud.

Books are funny things. You often don’t realise what you have produced, until long after publication. I am only now beginning to see that ‘School Wars’ is an accessible and punchy ( awful word – but let it stand) critique of the Coalition’s damaging policies on schools, and an impassioned but surprisingly calm assessment of the possibilities of a different kind of school system. I have learned in writing the book that I need to see things, in my head, almost pictorially, in order to believe in them. It came too late to include in the final chapter but I understood that what I was trying to describe for the reader was my picture of an ideal school and how we could create such a school in every neighbourhood and area in the country, if we had the imagination and the political will. That was – is – exciting.

Certainly, writing the book has changed – shifted – shaken up – radicalised – modernised – my own opinions, and what I am really looking forward to now are the many discussions and debates that seem likely to follow publication, particularly those with the people who really know – state school leaders, teachers, pupils and parents. Over the next few days, I will put up details of the events planned over the autumn.

My publishers have also persuaded me that I have to Twitter; groan!

As for this website, I will finally get back to doing a weekly blog on current, cultural affairs – not just education.…

Forty years of feminism……..

Read Melissa Benn’s contribution/s to Women and the Revolution, a collection of articles from Guardian writers on Forty Years of Feminism, edited by Kira Cochrane and published tomorrow, November 25th.…

Read all about it!

If you are interested in the long term implications of the government White Paper on education, published today, or interested in government policy, education quality and equality in general, please go to our new website/campaign The Local Schools Network – and join the debate!…

Join us please!

Below a piece I have written for tomorrow’s Guardian – part of our official launch of the Local Schools Network. If you believe in non selective high quality state education and want to help us further improve it, to the benefit of all children, not just a few, then please join our campaign group or get involved in any way you think might help. The LSN website lists some of the several campaign organisations fighting to improve, not denigrate, state education.

Tomorrow’s whirlwind visit to London by Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, could not have come at a better time for Michael Gove. Last week the secretary of state was besieged by discomfiting revelations about £500,000 of public money granted to the New Schools Network, the charity and company set up by one of his former advisers, 25-year-old Rachel Wolf, during which it emerged that no other organisation was asked to tender for the job of advising groups who want to set up new and “free” schools.

This week, then, in place of answering questions about transparency and accountability, Gove will be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with one of Obama’s lieutenants – at Hackney’s Mossbourne Academy in London, no less; the jewel in the crown of New Labour’s education policy – and talk about the need to tackle educational inequalities, root out bad teachers, ill discipline and so on.

In fact the funding of the New Schools Network and the expected razzmatazz around Duncan’s visit are all part of the same strategy: central planks in the frequently disingenuous war now being fought over the future of our school system, in which a seductive language of cultural radicalism and a powerful invective against educational inequality will increasingly be used to promote a further fragmented and multi-tiered system of education. Existing state provision is in effect being undermined by a mix of instant celebrity critics, a growing number of private providers and behind-the-scenes lobbyists, with the full if not always fully publicised support of the government.

There are two crucial elements to this new schools agenda. The first is the relentless knocking of the comprehensive inheritance; the rational administrative reform introduced in this country from the 50s onwards that sought to end the pernicious and deeply unpopular grammar-secondary modern divide.

The New Schools Network website, for instance, features videos shot in close-up of agonised parents desperately seeking alternatives to their failing local school – although only a tiny percentage of the nation’s schools are now deemed to be failing.…

Because you’re – all – worth it…

Read my latest post on the Local Schools Network – and then sign up and support us.

A very interesting piece by Danny Dorling in today’s Guardian Education about a speaking tour he undertook around the country, just before the Comprehensive Spending Review, in which he visited a range of schools, including a local comprehensive, an F E college, a selective grammar and a public school – to talk about economic divisions and how where you are born still determines where you will end up in life.

Interestingly, the more selective the school the less realistic Dorling found the students’ grasp of economic reality and division, and the more faith placed by the student in ( their own) ’hard work’ as the means to get somewhere in life; in other words, students benefitting from a more affluent upbringing or privileged education are the ones failing to understand the place of geographical or social class or educational hierarchies, yet they are the ones most likely to succeed. ( For a perfect example of this, look no further for the mismatch between the economic and educational background of the Coalition leaders and the horrendous implications of the CSR)

Dorling also quotes Nelson Mandela from a speech the great man made in 1994 in which Mandela apparently argued that every child should have the same amount spent on their education and that this was a cause he was ‘prepared to die for’.

As Mandela has already championed several world changing causes at risk to his own life, perhaps this is one that we at the Local Schools Network should now take up, namely that the political classes find the means to equalise annual school funding across the country and across the sectors, including the private sector?

After all, we’re all in this together, right?.…

Women and the cuts

Read Melissa’s latest post on the Public Finance blog on the implications of the cuts for women and families.…

New Schools Leg Up

An interesting blog here from The Other Taxpayers’ Alliance following Freedom of Information requests to government about the New Schools Network and its funding from government – with a positive endorsement of our new organisation the Local Schools Network right at the end.…

The Local Schools Network

The Local Schools Network is now officially up and running – so please would you all click onto the site to indicate your support for your local school, if you wish to, and add a comment/story/view or two.

A group of us set up this website/campaign after the government decided to fund the New Schools Network to the tune of half a million pounds. While there is obviously a case to be made for new schools in some areas, and we would support these, the New Schools Agenda is frequently an attack on existing local state schools. Setting up Free Schools, particularly in already socially polarised inner city areas, will only further demoralise many community comprehensives, drawing away the better off and more motivated parents – those, that is, not already signed up to private education or grammars or those faith schools which can, through archaic admissions policies, shape their own school population in a way that many community/comprehensives simply can’t and wouldn’t want to.

The more I have worked on the Local Schools Network, while at the same time researching the history of our state system and visiting schools (for my forthcoming Verso book) the more I believe we are in the middle of a frequently covert but extraordinarily important battle over the future of state education, with many forces ranged against it.

That is why it is vital that we all defend – and fight to extend and improve – non selective state education against those, in the Coalition and certainly in the Tory party, who want to run it down at every turn and replace it with quasi independent schools or a return to grammars or a mish mash of both.

Our state education system has made extraordinary strides over the past few decades; but there is so much more to do. The Local Schools Network is just one contribution to defending this vital element of our society and working to improve it for all, not just a select few.

Please support us.…

…and this…..

Excellent piece by Simon Jenkins this morning on the many many wrong turnings of governments and politicians on education, localism, fairness etc over the years. There is now a real opportunity for the new Labour leader, if he or she is brave enough, to suggest something quite radical and rational on the schools front. It would not only be the right thing to do, it would be massively popular.…

Latest writing

THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

Latest news & events

A Cold War Tragedy

Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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