Private schools offering lavish extracurricular activities give their pupils an unfair advantage and should be forced to share their facilities with state pupils, says a report commissioned by the prime minister.

Former cabinet minister Alan Milburn was asked to look at how class barriers could be broken down in Britain and found that middle-class children whose parents do not move in the “right” circles, as well as those from poorer families, now risk being shut out of professions that have become more socially exclusive.

Milburn says that fee-paying pupils benefit from an emphasis on “soft skills” such as teamwork and communication, which are imparted through sport, music and drama. With more pupils now getting the academic grades needed for university, private pupils get ahead because of their more rounded CVs and confident presentation.

The report calls on the Charity Commission to force schools to share extracurricular activities with state school pupils as a condition of maintaining their charitable status, and for Ofsted to inspect state schools on their provision of extras such as music and drama to ensure they become a priority. Gaby Hinsliff, The Observer.

No, no, no, no the answer is that private schools aren’t charities – there is nothing charitable about educating wealth children – this is a loophole that should be closed now – there is no sensible reason on earth why taxpayers should subsidise the rich. And I wonder how many parents would continue to send there children to private schools if they had to bear the full cost? Quite a few I suggest.

I’m fed up with teachers: as parents we have a right to independent assessment of our children’s schools how else are we to know if a school’s performing is good or bad? How else do teachers propose we assess a school if Sats tests are abandoned?

Last night, Christine Blower, the general secretary of the NUT, said: “All of the arguments about getting rid of tests for 14-year-olds apply to 11-year-olds as well. We really think there is no point in testing every single 11-year-old in the country. Even if there is a will to change the league tables, it won’t happen unless you get rid of the tests. We’re saying we’re happy to do sampling and teaching assessments but get rid of tests in all three subjects at key stage 2″. Polly Curtis, The Guardian.

And there you have it teachers want to assess their own performance, I can’t see any poorly performing schools anymore, if we swallow this we’re living in cloud cuckoo land.

Government plans to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) compulsory from the age of five , published yesterday, include a clause allowing schools to apply their “values” to the lessons and another allowing parents to opt their children out on religious grounds.

It means that all state secondary’s in England – including faith schools – will for the first time have to teach a core curriculum about sex and contraception in the context of teenagers’ relationships, but teachers in religious schools will also be free to tell them that sex outside marriage, homosexuality or using contraception are wrong. Sexual health campaigners warned that such an approach could confuse teenagers, but Catholic schools welcomed the move. Polly Curtis, The Guardian.

Now what on earth’s happening here? Religious sensitivity gone mad – religion has no place in PSHE – do we want our children growing up believing for instance that condoms increase their risk of HIV/AIDS? Of course not, but Pope Benedict XVI preached just that in his first papal visit to Africa just last month – and don’t get me started on homosexuality or sex outside marriage or …there’s hundreds of reasons why religion should be kept out of schools let alone PSHE lessons.

Lord Sutherland has completed his inquiry into this year’s Sats test fiasco and says

In practice, failures occurred at almost every stage of the test delivery process in 2008 from the registration of pupils to the presentation of results. Source: The BBC.

A damning indictment, however the response mustn’t be the abandonment of testing – it was a mistake to abandon testing for 14-year-olds. Why you ask? Conor Ryan supplies the answer.

Those who think this is a terrible burden clearly have short memories. The reason the national tests were introduced was because we used to have no idea whether or not primary schools were doing their job. When the first national test results were published in 1995, and over half of all youngsters failed to reach the expected standard (it is now 20%), the country was shocked. When individual school results were published despite the objections of the teaching unions, we learnt how apparently similar schools were achieving radically different results.

In short, those same forces who are now demanding an end to testing had conspired to hide the truth from parents and taxpayers. The problems with this year’s tests must not become an excuse to return to those days. And Schools Secretary Ed Balls must speak up loudly and clearly in favour of school standards – after all, they matter most to the least advantaged children who lack the parental support to get on without decent schooling. Source: Conor’s Commentary.

There’s often much discussion about our education system, many bemoan our drop in standards. However in my experience as a parent of four, nothing would appear further from the truth, children work far harder than I or my contemporaries ever did.
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) survey ranks England in the top 10 for the first time.

These results are magnificent tribute to teachers and students, placing them above all our major European Competitors as well as the United States. As Conor Ryan Points out this is the generation of 14 year-olds who were educated through Labour’s numeracy strategy from the start of primary school.

Still, you can trust the Tories to try and undermine the achievement.

Conservatives’ children’s spokesman, Michael Gove, said it showed England’s pupils were in the “global second division” behind Asian countries.

“Parents will be worried that our maths performance is behind that of Kazakhstan,” said Mr Gove. Source: BBC.

Does Grove have any idea what has been achieved, back in 1995 under the Tory government England was ranked 25th for maths, but I guess he’d like to forget that.

Hat Tip: Conor’s Commentary.

If like us you’re starting to consider your child’s A-level options then you may well want them to avoid A-levels that many of the top universities consider “soft” by which they mean unacceptable for entrance. The trouble is there’s little help from the Universities.

Only two top universities publish a list of “non-preferred” subjects, a Policy Exchange report claims.

In January, the Russell Group of top research institutions warned that state pupils especially could be hampered by choosing “soft subjects” at A-level.

The report says universities and schools must make things clearer.

It says that only Cambridge University and the London School of Economics publish lists of less-preferred subjects, while other universities offer no clear advice about subjects that could count against students.

Cambridge’s list has 20 A-levels which could be considered “less effective” in applications – including accounting, business, dance, ICT, media studies, sports studies and travel and tourism. Source: The BBC.

Cambridge and LSE publish lists of non-preferred subjects. Both universities list the following as less effective preparation for university: Accounting, Art and Design, Business Studies, Communication Studies, Design and Technology, Drama and Theatre Studies, Home Economics, Information and Communication Technology, Media Studies, Music Technology, Sports Studies and Travel and Tourism. In addition LSE singles out Law (but Cambridge does not) and Cambridge lists: Dance, Film Studies, Health and Social Care, Leisure Studies, Performance Studies, Performing Arts, Photography and Physical Education.

…

Without clear advice from universities pupils and parents are left to play a guessing game about which subjects might give an advantage when it comes to applying to a leading university. It has long been accepted that General Studies is often not preferred by universities and should be regarded as more of an “add-on” to other A-levels. Some of the “softer” arts A-levels, such as Media Studies and Music Technology, may be easy to pinpoint as less traditional. However, the new “professional” A-levels are more confusing. It seems particularly unfair to expect pupils or parents to instinctively know that Law, Accounting and Business Studies may be considered “soft” or less desirable by many top universities. Source: The Policy Exchange.

Still I can’t help thinking students from Public Schools will know exactly what subjects to avoid.

Almost everybody seems happy that the Key Stage 3 tests have gone, I’ve personally favoured testing, and I strongly believe it’s raised educational standards, particularly for those schools at the bottom of the achievement tales. Here’s one voice of agreement.

Oliver Quantrill Maths teacher, Lavington School, Wiltshire

I was very disappointed by the news, primarily because I think it has been taken for entirely the wrong reasons. This year’s marking fiasco, which was totally unconnected to the tests themselves, seems to have unduly influenced the decision.

Nothing has changed with the tests – we still have roughly the same number of students taking roughly the same test, so the idea that the system has reached breaking point is untenable.

In terms of impact on us as a maths department, it will probably make little difference, apart from adding slightly to our workload. We will still be doing an internal assessment, as I suspect will most schools, and we will try as hard as we can to make it as formal as possible so we can motivate pupils to take it seriously, get themselves prepared for the start of the GCSE course and give us and them an accurate assessment of their current level in the subject. The fact that this is no longer an external exam means it will be harder to convince them to take it seriously and we will have less chance of identifying those whose under-performance in lessons might be masking their actual potential. It also means pupils will have less experience of this kind of formal test and so will find the GCSE exams that much more daunting.

We, in our maths department, feel that the maths Sats paper is a good test of abilities and, although we obviously take other evidence and experience into account, we largely base their GCSE targets on this result (and are extremely successful in doing so). Hopefully the Sats exams will still be available – the other alternative would be just to keep reusing the old papers. All that happens now is our department will have to put in a significant extra amount of time and effort marking and moderating our own set of papers.

Scrapping a good test, which is a reliable measure of a pupil’s progress, seems short-sighted. Source: TES.

Hat Tip: Conor’s Commentary.

More than one in five teachers would like the cane reinstated to punish pupils in cases of “extreme” bad behaviour, a survey has revealed.

The most common reason cited for supporting corporal punishment was the deterioration of behaviour in schools, more than 20 years after corporal punishment was abolished.

The poll, conducted by the Times Educational Supplement, asked 6,162 teachers, mostly in the state sector, whether they supported the “right to use corporal punishment in extreme cases”. Just over 20% said they would. Source: The Guardian.

Any teacher supporting corporal punishment should be sacked now – they’ve no business in education.

I posted on Wednesday about the ridiculous removal of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Education for Leisure” from the GCSE curriculum. Duffy has written a poem called “Mrs Schofield’s GCSE” in response

You must prepare your bosom for his knife,
said Portia to Antonio in which
of Shakespeare’s Comedies? Who killed his wife,
insane with jealousy? And which Scots witch
knew Something wicked this way comes? Who said
Is this a dagger which I see? Which Tragedy?
Whose blade was drawn which led to Tybalt’s death?
To whom did dying Caesar say Et tu? And why?
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark – do you
know what this means? Explain how poetry
pursues the human like the smitten moon
above the weeping, laughing earth; how we
make prayers of it. Nothing will come of nothing:
speak again. Said by which King? You may begin.
Source: The Guardian.

Hat Tip: Obsolete.

The BBC reports GCSE poem dropped over knife fear, a spokeswoman for the AQA exam board said a complaint was received about the inclusion of the poem and against a background of fears over teenage knife crime had decided to drop it from the anthology. Here’s the poem in question.

Education for Leisure

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
we did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
For signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
he cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
the pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

Source: The William Howard School

Yes, it involves a knife, however its not a glorification of knives in any way and when put against what assails us on our TV’s it seems a completely bizarre decision, furthermore I don’t suspect the purpertrators of knife crime spent much time in the classroom, that’s the problem, lack of education, not a poem involving the use of a knife. Still what on earth was in the complaint that made the exam board take such drastic action?