There’s been a lot of hysteria over the latest primary results and whilst they are disappointing let’s not forget what Labour has achieved.

72 per cent of pupils achieved a level 4 or above in both English and maths, up from 53 per cent in 1997, but a decrease of 1 percentage point compared to 2008. Department for Children Schools and Family.

This drop as Connor Ryan points out is probably as a result of a toughening of standards with the removal of the borderlining process – borderlining is where papers falling just below the standard are re-checked. However what is not in doubt is how improvement has slowed over recent years – this needs to be addressed – but don’t listen to any Tories claiming education has failed it hasn’t – undermining the achievements of hard working teachers and pupils by claiming it does no-one any favours.

North Carolina has shows us how we might improve our schools – Johann Hari Explains

Something extraordinary has been happening in North Carolina’s schools over the past few decades, and the best guide to this experiment is an important new book by Professor Gerald Grant called Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

He looks at two very similar cities – Syracuse in New York State, and Raleigh in North Carolina. They are both 1950s boomtowns turned to 1980s ghost towns. It’s the same-old, sad-old story: industry shrivelled and the white middle classes stampeded to the suburbs, leaving behind shell-cities scarred by poverty. Yet there is today an extraordinary gap between these cities. In Syracuse, only 25 per cent of 12-year-olds can read, write or do arithmetic to the appropriate basic level – while in Raleigh, it is 91 per cent. Almost all of the schools in Syracuse fail; none of the schools in Raleigh do. What are they doing differently?

Raleigh’s governors decided to do something bold and unconventional: they looked to the scientific evidence. In 1966, Professor James Coleman was commissioned by the White House to conduct the largest study, to that time, of what makes good pupils succeed and bad pupils fail. After years of on-the-ground analysis, he came up with something nobody expected. He found that the single biggest factor determining whether you do well at school or not isn’t your parents, your teachers, your school buildings or your genes. It was, overwhelmingly, the other kids sitting in the classroom with you. If a critical mass of them are demotivated, pissed off and disobedient, you won’t learn much. But if a critical mass of them are hard-working, keen and stick to the rules, you will probably learn. Watch any 10-year-old: they are little machines for snuffling out the sensitivities of their peer group, and conforming to them.

Facing their schools’ failure in the 1980s, the Raleigh school board returned to this evidence and tried to puzzle out: how should it change the way we run our schools? Touring the schools, they could see why the research was right. Children from poor families need more help than kids from rich families. They are more likely to have chaotic home lives, less likely to have the importance of education drilled into them from birth, and they have lower expectations for themselves.

In small numbers, in an ordered environment, these poor children can quickly be brought up to the level of the rest, and indeed exceed them in many cases. But when they form the majority of a school’s pupils, the teachers can’t cope, discipline breaks down, and learning stops. A school for poor children soon becomes a poor school.

So they formulated a bold – and strikingly simple – solution. They wouldn’t allow any school, by law, to have more than 40 per cent of its children on free school meals, or more than 25 per cent of children who were a grade below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the children who needed the most help wouldn’t be lumped together where their problems would become insurmountable; they would be broken up and fanned out across the educational system. Raleigh merged its school system with white suburban Wake County, so they became one entity, sharing pupils. In order to soothe suburban suspicion at this change, Raleigh turned a third of its inner-city schools into specialist academies, offering excellent music or drama or language specialisms. Soon, children were bussing in both directions every morning, in and out of the suburbs.

Many conservatives savaged the plan as “social engineering” and said it was doomed to fail. Some parents were angry, and a few decamped for the private school system – until the results came in. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.

It’s not hard to see why. Each school had a core majority who respected the rules and valued education – and the other kids normalised to their standards. Those who found it tough could now be given special attention, because they weren’t any longer surrounded by a mass of equally troubled kids. Today, 94 per cent of parents in Raleigh say they are happy with their child’s education. School boards supporting this integration keep getting re-elected.

Raleigh succeeded because it built genuinely comprehensive schools: in which rich, middle-class and poor kids learned together. In Britain, we tell ourselves we have built “comprehensives” – but, except in a few enclaves, we have done nothing of the sort.

We allocate school places according to how close you live to a school. This immediately creates a social apartheid where middle-class children have successful schools in leafy suburbs, while poorer children are ring-fenced in sink schools and end up at Tesco at 16 with few useable skills. (Rich children are creamed off entirely into private schools.) Comprehensivisation didn’t fail; it didn’t happen.

There are only a few areas in Britain with genuinely mixed schools, like Grampian – and they get the best overall results. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Kent, where children from the middle and the rich are creamed off into grammar schools where just 1 percent of kids are on free school meals. They have the worst overall results in the country. Johann Hari.

Now, can Labour find the backbone to implement?

Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy attacked “woefully low” standards in Britain’s education system, blaming the government for a surplus of quangos and guideline overkill.

Joining other business figures who have publicly voiced discontent with Labour in recent weeks, Leahy said that Tesco, as Britain’s ­ largest private employer, depended on high standards of education but was not getting them. Katie Allen, The Guardian.

I’m fed up with the constant unfounded attacks on education, there’s no getting away from the fact that or schools have never been better – one statistic: the number of secondaries where fewer than 30% of pupils gain five good GCSE’s including English and Maths has fallen from 1600 in 1997 to just 270 this year – Source: DCSF.

Yes we need to do better there’s 270 secondaries for a start – education isn’t a place for complacency – what we don’t need is unfounded attacks like these.

As for Tesco depend on high standards of education – what a joke – you don’t need a university degree to operate a cash register or the thousands of other menial and boring jobs his company provides

You know there’s a whole thesis to be written on how Tesco’s has failed us – here’s just one story that springs to mind on how supermarkets have and are continuing to destroy the lives of workers on banana plantations – all done with our own money.

Bananas down to 38p per kilo in Asda, 35p per kilo in Tesco this week. A supermarket price war over a fruit with as much comic potential as the banana ought to be funny. Asda has said that it will take the cost of slashing the retail price from its own margins and not pass the pain on down the supply chain, so surely consumers can only benefit as the big four rivals slug it out for market share. Except, of course, we know that’s not how the script usually runs when UK supermarkets start price wars.

If anyone thinks supermarkets are in the business of simply handing cash back to customers, they are being naive. I’ve been analysing data on price rises in Asda on some of the biggest-selling brands between 8 July this year and last week – when the banana wars got heavy. There’s been a 72% increase in PG Tips tea, a 45% rise on some Colgate top-selling toothpastes, a more than 100% increase on some Pringles crisps, 38% on Rich Tea biscuits, and 85% on single cream. These are steep rises, not on goods that were previously on promotion, but on the usual price.

That looks to me remarkably like a supermarket increasing its margin to build a war chest of cash. Can I be sure? No. Like most shoppers, I find it impossible to keep track of supermarket pricing because it is so variable and opaque. Even the competition authorities have admitted they do not have the resources to monitor what the big picture is. But it’s a fair bet that what supermarkets give back to us with one hand, they are taking, or have already taken, with the other. In the short term, cutting the price of bananas and selling them below the cost of production is a game for them, a paper exercise in shifting profits around, designed to grab publicity, pull shoppers in to spend on other highly profitable goods, and squeeze their competitors.

But in the medium and long term, it’s no game for the rest of the banana industry. A phony supermarket price war is a real war for them – one in which they tend to suffer the collateral damage. We know from the bitter history of such price wars that the costs have been passed down the chain, if not immediately, then over the subsequent months. Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian.

Never forget they’ll do anything for a profit – what Leahy really means is pupils aren’t trained to maximise the amount of cash he trousers and he trousers plenty.

Andrew Grant chair of Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference which represents 250 private schools complains

“I have been wondering how we arrived at a position where to be a member of the self-reliant middle class, to pay your taxes without complaint, but to try to stand on your own feet, to take financial responsibility for your children … to pay your way honestly, can be widely regarded as somehow tantamount to treason”.

The Charities Act 2006 demands private schools justify their charitable status to retain up to £100m in tax breaks each year. Under new rules, private schools must offer more educational benefits to pupils from families who are unable to pay fees. This year, two out of five schools inspected by the Charity Commission were told they failed to provide enough bursaries.

“The threat that underlies the guidance is the well-tried medieval one of confiscation of land and property,” Grant said.

“How dare [politicians] criticise our parents for footing the bill to educate their own children, or seek to make it more difficult for them to do so?” he added. Jessica Shepherd, The Guardian.

However, Grant’s wrong, parents don’t foot the full bill, if Grant wants independence from the state then stop taking the state subsidies by being registered charities – let’s be honest there’s nothing charitable about educating rich kids. As for saving the state money I’d like to see the evidence. More troubling is the end result – our best Universities are stuffed full of private school kids who become parents of rich kids at private schools who go to… you get the picture – an unbroken circle of privilege.

So the CBI’s recommending a cut in student numbers to maintain quality by charging them more, so not only will the poor be supporting the offspring of the wealthy in obtaining University places they’ll now be denied places by the increase in costs of attending.

Education is important, limiting numbers to maintain quality is short-sighted. What is needed is investment so that every University provides quality – this is the way the UK will compete in a global market now and in the future. How to pay for this is a question that obviously needs answering, lets start by looking at the ways the wealthy take advantage of our tax system, one the springs straight to mind is the charitable status their private schools enjoy – let’s stop that now and put the money paid into education for all not the few.

Additionally a point that seems missed in further education discussion is why courses that don’t involve University are treated as second class – this attitude needs to be changed – not every child is suited to University and not every business requires university graduates – more skills based training is desperately required.

For the first time, more than 50% of A-levels taken by privately educated pupils scored an A compared with 20% of those in state schools. Polly Curtis, The Guardian.

I personally would like to abolish private schools however I recognise that’s highly unlikely – what I would like to see is the charitable status of private schools removed – why should poor students through taxes subsidise the education of the wealthy students which then deprives state pupils of university places.

The Tories latest educational proposals are intent on ignoring the fact that not every child is academically minded.

With just days to go before this year’s A level results are announced, the Tories said they planned to overhaul the “dumbed down” system introduced by Labour.

The plans are the first to emerge from a Tory inquiry into the examination system led by Sir Richard Sykes, the former rector of Imperial College, London.

The proposals being actively considered include:

Giving more points in school league tables for A-levels achieved in “hard” subjects, such as maths and physics, and fewer points for so-called “soft” subjects such as media studies.

Removing vocational qualifications, including the Government’s flagship new diploma, from league table rankings because they are “nowhere near as academically demanding” as traditional A-levels and GCSEs.

Doing away with the Government’s current measure of GCSE performance which judges a school on the proportion of its pupils who gain five A* to C grades. Critics claim the measure forces secondaries to concentrate on borderline C grade pupils, ignoring the needs of more able children. Instead, the Tories would introduce a points-based system which would place more value on higher grades.

Improving the quality of A level and GCSE exams.

Forcing schools to track where school-leavers end up and to publish details of the universities or jobs they go on to. Julie Henry, The Telegraph.

Now I’m not suggesting their aren’t problems with league tables but treating vocational education as second rate doesn’t do the country any favours instead it ignores the fact that not all children are suited to university and good employment records of many vocational courses.

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.