Feb 28 2007
Has your child won the school lottery?
Brighton Council have announced they will award scarce places at good schools by lottery, to stop energetic and concerned parents doing better at getting their children in.
Many in Labour want to engineer a world where children from poorer backgrounds have a chance of a place at a better comprehensive miles away from their homes. The Brighton scheme does not do this, as many of the children from the poorer districts will be allocated places at their local school, whose results are often inferior to the schools in the richer parts of town.
What should we think of this idea?
It
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John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I believe that the answer to education problems is small classes as in the privat sector. That willnever happen, however, as I have yet to see any privately educated MP have a real interest in less able children. It would also be an expensive option requiring taxpayers to actually care about there fellow citizens.
Alternatively, why not IQ test early on and then streamline the children into specialist schools ( grammar or technical or arts, but renamed to avoid offence) to best prepare them for a working life. We cannot all end up as mathematicians, novelists, actors, graphic designers, etc. The specialist schools could be based on a reuse of existing buildings.
This would not be a high pressure, pass or fail on the day, 11 plus system but an effort to put children into the stream where they will be most effctive, and have self esteem in later life. It might have the added bonus of stopping the CBI whining about the quality of school leavers.
I would love to hear your opinion on school vouchers/tax-credits or selection on ability?
This lottery system will be a disaster and will only compound the problems of the socialist comprehensive school system. You can also add to the list:
6. One third of state schools do not provide academic subjects, such as History and Geography, at GCSE level . Where does that leave a bright child sent to one of these schools?
As usual, socialist policies end up hurting exactly those who they are designed to help - the poor.
Middle class parents put their kids into good schools either by moving to a good catchment area or by paying for private schools. No wonder catchment areas are shrinking or that school fees are soaring.
We need a robust selection system that includes the possibility of transfer between “streams” for late developers. Vouchers won’t work in this country (at the moment) because a lot of parents just aren’t interested in finding the right school for their kids so we need to make the worst schools better as well as improving the average. We can do this by making sure that the schools for less academically able children teach them something useful.
All of us have one thing in common, half of us got here by winning a race up our Mother’s fallopian tubes against a few million other competitors, our other half was in the right place at the right time.
This smacks of trying to cut out the competitive element to life completely. What will we become if this happens? A nation of juvinilles who whinge ‘it’s not fair’ until our dying day other than accept our lot in life for what it is and make the kost of it.
’streamline the children into specialist schools (but renamed to avoid offence…’ (billy)
No, no, no. If people take offence by the terms ‘grammar’, ‘technical’ or ‘arts’ then tough luck to them.
A lottery to get the best places, just exactly puts the cart before the horse. Typically socialist! They should be concentrating on improving the poor schools so that eventually there are sufficient ‘good’ schools for the majority of pupils to attend. Ten years and they haven’t managed it, no suprise there, really.
To reply to Ed Clarke’s points. I think you underestimate parents as the vast majority are fanatically interested in their kids education. Also, the whole point of vouchers or tax-credits (which I prefer) is they force schools to compete for pupils thus raising the standard of all schools. Schools that cannot compete will not attract enough pupils and close.
A good study is by Mackinac (US) and they recommend tax-credits;)
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6517
Some schools work well specifically because they are small; adding more places at good schools is not always going to be a good idea. Nor will it always be practical, as there may be insufficient funds to build appropriate extra classrooms.
Teaching styles should become more rigorous, more basic factual knowledge needs to be taught early on, more grammar schools would be excellent.