EADT 4
EADT 4
EADT 4
Listen up at the back. Pay attention. It’s time for a test.
Put your hand up if you think freedom is a good thing.
Hundreds of years of democracy, freedom of speech, and a mostly sceptical media that likes to ask probing questions of people in power – all of these will make lots of us think it’s a stupid question, an obvious one.
Of course freedom is a good thing, we’ll reply. To do otherwise would be like saying that happiness or health or hope are bad ideas. It’s unarguable, isn’t it?
The reality, of course, is that in life things are often rarely quite as straightforward as they seem.
I’ve being leading various after-school revision sessions this week with our GCSE English A* wannabes – the students who are aiming to get the very highest grade in next week’s English Reading & Writing exam.
And one of the bits of advice I’ve been giving is to look for shades of meaning, to use verbs like ‘might’ and ‘may’ and adverbs like ‘possibly’ and ‘perhaps’ because these allow us to express our view of the world with more precision, more subtlety, more light-and-dark. It’s what the best writers usually do.
And so it is, I think, with freedom. It’s a word that the current Government uses a lot. They suggest that freedom is at the only alternative to ‘nanny state’ or ‘low expectations’.
So schools which are academies or free schools are encouraged to relish shimmering new freedoms. They can opt out of teaching the national curriculum; abandon national regulations on healthy food (the Jamie Oliver campaign); and choose, if they like, not to offer extra-curricular music.
This to me is a funny kind of freedom. I don’t want my child’s experience of school to be shaped by the narrow whims of the headteacher.
Instead, I would respectfully suggest that any decent school should have certain essential non-negotiable elements, whether it’s an academy, a free school or (like ours) a proud comprehensive: well-dressed, committed teachers; lots of extracurricular music, sport, debating, and the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme; a strong unwavering commitment to healthy eating and children’s mental health; soap and toilet paper in the pupils’ toilets; and a national curriculum that reflects ‘the best that has ever been thought and said’.
If schools have the freedom to opt out of any of that, then I think it’s a phoney kind of freedom.
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At the weekend, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (ex-Westminster School) was lamenting the fact that more children from private schools get top grades at A-level than those from state schools. The previous week Education Secretary Michael Gove (ex-Robert Gordon’s College) said much the same.
It always surprises me that such obvious claims are made. If you take children from highly aspirational backgrounds, with parents paying hefty fees, and hold an entrance exam designed to sift the academically gifted from the others, then surely we should be lamenting that some of those schools don’t do better, given the advantages they exude.
More remarkable for me is the achievement of genuine comprehensive schools like ours where this year eight of our students have gained offers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. They will, in most cases, be the first generation from their families to go there.
But what makes me just as proud are the 16-year old students who have gained college places to study motor mechanics, hairdressing and plumbing.
The reason I could only ever work in the state sector is precisely because of this: the way we can help to shape the lives of all our youngsters, with those from the most aspirational backgrounds mixing with those who need our support the
most.
That doesn’t mean treating all students as if they were the same. It’s about having high ambitions of them all, regardless of how much their parents earn or how they did in entry exams.
That’s why I appreciate so much the faith of parents who put their trust in the state sector and shrug off the frequent sniping at our schools from people in power who should know better. It means a lot.
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A quick joke that makes them laugh in the staffroom but which I don’t find at all funny.
Question: What’s the collective noun for a group of headteachers?
Answer: A ‘lack’ of principals.
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Published in the EADT Education Supplement,
Wed 23 May 2012
Wednesday, 23 May 2012