Spectator Schools September 2015

SCHOOLS September 2015

Muriel Gray The case for arts teaching Tony Little How teenage boys think Ysenda Maxtone Graham Let’s abolish homework!

Toby Young The next 450 free schools Laura Freeman Comprehensives with cows In association with

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Solid state Our schools have long been held up as an example to the world – and the ever-increasing number of international students shows that a British education is still very desirable. What has been less emphasised is that while our independent schools certainly have a lot to offer, so too do our state schools.

In this supplement, kindly sponsored by Brewin Dolphin, we take a look at the changing worlds of state and independent education. Sophia Waugh explains why she sent her children to a comprehensive, while Ysenda Maxtone Graham argues that most homework should be abolished. Or is the British system relaxed enough already? Cindy Yu explores the strict Chinese education system – and is glad she moved to the UK aged nine.

On page 14, former Eton headmaster Tony Little explains how neuroscience can explain the sometimes bizarre behaviour of teenage boys.

And Katherine Whitbourn, who three decades after her last exam has just taken an AS-level, expresses her sympathy for adolescents everywhere.

There is plenty more, too, so please read on. I hope that you find it all both informative and entertaining, and do look out for the next Spectator Schools, in March 2016.

IN THIS ISSUE Private advantages Ross Clark

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My exam hall hell Katherine Whitbourn

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Against prep Ysenda Maxtone Graham

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School farms Laura Freeman 8

Storing school stuff Camilla Swift 24

The future of free schools Toby Young 10

Lessons from RE Lauren Nicholson-Ward 26

The new A-levels James Wardrobe 11

In praise of tutoring Edward Webster 27

China’s battery children Cindy Yu 13

The arts advantage Muriel Gray 28

Teenage brains Tony Little 14

EPQs explained Stuart Dalley 31

State school success Sophia Waugh 16

Teaching dyslexics Mary Anne Hansell 32

Rural comprehensives Constance Watson 18

Four schools to watch 34

Editor

Camilla Swift Drawings

John Jensen Supplied free with the 19 September 2015 edition of The Spectator www.spectator.co.uk The Spectator (1828) Ltd, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7961 0250.

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Sauce for the goose: pupils have been shown to learn best in equal-ability classes, yet academic selection is confined to the private sector

What do they do in there?

Private schools consistently outperform state schools in exams, but why exactly? A thorough investigation has uncovered the answers, some of them surprising, as Ross Clark finds out

T

he idea of private schools as bastions of academic achievement has taken me some getting used to. When I left school 30 years ago, private schools were places of cold showers, beautiful but crumbling buildings and expansive playing fields. But good exam results? We never knew, of course, because exam results were not published, but there was always a suspicion — at least among grammar-school pupils like me — that private schools had more than their fair share of duffers who

19 SEPTEMBER 2015 | SPECTATOR SCHOOLS | IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN

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gained a leg up in life through friendships made on the rugger field rather than hard study.

Yet since the Department for Education started to publish school exam results two decades ago, the results have been there for all to see. In 2014,7 19 per cent of A-level entries at independent schools were graded A*, compared with a national average for all schools of 8 per cent. It is a yawning gap which has stood out year after year, but why? It is easy to complain about ‘lack of resources’, but rather than moan about the unfair5

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ness of it all, one state school has set out to discover why children at independent schools consistently outperform their peers at state schools.

Christ the King Sixth Form College is a trio of schools in Lewisham, Brockley and Sidcup. Its own results are impressive, with pupils passing 98.4 per cent of the A-levels they took last year. When some money became available from the Mayor’s London Schools Excellence Fund, it instigated a project — involving Eton, St Paul’s, Wellington and several other state and independent schools — to see if there were lessons which it and other state schools could learn from the independent sector.

Teachers were sent to observe and take lessons in each other’s schools. Meanwhile, pupils were consulted on what they thought of teaching methods, and the results studied.

It turned out that there was no single, obvious answer, but several things did stand out, according to Sue Sing of Christ the King Sixth Form College, who has managed the study. ‘A strong subject knowledge is incredibly important,’ she says, ‘as well as being able to develop that knowledge.’ Many of the independent school teachers had degrees from top universities; a large n ­ umber had postgraduate degrees. They were thus able to stretch the most able of their pupils and engender an intellectual curiosity in their pupils.

The independent school teachers, adds Sing, t­ ended to work in large departmental teams, which gave them the ability to bounce ideas off each other. ‘In state schools you have much smaller numbers, and sometimes you have departments made up of one teacher,’ she says.

‘In some cases, a physics teacher would have to teach other subjects such as chemistry and biology.’

In the independent schools, lessons were found to crack on at a much faster pace — sometimes too fast for some pupils, who suggested they might like a bit more consolidation time. Faster progress was possible, says Sing, because independent schools were able to gather much larger cohorts of able pupils. Lessons in state schools tended to go a little more slowly, she says, partly because of the much wider range in ability of the pupils.

This will reinforce what for many people has long been obvious but which David Cameron refuses to recognise: that most state schools are hampered by being unable to select pupils according to ability. It is all very well streaming pupils, but when you get to the upper end of the secondary school age range, where there are a great number of subjects on offer and relatively few pupils doing each one, it becomes extremely difficult to create viable classes of high-achieving pupils — or, for that matter, medium- and lower-ability pupils.

Last month the Sixth Form Colleges Association revealed that some of its members had been forced to cancel courses in sciences and languages because they have been unable to create financially viable classes in those subjects. Christ the King Sixth Form College has already changed its teaching methods in response to the study. ‘What we have been able to do is to organise lessons so that we have one group of pupils across the three school sites,’ says Sing.

Other popular explanations for the differential in educational achievement between state and independ6

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The right staff: many teachers in independent schools have postgraduate degrees

ent schools seemed to play less of a role. While private schools often like to boast in their brochures about smaller class sizes, and some in the state sector are apt to use large class sizes as an excuse for underachievement, this turned out to be based on a false premise.

‘When we compared class sizes, sometimes they were smaller in the state sector,’ says Sing, ‘but not always.’

Neither did pupil behaviour seem to be much of an issue, possibly because the study included only Key Stage 4 and 5 classes, where pupils are more mature anyway.

Ever since Cameron ditched his commit­ment to selective education, a month after becoming Conservative leader in 2005, the party’s policy on schools has had a huge hole at the centre. It wants state schools ‘In some state schools the to learn from the private sector, and physics teacher also has to yet it denies them the freedom which teach chemistry and biology’ virtually all leading private schools exercise unapologetically: the right to select their pupils on merit.

David Cameron is not shy about having attended Eton, even if he is often assumed to be. He praised it as a ‘great school’ in one of his conference speeches, drawing applause from an audience which seemed almost caught out by the licence he was giving them to cheer something they had otherwise assumed they must feel guilty about. George Osborne has braved negative PR — of which there turned out to be very little — by putting his own children down for private schools. So why, when evidence suggests that teaching succeeds at a faster pace when pupils are better matched in their ability, does the government continue to confine academic selection to the private sector?

David Cameron saw dumping a commitment to new grammar schools as part of his efforts to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand. If that decision provided any help in this at all — which I doubt — that is a rather lesser issue than raising attainment in state schools to meet standards in the private sector.

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Animal magic

tack up, mount and dismount, tighten a girth and — as Hamza neatly demonstrated — master a rising trot.

A growing number of inner-city An increasing number of inner-city schools are discovering schools are finding ways to bring a bit of rus into the urban environment. If the power of reconnecting with nature, says Laura Freeman a village school has a garden, a chicken coop and half a dozen stables, why shouldn’t an inner-city academy?

There may be room for goats behind the bike sheds, chickens in a corner of the playground and beehives beyond ee-ha!’ is the triumphant shout from a rid- the basketball hoops. Gateacre School in Liverpool has a ing school in south London, where Hamza, a wildflower meadow in the Year Seven yard. teenage boy, has just completed a gymkhana At Charlton Manor Primary School in Greenwich, exercise in a faultless rising trot. He takes a pupils have helped keep bees for six years. When a nest hand off the reins and makes lassoing motions was found near the gates one summer, teachers panicked, in the air to emphasise his point. while the children were curious. Headmaster Tim Baker Hamza is wearing his school shirt and jumper (tie neat- explains he wanted to teach the children not to be fearly rolled in a cubby hole in the tack room) above track- ful. Today, the school has three hives, a wardrobe of childsuit trousers and borrowed riding boots. The sand-covered size bee suits and two after-school bee clubs, each with a riding school has been built between the tower blocks of waiting list. There have been ‘a couple of stings’, says Mr the Barrington Road estate and the railway line between Baker, but the children have learnt about ‘getting stung Brixton and Loughborough Junction. and getting up again and getting on with it’.

Lambeth is one of the poorest boroughs in London: Four years ago the school added 12 chickens — one 32 per cent of pupils qualify for free school meals, against named Nuggets— and the pupils eat their own eggs and a national average of 16.3 per cent. The borough has 103 honey at the morning breakfast club. At Charlton Manor, schools and not a lot of space to spare. Which is why, on a 67 per cent of the children come from black and minorThursday morning, Darnell, Hamza, Gary, Lucy and Kate- ity ethnic families, 47 different languages are spoken and rina, all from Landsdowne School, a special-needs second- 82 per cent of the children come from families in the botary between Brixton and Stockwell, have decamped to tom 10 per cent of income in the country. the Ebony Horse Club under the railway arches. The club Mr Baker says the bees and chickens have been invalteaches children from local state schools to muck out and uable when it comes to teaching children about kindness,

‘ Y

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caring and respect for the lives of others. In a borough carved up between four gangs, with ten knife crime incidents a month, Mr Baker hopes that the chickens will teach children about the ‘finality’ of death: ‘By steering children away from death, by protecting them, we make it harder for them to understand it.’

At Quintin Kynaston School in north London they have not just chickens, but guinea pigs and three goats, which can be seen from the top deck of Finchley Road buses. The animals were introduced by a youth ­worker who had worked with disaffected teens on ‘outward bound’ courses. Headmaster Alex Atherton says the small farm ‘adds an air of calm to a particular area of the school where the kids can be quiet without a football flying at them. It has meant a great deal to the kids. It’s a countryside element in an urban environment.’ More than 80 per cent of the school’s pupils qualify for free school meals, 95 per cent are from BME families and more than 80 per cent speak English as a foreign language. You may recognise the name Quintin Kynaston. The school was in the news for all the wrong reasons when it was revealed as the alma mater of Mohammed ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazi.

‘Lots of the kids live in estates where they have someone living in the flats above, below and either side of them,’ says Mr Atherton. The chance to nurture a smallholding, be it ever so small, is a valuable one.

For schools where teachers don’t know the first thing about keeping chickens, it is Claire Peach to the rescue.

Claire runs Hens for Hire and is evangelical: ‘All schools need chickens.’ At the beginning of term, she drives from

her home in Burton-on-Trent, where she has kept chickens in the back garden for six years, to schools in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, London and Birmingham, with chickens and an Eglu — a lightweight plastic chicken house. Schools can hire two to eight hens for a term or a school year, and Claire collects and looks after the birds in the holidays. A similar scheme for beehives is run by Hire a Hive, though with rather more health and safety forms to fill in.

Claire says that too many city chil- The headmaster hopes the dren ‘have no conception of the con- chickens will teach children nection between chicken and egg’. about the ‘finality’ of death When they see it in practice, ‘it blows their minds’. ‘A lot of children don’t have pets at home and it’s very important to teach children about care and responsibility for another creature.’

There is, of course, the odd tragedy. In October 2013, CCTV at Alma Park Primary School in Manchester caught three thugs breaking in and killing the school’s two chickens. The school’s secretary told me the children were ‘very upset’ and that Alma Park has not replaced the hens.

It seems a shame.

Standing in the stable yard in Brixton, it is clear that trotting circuits of the riding school on Rocky and Shaney is a joy for the Landsdowne pupils. Hamza giggles so much he almost loses his seat, while Darnell, who has worn a look of surly teenage discontent for much of the lesson, breaks into a wide smile when he manages a perfect dismount, both riding boots hitting the sand at exactly the same moment.

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On the march: Toby Young’s group has now opened three schools and hopes to have another three in the next two years

Cameron’s crusade (and mine) Can the Prime Minister really be serious about creating 500 new free schools by 2020? Yes he can, says Toby Young

E

ven I was taken aback when, during the election campaign, David Cameron pledged to create 500 new free schools if the Conservatives won a majority. Was he being s­ erious?

Five hundred is twice the number that opened during the last parliament and, to be frank, some of those probably shouldn’t have done. Two have closed already — the Discovery New School and the D ­ urham Free School — and a few more will probably shut before 2020. Was this just intended as another negotiating chip for use in the coalition talks in the event of a hung ­parliament?

I don’t think so. I bumped into Cameron at a party in July and the first thing he said to me was that he wanted

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Toby Young free schools_Spectator Schools Sept 2015_Spectator Supplements 210x260_

to keep the momentum of the free schools programme going. He’s in deadly earnest about it. When he retires in five years’ time, he wants to be able to point to 750 new schools as part of his legacy.

In spite of the teething problems, there’s no doubt it has been a successful programme to date. Yes, two have closed, but that’s quite a low rate of attrition considering that 255 are still open. And those that have opened are above average, according to Ofsted. A quarter of the free schools it has inspected so far are ‘Outstanding’, compared to just 10 per cent of schools overall.

Critics complain that they cost too much, are being set up in areas where they’re not needed and only cater to middle-class families. In fact, the average cost of setting up a free school is less than a quarter of the average cost of setting up a new secondary under Labour, 70 per cent of them are in areas where there’s a basic need for more places and free schools are eight times more likely to be opened in England’s most deprived areas than the least.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that free schools are an untested experiment. Supporters argue that it’s only by

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trying out new approaches that we can find out what works and bring about system-wide improvements. Of course some free schools will fail, but if the majority succeed and pass on important lessons to other schools about how to boost attainment, then the experiment is worthwhile.

The school I co-founded in 2011 — the West ­London Free School — has introduced an innovative curriculum that teaches children a core body of knowledge across a range of traditional subjects. All children, no matter what their background or ability, study Latin for the first three years and go on to do GCSEs in English, maths, the sciences, history or geography, and an ancient or modern foreign language. Will this prove too challenging for some of the lower-ability children? We won’t know until our first cohort of pupils take their GCSEs next year, but I’m optimistic.

Those free schools that have already posted exam results have done remarkably well. Last year, the London Academy of Excellence in Newham — a sixth-form that opened in 2012 — got better A-level results than Wellington College, with five pupils going on to Oxbridge.

Another great advertisement for the programme is the Ark Conway Academy — the nearest free school to my home in Acton. In spite of being in one of the most deprived areas in London, Ark Conway got the best Key Stage 1 results in England last year, beating not just every other state primary, but every fee-paying preprep as well. What’s remarkable about this is that many independent schools for this age group are academical-

ly selective, whereas Ark Conway takes all-comers. It’s unlikely that all free schools will do as well as these two, but I’m confident that their results will be good enough to justify the Prime Minister’s faith.

So will his goal of opening 500 additional free schools in this parliament be achieved? At present, there are 53 in the pipeline, so that means another 447. The officials I’ve spoken to at the Department for Education are worried that they won’t get enough high-quality appli- Those free schools that have cations to meet that target, but they already posted exam results hope to get close. If anyone reading have done remarkably well this is thinking about submitting a proposal, I’d urge them to do it, not least because they’ll be pushing at an open door. Their first port of call should be the New Schools Network (www.newschoolsnetwork.org).

My group has now opened three free schools and we hope to open three more by 2017. I’ve written a best­ seller, appeared in the West End in a one-man show and co-produced a Hollywood movie, but this is easily the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Everyone wants a legacy, not just the Prime Minister, and I can think of few more worthwhile than helping to create a chain of really good schools that transform the life chances of all their pupils.

The West London Free School Primary, which Toby Young co-founded in 2013, has just been ranked ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted.

The new A-levels: a user’s guide This September’s sixth-form students are the first to start courses involving the new A-levels.

New A-levels are not ‘modular’.

Each involves taking several exam papers, but they must be done all together, at the end of the course.

New A-levels have same A*–E pass marks, but exams will include a wider range of question types, and course work will be examined only if it is essential. Another major change is that AS exams will continue as a stand-alone qualification, but will not count towards new A-level marks.

New A-levels are arriving in stages — this September for English, economics, biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, art and design, history, sociology, business and computer science, then 2016 for subjects including geography, maths, and languages, with the final ones in 2017. Here are some of the implications for students and teachers:

• It won’t be possible to do some A-level papers at the end of lower sixth and then focus on the rest in the second year: students will need to know everything in depth for their final exams. New A-levels thus pose a much tougher revision task.

• It won’t be possible to improve a grade through re-sitting a module: the whole exam must be retaken.

• Teaching the new A-levels won’t be straightforward either. Although there is some new content in most subjects, the big challenge is how to prepare students for an all-ornothing exam on two years’ work.

Most teachers never faced such big end-of-course exams themselves.

• Advisers will be feeling their way too, as they help students choose their programme: whether, for instance, to take extra courses — a fourth subject at AS-level or the Extended Project Qualification

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(see page 31) — or to play it safe and stick to three A-levels.

• The new AS specifications have been designed to be taught alongside the first year of A-levels, and schools will be tempted to use them to encourage lowersixth students to work harder and as a prediction of A-level grades.

Will students bother to take them now that they don’t count towards the final A-level grade? Top universities have said that they don’t require students to have AS qualifications, but if a student has AS results, they must be declared.

• This year’s students may end up with courses containing a mixture of ‘new’ A-levels and ‘old’ ones.

Keeping on top of such hybrid programmes will pose yet another challenge for the class of 2015.

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the textbooks always hold the correct answers.

The much-coveted prize of the intense system is university admission, won by succeeding in the gaokao, an annual three-day exam session. Despite their hard work, one in four children still will not make the cut. The pressure has only worsened in the last few decades, since each family now has only one child on whom to pin hopes. But high expectations are hardly new.

In the past, becoming a zhuangyuan by succeeding in the imperial examinations led to positions and wealth for the scholar, and prestige for the entire family. Despite imperial China being long gone, families still see things the same way today, Are our kids tough enough? Probably not leading to a modern version of ruthless exam-oriented study.

Proponents of the system point out its contribution to social mobility and fairness. After all, unlike the British system of Ucas, gaokao does The Chinese education system is beyond intense, writes Cindy Yu. not reward points for extracurricular activities that not all can afford.

The exam results are astonishing but the students’ lives are harsh What’s more, with each single mark determining the difference between hundreds of thousands of students, uniform marking schemes with little n the early morning light, the sleepy students of focus on originality of thought mean that examiners are Hengshui Senior Secondary School are putting capable of marking objectively. on their tracksuits in the dimly lit dormitories.

But there are other ways to achieve fairness. A-level It’s 5.30 a.m. By the time lessons begin at 7.45 exams in this country also have uniform mark schemes they have already had morning exercise, an hour within the scope of an exam board, yet allow for a more of self-study and a balanced breakfast. Under a strict relaxed classroom atmosphere. In truth, the Chinese regime that you might think belonged at a correctional system is a reflection of the philosophy and culture of centre, the youngsters are getting ready for another day the country and its ruling party. For centuries, emperors in this high-achieving school in China. have utilised the rujia teachings of Confucius to emphaAs one of the country’s ‘exam factories’, Hengshui sise social hierarchy. Today, though they prefer to be has perfected the art of battery-farming children to pro- called president instead of emperor, these values are still duce exceptional results. A day in the life of the Heng- intact. After all, why should children be taught to chalshui student consists of a constant loop of work, rest, lenge authority in the classroom when they won’t need exercise, feed. In each day a student has ten 40-minute this skill in society? What’s more, with the century of lessons. After dinner comes 20 minutes of TV; usually to humiliation still a fresh wound, it is common knowledge catch up with current affairs rather than the Kardashi- in China that not everyone is a winner. ans. After three more hours of study, books are packed Of course, many children thrive in this setting. I did up at 9.50, almost 16 hours after they were first opened. — having been promoted to class monitor and all-round Any gossip or free time must be packed into a ten-min- teacher’s pet in my school in Nanjing. But my family ute gap before lights out at ten. And repeat. emigrated when I was nine, so I was spared the worst As anyone who has watched the BBC show Are Our of the process. My schooldays in London — often conKids Tough Enough? will know, the length and regi- sisting of challenging teachers so much as to make them mentation of the school day are not the only differences cry — couldn’t have been more different from those between the Chinese and the British systems. Unlike the of my friends in China. What you’ve heard about the interactive lessons valued by the British system, where Chinese system is true — it is pressurised, competitive everyone is a winner and peer comparison is discour- and intense. And the results are astonishing: the pooraged for fear of upsetting the children, the Chinese sys- est 15-year-olds in Shanghai and Hong Kong performed tem is brutal and its teachers are fierce. It isn’t the done better in maths, reading and science than the most privithing to challenge this authority, which leads to a lack leged pupils in the UK. But when the cost is so high, I’m of critical thinking in classrooms, where the teacher and glad I’m not one of them.

China’s battery-farm schools

I

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Inside the teenage brain We tend to think adolescents are more or less grown up – but they’re not, says Tony Little. Recent research shows just how differently they think

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hy on earth did you do it?’ must be one of the most frequently posed questions to teenagers. The bright, ambitious boy standing before me is perplexed: prompted by a video clip online, he has liberally sprayed aerosol on his torso and then set fire to himself. There is a pause, then, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

In matters trivial, dramatic or, in this case, painful, teenagers seem to behave in bizarre ways. It is tempting for parents to believe that once our children reach adolescence somehow the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood has been bridged. We tend to believe that we are dealing with an individual who, although perhaps physically still undergoing some development, has a mature brain; lacking a little experience perhaps, but nothing that a sound secondary education cannot provide. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

There are huge differences in the way that the adult and adolescent brains operate. Indeed, a teenager appearing

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to behave like a lunatic may just be a normal adolescent.

At times it can seem as though this evolutionary process has been designed to cause maximum frustration to parents, yet such processes have been carefully selected to ensure a successful outcome for the child — and, though it can sometimes be hard to believe, also for the parent.

In the past 15 years there has been a dramatic increase in the neurobiological evidence available to support psychological investigation. In particular, a wealth of data is being produced by magnetic resonance scans, which throw light not only upon the structural transformations in the brain but also, by monitoring blood flow in the brain, on which regions are active when particular tasks are being performed. It illustrates the connections that are being established between discrete regions of the brain.

The picture that emerges from these investigations is of a strong motor driving adolescents’ behaviour, but one which is only loosely integrated with those higher functions that allow subtle differentiation about the

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appropriate action to take. The engine is powering away, but the selection of gears and indicators and use of the brake can appear random. It is a picture complicated by the fact that each person develops in a different way — there is no model route. Neuroscientists are now making significant progress in identifying the networks involved in cognitive control and are beginning to develop strategies to highlight the social experience young people need in order to have a stable, integrated, balanced approach to situations. What is clear, however, is that it is absolutely essential to allow adolescents to make mistakes, and to allow them to do so in a safe environment which enables them to get things wrong and learn.

Adults need to learn, too. The default mode of adults is to talk at young people in the belief that imparting wisdom is at the heart of the educational process. We adults can learn much more by discussing what we do not know. Time spent listening to teenage children is time well spent. Both teacher and parent may learn many things that they did not know, and perhaps did not wish to know, but a platform for dialogue is established.

A growing awareness of the developmental process of adolescence has implications for the way we teach and this is increasingly understood. Some of the neuroscience simply underscores the received wisdom of traditional good teaching — dealing with one issue at a time with adolescent boys, for example. Rather more of the science shows how much we have to learn about the way adolescents think and react. In a decade we may well look back in wonder at our limited and inept under-

standing of this crucial and exciting period of human development.

There are also serious implications for the way we think about schooling. Throughout my time in teaching, I have often been amazed by the creativity and flexibility of the adolescent mind. It is one of the joys of being a teacher. Unshackled by adult preoccupations, the adolescent mind can turn on a sixpence and see things in different ways. Yet our conventional world of education A teenager who appears stifles this creativity. Our apparent to behave like a lunatic may reverence for deductive reasoning, just be an ordinary adolescent convergent thinking and selective retention perversely excludes divergent thinking, approximation and, importantly, guessing.

In a culture in which measuring the measurable is seen by some as the be-all and end-all of education, we are encircling our young people with limitations.

If we seek thoroughly to understand the process of adolescent development, engage with it and celebrate it, we will be better able to help our children navigate a complex world and also minimise the effects of the risktaking behaviour that is necessary in order for them to help shape their adult lives. And we would release the energy, creativity and spontaneity that is so characteristic of the adolescent mind.

Tony Little was headmaster of Eton College from 2002 until this year. His book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education is out now.

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Rough kids: boys from Rutherford School and girls from Sarah Siddons in Marylebone strike against caning, detention and uniforms, May 1972

State secrets Devotees of private schools are often pretty snooty about comprehensives, but Sophia Waugh not only successfully educated her children in state schools – she went on to teach in one

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o much of the divide between state and private schools is a matter of mere perception — the perceptions of the teachers, the parents and the children. When, years ago, I announced that I would be sending my children to state schools, my colleagues (journalists on a national newspaper) turned on me as a pack of hounds, baying their disgust at what they called my willingness to ‘experiment’ on my own children. Move over Mengele, here comes Waugh.

There are of course differences between the two types of education — but how many of them really matter? For my (yes, state-educated) children, many of the differences they saw between their various friends were nothing to do with education at all. Private school girls sported ‘messy buns’ and state school girls went for the ‘Peru Two TopKnot’. Private school children went on better holidays, were often more interested in sport, didn’t automatically help their parents clear the table.

State school children had tea, not supper, and it was often ready-made. But none of those reasons are the ones considered by parents thinking about schooling.

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Those of my friends who toyed with sending their children to state schools (in most cases it was only ­toying) came up with the same reasons not to make that leap of faith: class sizes; facilities; and something called ‘­friendship groups’. The first two reasons may be valid, but the last? One of the stupidest women I know told me she could not send her children to state school as she did not want them to meet stupid people. And yet they sat across from her every morning at breakfast.

As with all generalisations, the point is entirely missed. There are good and bad schools — and teachers — in both sectors, clever and stupid people in every class of society. So what are the real considerations when you decide where to send your child?

The first detail is of course where you live. If you live in a large city, it might well be harder to find a good state school. But then, what do we mean by ‘good’? ­ fsted, In the state sector we are driven by Ofsted. O with its eagle eye, has taken the place of God or a ­caring monarch. Let us our lives, our souls, our debts, our careful wives, our children and our sins lay on Ofsted. Real-

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ly? What exactly do they look at? And what do we as parents look at when we read the report?

Exam results are obviously pretty key. Private schools tend to outperform state schools — but they are mostly selective, weeding out the weak. How many parents really take that in when they look at the results? You need to look at the Value Added figure — which means whether the children have progressed as they should have since crossing our thresholds.

The school at which I teach is an urban comprehensive. (I didn’t just experiment with my children, I went on to have a career change and experiment with myself.)

My children’s school was rural and had lower results; their students mocked our urban ones, and said they were like private-school children. But it was just a matter of intake — we got the consultant doctors’ children, they got farmers’ children. Snobbery? No, just that more of our parents are pushy. Being in a town, we also have some very deprived children. I am convinced children from every background benefit hugely from being in a comprehensive, mixed society.

The concerned parent needs to realise that children make their own choices. If you want to work, you can; if you want to end up in an inner-city gang, or in a rural graveyard taking drugs, you can do that too. The advantage of being in a school full of people of totally different backgrounds is you can decide who you want to be — the choices are delicious and endless. The clever children of whatever background will naturally be drawn towards each other, as will the sporty, the musical and

the potentially criminal. They will find each other out wherever they are.

What often doesn’t make the news is the good achieved by so many state schools. Yes, in our cap-doffing to Ofsted we have to make sure of our results, but there is so much more we offer. State schools offer vocational training from an early age. In the 1970s you were grammar or secondary, but many comprehensives now manage to be both. You can do a building course Stop worrying about who and take history GCSE — you keep little Freddy knows, it’s your options open. If your child realall about what he knows ly isn’t academic, why on earth push them through painful exams for the sake of it?

Only 7 per cent of the population is privately educated. What are the other 93 per cent of us whining about?

We are the majority, and it is up to us to change perceptions. What has to change is not how we are educated, but how we perceive our education system. The curriculum has, thank God, been made more rigorous. Our state school children are given a very fair deal.

Actually, what has to change is how you pusillanimous parents too frightened to face the hoi polloi of your own towns think. Stop worrying about who little Freddy knows and concentrate instead on what he knows and how he thinks. Then little Freddy will have an education of which you can be proud.

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Customs of the country The joys of a rural comp, by Constance Watson

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here are some things that will always be in competition. The Capulets and the Montagues; William Brown and Hubert Lane; the NHS and Bupa. They thrive on the tension, and there is always a story to be told.

Such is the case with schooling in this country. The education system, and the battle between private and state education, receives vast amounts of media attention. We often hear about why the state system is ‘failing’ — or conversely, more recently, triumphing.

Then there’s the perennial university conundrum: last year the Department for Education predicted that privately educated applicants would be five times more likely to gain admission to Oxbridge than students from state schools.

Add to that our social attitudes. We in Britain obsess over schooling. The value that we place on education is like no other: to some, it makes perfect sense to remortgage their house so their child can go to a school that has an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Others will do anything to get their child into a fashionable school. The children, meanwhile, just muddle on through wherever they have been plonked, unaware of the dilemmas that nag away at their parents.

I went to a large comprehensive in rural Somerset.

The differences between rural state schools and their urban or private counterparts are pretty obvious. City schools have the advantage of being closer to museums and the theatre. Private schools also offer exotic holidays (sorry, ‘geography trips abroad’), and ­interesting outings and activities. Fat chance, at my rural comp, that we were going to be taken to the Big Smoke to see the latest exhibitions — but then again, we didn’t really mind. What we didn’t know about, we didn’t miss. In fact, we did once go to London on a school trip — to see a Hindu temple. It was a dispiriting outing and if anything it put us off visiting the capital. Perhaps that was the aim.

Despite the lack of museums in our part of Somerset, there were tremendous benefits to the school’s countryside location. Our playing fields were vast; we dissected offal from the local abattoir in biology; everyone knew everyone’s families, and there was a secure sense of togetherness. The amenities were inferior to those at most private schools, I expect, but we pupils enjoyed what we did have. On the whole, school facilities, catering arrangements and libraries are far more of a concern for parents than for children.

There are of course other aspects of private educa-

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Grass is greener: private or state?

tion that the state system cannot begin to compete with.

One benefit of a private education is that the class sizes tend to be smaller. Classes at comprehensive schools can consist of up to 36 pupils. Such large numbers make it difficult for the children to reap as much learning as they could if there were a higher teacher-student ratio.

The national average hovers at around 21 in the classroom for state secondary schools but, as in every school on the planet, the quality of the lessons mostly depends on the teachers. Some are hopeless at crowd control; others could lead an army. Larger classrooms and fewer facilities put rural state schools on the back foot. On the other hand, a good teacher can inspire students whether in an expensive institution or a free one.

The purpose of a good education is largely to morph children into competent, well-rounded and thoughtful adults. Research last year found that children who attend private school will, on average, earn £193,000 more in their early careers than those from state school, which is presumably reassuring for parents who have invested large sums. But where are the statistics on their ability to make good choices, on their capacity for happiness? Does a private education really mean that someone will lead the best possible life once they’ve sat their A-levels and they land in the real world?

Private education offers no guarantee that your child will become a master of the universe. State education does not mean that they will end up at the bottom of the heap. Meanwhile, the diversity of backgrounds and abilities that you find in the state system offer a far more accurate microcosm of society. And it seems to me that that is to be highly prized.

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psychology we know. The doors of the hall swing open and the stampede for desks begins. Mine is wobbly and bears the usual legends: ‘Sod Off’, and ‘So-and-So Is a Such-and-Such Obscenity’. Invigilators patrol the aisles, checking our see-through pencil cases for evidence of cheat sheets and scrutinising our photo IDs (yes, really): driving licences and passports for the golden oldies, student cards for the rest.

As the clock ticks towards zero hour, a recorded voice reminds us that this is our last chance to hand in our mobile phones, that we must write in black ink and that we are now under exam conditions. Everyone’s sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. The lad at the desk next to me has the corner of his question paper booklet already clasped in a shaking hand, ready to fling it open the second the signal is given.

And now that moment has come.

A lady in a flowery dress tells us in a severe voice: ‘You may now turn over your exam papers.’ The words swim in front of me. We must answer all the questions, around 30 of them in From black ink to bodged mnemonics, examinations are just scary. total. There is no choice. There is no coursework on this syllabus to give us Katherine Whitbourn sympathises with everyone who hates them a cushion. Hang on, didn’t somebody say that exams had got easier? The knowledge drains from my brain at the speed of vegetable water through y heart is pounding, my hands are shak- a colander. What were those mnemonics again? FLUB? ing and there’s a leaden feeling in the UDOPI? SCAART? I can’t even remember what they pit of my stomach. My pupils are dilated are, let alone what they stand for. and my digestive process has ground to The boy next to me seems to have belted through his a halt. My sympathetic nervous system is paper at breakneck speed and is now slumped in his chair, kicking in and activating its ‘fight or flight’ response. And legs outstretched, arms limp by his side. This will be his how do I know all this? Because the subject of ‘Stress, and default stance for the remainder of our ordeal, although the Body’s Reaction to It’ is one of the topics on the AQA he will occasionally lean forward to scribble a sentence AS-level psychology syllabus — an exam I’m just about to or, at one point, to bang his head three times on his desk. sit. Stress? I don’t just know about it. I’m living it.

I know exactly where he is coming from. The minutes Three decades after I last took an exam, I am stand- tick by and I feel myself falling into all the traps. I’m not ing outside the sports hall of my local sixth-form college stopping to read the question properly. I’m not underwith five other adults and several hundred 17-year-olds standing what the examiners are getting at. I’m writing preparing to submit ourselves to everything the question too much for the short answers and too little for the long setters can throw at us. I have not felt ones. Worst of all, I’m not sticking to the printed lines they this scared since Uncle Jack showed give you to write on but scribbling wildly all over the place.

Don’t be angry with your his true colours in the final series of It’s only after the exam is over that I learn this might well children if it all goes wrong. have cost me points, if the clever high-tech marking sysBreaking Bad. A voice in the queue mentions tem can’t decipher my words. Who knew?

It might not be their fault But that’s for later. For now, it’s time to stop. We must that there are only 15 marks between an A grade and a D. Worried faces put down our black pens. We must not finish our sentence do the maths. If we mess up the mighty 12-mark essay (and boy, does it feel like one). We must remain silent until question (will we remember the difference between ‘dis- our papers have been collected and we’ve been told we cuss’ and ‘describe’ and ‘evaluate’?) and miss the point can leave the hall. of a couple of two-markers, we are sunk. Our grades will Wordlessly, an invigilator points at our row and beckplunge from here to ignominy, regardless of how much ons in the manner of a police officer directing traffic

The horror of exams

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round a pranged car. We clump outside. Our gang huddles by the door, comparing notes. What did you put for that multiple choice question? C or B? Damn. I put that and crossed it out and put the other one.

The teenagers disperse to do whatever they do after exams. They seem to think it went OK. Only the adults, for whom the result doesn’t matter, are visibly anxious.

Although we have all of us held down jobs for years and most of us have qualifications in other things (our number includes a florist, a mental-health nurse, a lawyer, a history teacher and a hospital data analyst) we are all over the place when it comes to AS-level psychology. We cross the road for peach bellinis at a nearby pizza place. Gradually we return to our grown-up personas.

And so that’s it — until the dreaded results day arrives in the middle of August, by which time I have long forgotten the case studies I so painstakingly committed to memory. But there’s something I have learnt from the whole experience, and it’s this. That exams, when so much is riding on them, are really, really scary. That every parent and teacher should take one to remind themselves how nerve-racking it can be. That the pressure on our children to attain a particular grade is intense, and horrible, and relentless. And that it can all go wrong for them in the blink of an eye: a misread question here; a loss of concentration there; an unhappily altered ‘relationship status’; a missed alarm or bus.

Even the January retake safety net has vanished, a casualty of the previous government’s well-intentioned, but often brutal, reconfiguration of the exam system. I’d always felt somehow doubtful about the merits of such a one-strike-and-you’re-out decree — after all, if nobody ever had a second crack at anything, would there be any drivers on the road? Would anybody have a job? Whatever happened to that excellent maxim ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again’?

And now that I’ve walked in their shoes, albeit for only a short distance, I feel ever more sympathy for my young co-examinees. For me, that AS-level was a bit of fun. For them, it could shape their futures.

I’ve often in recent months recalled a story told to me by a now long-deceased news editor about his application for his first job on a local paper. He was asked just one question: ‘Can you ride a bike?’ These days you need to be able to walk on water to get into the media, as well as being in possession of a clutch of A-stars, firsts and relevant internships.

So parents, take a tip from me, if you will. Please, never again ask your children how it went, whether they left any gaps and whether they gave themselves enough time to go back and check their answers. I wouldn’t have wanted to answer those questions post-exam, and neither do they. And don’t be too angry with them if everything goes horribly wrong. It might, actually, be nothing to do with whether they did enough work or not.

And to those teenagers all around me that day, I really hope it went well for you. I hope you got the grades you needed and are about to start the courses you aspired to. Because if the whole thing was anything like as stressinducing for you as it was for me, you deserve it.

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London parents: Why the hysteria?

As competition for places at independent London secondary schools puts unbearable pressure on prep school children and their parents, Mayeld Head says: Don’t panic!

There is another way, and it doesn’t mean compromising your children’s education.

It is easy to see how parents get caught in the frantic race for places at the top London schools, which do indeed offer an outstanding academic provision, but we must remember that the mental and emotional wellbeing of children is just as important as their academic performance, and can profoundly inuence these results. I worry that the burden of exam pressures shouldered from such a young age is damaging our children; storing problems for individuals and society as a whole.

Of course, the pressure just to get into these schools is only the beginning. The stress children feel and the pressure to achieve the best results is unlikely to let up throughout their careers in such a school environment. While some children thrive on pressure, most don’t. Is such a choice really the best thing for your child?

A good education is not about teaching children tactics to pass exams. The best schools will teach pupils to think independently and creatively, to make mistakes and learn from them, emerging at the end of their school career with the condence to be the best that they can be, and to accept others for what they are. Excellent academic results will come as a happy consequence.

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I cannot impress on you enough that choosing a school outside of London should not and does not mean compromising on results. There are a great many schools outside the capital that sit consistently at the top of the league tables, and the majority of these are boarding schools.

Mayeld is among them. We are a highly academic school, but this doesn’t stop us placing as much emphasis on challenging each pupil outside the classroom as within it.

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Quite apart from the convenience, boarding can enrich pupils’ school experiences, helping them to develop condence and independence within a secure and mentored environment. Boarding houses these days offer plenty of home comforts, and what better for teenagers than to have friends on call from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to sleep?

Modern boarding can be a exible option, with many schools offering weekly, termly and exi options. It can allow parents more freedom within increasingly busy schedules, while removing the sometimes substantial travelling time from a child’s day can enable him or her to participate in more sport, extra-curricular activities and allow them extra study time.

Many schools – Mayeld included – are within easy reach of London, and offer transport to and from central London. Set amongst the rolling hills and wooded valleys of East Sussex, Mayeld offers not only the most glorious views but also the luxury of space: we have extensive grounds, and our pupils benet from a range of sports and outdoor activities in school and the surrounding countryside. For example, Mayeld has its own equestrian centre on site, enabling pupils to ride at lunchtimes and after school; a luxury enjoyed by very few London schoolchildren. Working hard and playing hard is easy!

The over-subscribed hothouse mentality, obsessed with league table ranking, is putting our children’s mental health at risk. There is so much more to life – an education for life – than jumping through hoops, whether it is during their time at school, or in order to get into the school in the rst place. If you want your children to be dened by more than just their exam results, it may be time to take a step back and consider the alternatives.

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should never be disproportionate to the educational advantage it brings.

In my experience, written prep — or homework, for the day-student — has a deadening effect on childhood, wrecks family relationships, wipes out the possibility of children going to the theatre on a weekday, and achieves the opposite of what it is intended to do. It puts children off three vital things: (a) working, (b) the subject and (c) their parents.

No sooner does a child arrive home in the evening, exhausted after eight hours at school, than the mother feels obliged to utter the loathed words, ‘What’s the homework this evening?’ ‘Er… there’s a science sheet to do, and a history essay on “King John: was he good or bad?”’ You look in the school bag (the smell of the shabby school bag is itself redolent of the daily sinking heart) and inevitably you can’t find the science sheet. So you have an instant row at the tea table, and have to ring another kind mother who’s having problems with her scanner.

A black cloud hovers over the evening; the child begs to have free time before starting; and before you know it, it’s 6.30. ‘Time to start.’ ‘I’m stuck.’ The science question is ‘Why ‘Have you done this in class?’ Essays often require a lot of help from parents – and Wikipedia did Aisha decide to use propanone rather than water?’ ‘Have you done this in class?’ you ask. ‘We’ve done it a bit, I think.’ So you both ­Google ‘propanone’ and try to work out what on earth it is and why Aisha Homework is meant to inculcate a love of learning in students, but might have used it. Anything to help the child get the wretched thing Ysenda Maxtone Graham thinks it’s at least as likely to do the reverse done. For 99 per cent of children, the main aim, when doing homework, is to just get it out of the way. There’s no enjoyment or enthusiasm, and e will have to look at how we are often no sense that the work is leading anywhere. doing things. Will we even be doing Half an hour later, it’s over to King John. ‘Have you prep?’ So spoke Eve Jardine-Young, got any notes?’ ‘No.’ So, with unmotivated child beside principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ you, you look up King John on BBC Bitesize, but the College, this summer, galvanised to facts it gives are too childish, so you look up King John speak out by the alarming increase in depression among on Wikipedia, and find yourself wading through section teenagers. It was brave of her even to question the need after section about various kinds of loss of French lands, for prep: in our age of competitive league tables, it seems or sometimes gains. It’s bewildering, and now it’s 7.55 heresy to suggest any kind of decrease in daily output and you haven’t cooked the supper, and you take five from students. gulps from a large glass of wine, making it even harder But she is right to question it, and I hope her tenta- to work out whether King John was good or bad. How tive question will soon be transformed into an unten- teetotal parents get through homework evenings, I can’t tative statement: prep should not be routinely given, imagine. Part of the reason why boarding-schools are and it should only be given if there’s a compelling rea- still thriving is that parents at their wits’ end can’t face son for doing so. This would get rid of the vast majority five years of homework-blackened evenings through of prep that children are set at the moment. The time the teens: £33,000 a year seems well worth the money and agony involved in ploughing through evening prep to avoid that.

The perils of prep

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19 SEPTEMBER 2015 | SPECTATOR SCHOOLS | IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN

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This domestic vignette is not the ­scenario which the teachers who set the homework have in their optimistic minds. They think, ‘Children really grow and become mature from learning to work by themselves in the evenings.’ By setting homework, they give the illusion of progress and industry and of being a hard taskmaster, which is what they think parents want.

But really it is a form of laziness, and it doesn’t make children improve at the subject. It might make the parents improve; it makes all except a tiny fraction of highly self-motivated children hate it, and produce useless essays that they are then expected to revise from. When we send our children to school, we’re saying, ‘Over to you.’ When they come home for the evening loaded with homework, the school is effectively retorting to families, ‘Back to you.’ With holiday homework (six pieces of work to do, plus a project on Nelson, is normal, and most leave it till the last week), there is barely a day of the year when a child is totally psychologically free.

Is this really preparation for adult life? When adults come home from a hard day at the office, are they expected to spend the evening doing homework? Perhaps some, are these days, but in general home is home and the office is the office, and the best work you do is in your actual place of work.

Eve Jardine-Young’s first sentence, ‘We will have to look at how we are doing things’, makes me think, ‘Yes! Teachers, please do look at the way you are doing things.

You are wonderful in many ways but you haven’t got homework right.’ Prep/homework is so deeply built into

the conventions of education that hardly any teachers dare to stand back and ask, ‘Is this really the best way of making students both good at and keen on my subject?’

Homework should surely be work that cannot properly be done in the classroom: and this is learning. Learning a page of facts; Latin vocabulary; poems by heart; a 1,000-word précis of the life of King John in which we discover whether he was in fact good or bad. A list of Homework puts children off useful French words, such as ‘même’ a) working, b) the subject and ‘rien’, which no one ever teach- and c) their parents es you. The different kinds of plate tectonic boundary. A sheet of facts about plant cells, ideally written by the teacher him- or herself, who has thought hard about what the students actually need to know.

This is a lovely thing to do in the evening (especially with the large glass of wine): sit on the sofa with your son or daughter and a page or two of facts or vocabulary thought out by the teacher, and help him or her to memorise them, inventing mnemonics as you go. Then the next day there should be a test or an essay in class, to ensure that the information has been absorbed. The essay produced in class will be totally the child’s work, rather than a slightly tipsy throwing together of Wikipedia facts plucked out by a desperate parent. It would give the teacher a true picture of how a child is doing.

And it would also alleviate the last-minute hell that is revision, because every single piece of learning-style homework is itself a step on the revision road.

Thinking inside the box There are almost half a million foreign students in the UK — at boarding schools, universities and colleges. In independent schools alone, one in five new students are from abroad. And this creates a problem that no one really thinks about. What do these children do with all their belongings? Any parent who has sent their child off to school, boarding or not, will remember the seemingly endless school uniform list. ‘Two pairs of black, lace-up, polishable shoes, plus a pair of Sunday shoes.’ (What’s wrong with using Friday shoes on a Sunday?) Trunks, bath sheets, three pairs of pyjamas… and the games kit, of course. Tennis rackets, hockey sticks, football boots, and the helpful fact that the entire school uniform changes for one short term in summer.

More and more British-based students have parents who live on the other side of the world. Matron and the internet can help with the

uniform-buying stages, but what happens when pupils are expected to move out of their dorms over the Christmas, Easter and — worst of all — long summer holidays? Some schools have basements they can use for storage, but often this space is limited. All the poor girls I was at school with whose parents were based in Hong Kong or the States had to find a kindly godparent or unknown third cousin to look after their piles of uniform until the next term. Friends at university had similar problems.

If you don’t have an amenable relative, what other options are there? Well, fortunately some enterprising individuals have come up with some solutions.

‘Storage for students’ (www. storage4students.com) has options for both university and boarding schools students, which can include collection of boxes and luggage from school or university, and storage for the summer. The School

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Trunk company (www.schooltrunk. org) goes a step further. Its ‘Silver Storage’ package simply involves collection, storage and delivery of your luggage. But with the ‘Gold Care’ option, the company will unpack your child’s luggage, check the contents against the uniform list, and then dry-clean, re-nametape, repair and re-pack everything before next term. Perhaps not so useful for university students, but perfect for international boarders — or British-based parents who’d rather not have the hassle of doing it themselves. And luggage options are improving, too: Tuck Online (www.tuckonline.com) has a wide array of trunks and tuck boxes in more exciting colours than the navy blue that was standard when I was a teen. If packing up at the end of term used to be a chore, these days there’s no need for it to be anything like as stressful.

Camilla Swift

IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN | SPECTATOR SCHOOLS | 19 SEPTEMBER 2015

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Saints preserve us Pity the poor RE teacher, writes Lauren Nicholson-Ward.

It’s richly rewarding, but a complete juggling act of a job

T

eaching is, and always has been, challenging. As society changes, so do the demands on educators. Every new generation at the chalkface likes to grumble that they have it worse than their predecessors and that their working lives are tougher than those of people in other professions. In response to this, friends working in, say, the City tend to mention the school holidays. The long summer break is a source of smugness for teachers, but the truth is that most of us love our jobs, and not just because of the glorious ‘six weeks’.

One thing that I keep coming back to, though, is the very real difficulty of teaching religious education.

Teachers of RE are expected by their colleagues to be paragons of piety and virtue — and I am not being facetious here. They often have to cajole whole year groups of teenagers through a compulsory subject that carries none of the perceived weight or importance of English and maths in many schools. They are required to leave their own, often deeply held beliefs at the classroom door and then, in some schools, present a myriad of views — some of which they find intolerable or even dangerous — as being of equal merit. They are sometimes asked to present ideas that most rational people (and I’m including religious rationalists here) abandoned many decades ago due to their being totally unreasonable.

In the course of an average week, many RE teachers will have discussed abortion, the meaning of prayer, euthanasia, whether there is a purpose to human existence, homosexuality, the role of women in religion and whether there is life after death. They will have faced impossibly difficult and profound questions about these issues. They will have listened as students make comments that are, variously, bizarre, laudable, intolerant, ignorant and moving. This is delightful, yet it is also physically, emotionally and intellectually draining.

Very little was said about how best to deal with all of this during my teacher training, and I have therefore had to find my own way of doing things. My approach is to try to see myself as the medium through which information is imparted. I present what I hope are facts and try to remain as impartial as possible. I give honest answers about my own views, but only when asked. On several occasions, well-meaning people have told me never to tell my students anything of my own particular beliefs and to always turn the question around and ask them instead. I couldn’t disagree more with this notion. The subject I teach invites complex philosophical debates, and to refuse to engage personally would be very prob-

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Suffer the children: they know they can say what they like

lematic. That approach would also seem to suggest a belief that young people are not reasonable enough to be able to form their own views without feeling compelled to side with the authority figure.

I try to communicate to my students that there are a multitude of world-views and perspectives that they may never have considered. I hope they know that they can say things that I dislike, so long as they communicate them properly. I also hope that I am not arrogant and that I don’t pretend that my personal views are objectively correct.

But it is difficult to reconcile my own philosophy with my teaching ideals. I don’t know whether there are such things as objective truths or immovable moral facts. My instinct tells me that there are some things that, to all reasonable people, are plainly wrong — discrimination, torture, genocide, apartheid and injustice, for example.

Yet not all people are reasonable, and we live in a world where some people clearly believe these things to be acceptable. I have never had a student disagree with me on this, and I can’t imagine a day when they will, but it does worry me. What would I say? I assume I would say that my view was not an objective truth, but that it ought to be. Subjective truth seems to be an unfortunate reality.

Tonight I’ll be planning my lessons. I’ll probably do some marking, too. I’ll try to build in time for these tricky issues, and attempt to predict where the discussions will go. I’ll evaluate how things went during the day and rerun debates in my head. I love my job, and the crazy, all-consuming, head-aching quandaries it throws up. It’s difficult and tiring, but it’s also fantastic.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN | SPECTATOR SCHOOLS | 19 SEPTEMBER 2015

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Tutoring: a weapon against the blob The tuition industry is growing rapidly in Britain, doing great work in improving numeracy and literacy and also aiding social mobility and aspiration. As former Marlborough headmaster Edward Gould said, the bigger the fence, the more ladders parents will use to get their children over the top.

At the expensive end of the spectrum, oligarchs prep their children to within an inch of their lives over the three months before they take the Common Entrance.

Consultants such as Bonas MacFarlane make it their business to shoehorn these children into schools the parents had never heard of 12 months before. Alternatively, there are the prep school parents who in the holidays quietly pull out their little black book of young Oxbridge students and pay them to give Johnny a boost and propel him to the top of the pile.

Less privileged parents are also looking beyond school for education. Kent’s grammar school system, for example, means it is a hotbed of 11-plus prepping. It is no surprise that they also have some of the highest scoring 11-plus results in the country. Tuition centres do not have to employ qualified teachers, although many of them do. They provide flexible timetabling, catch-up classes and a focused environment whose only role is to maximise pupils’ chances of getting high marks in exams.

With no government interference apart from childcare vouchers, the industry is left on its own. Parents know that these centres can be a secret weapon in their quest for their children to have a better life — especially when they have little choice over which school their children attend. Firstgeneration immigrants in particular

are acutely aware of the leg-up these centres provide.

Overseas, it’s no surprise that after-school tuition centres are popular in countries with the highest global numeracy such as South Korea and Japan. There they have rock-star tutors who earn millions of dollars a year by teaching to packed classrooms and live-streaming to their followers.

Michael Gove was entirely right when he referred to the UK’s education system as ‘the blob’; getting anything done is like wading through treacle. But the tuition industry knows full well that the more the blob grows, the better an alternative they become. From 11-plus to university entrance, schools do not have a monopoly on learning. Surely this is an industry we should be championing.

Edward Webster

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The complete picture

investment in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). Indeed the Royal Society has been making well-founded noisArts subjects have always been a vital part of a well-rounded education; es about the need to encourage CPD (continuing professional developconcentrating only on sciences is just short-sighted, says Muriel Gray ment) in every school, as there are currently far from enough resources to see this sensible policy through.

While concern about those skills verything in the 21st-century developed world is understandable, there is an elephant in the room. In is something the 21st-century developed fact, there’s an entire Billy Smart’s circus of them. This world believes it can monetise. Children, and has less to do with how STEM subjects can help our their education, are most certainly not exempt global competitiveness, and more to do with the need from this paradigm. for a child’s education to be well rounded.

Educationalists rarely tire of worrying about how Mention art, music and drama, and heads will nod as the next generation are falling behind in just about all manner of educationalist bollocks-speak begins to be everything compared with their equivalents in those muttered about how useful these subjects are as extrapesky developing nations. Somewhere else in the world, curricular diversions. countries are churning out prodigies, geniuses and work-­ These subjects can, according to a pamphlet handethically driven automatons who would rather kick in ed out to us at one secondary school, ‘enhance cultural their own heads than kick a football if it meant missing connectivity amongst a diverse pupil population, and an hour of maths tuition. expand self-expression within the space of creative, indiNaturally this is a concern when we rely on the vidual-driven initiative.’ The question ‘Will my child also next generation to invent, discover, build and deliver learn to draw a horse and play the piano?’ was dismissed the things that will make us rich, secure and power- — rightly, on that particular occasion — as facetiousness. ful. Hence, when faced with the opposite — a possible But the depressing reality is that the arts have been future nation of charmless, slack-jawed, texting, incuri- steadily shifted from being non-negotiable, essential ous youths who think Tennyson is a hiphop artist, and components of the school curriculum to being regarded prime numbers a shop — we return increasingly to the more as hobbies and diversions. We ignore this demo‘Something Must Be Done’ refrain. tion at our peril. The arts were once cornerstones of Inevitably this means ­a nother debate about the learning; the ability to act, read music, play an instruimportance of ramping up state and private sector ment, sing communally, dance, was prized. These skills

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linked the physical with the philosophical, and broadened pupils’ horizons.

This is not to be nostalgic for some golden age of ‘The Muse’. (My memories of music lessons are mostly of the furious tweed-skirted teacher rapping her ruler on the desk until the class sang ‘Hearts of Oak Are Our Ships’ roughly in time.) But by removing this key component of learning, I do believe we are selling our children short.

The education revolution that moved from learning by rote and enforcing academic discipline to a culture of making learning ‘fun’ ironically contributed to this downgrading of the arts to the status of an after-school club. Meanwhile, cultural sensitivities mean specialist institutions have been permitted to remove art, music, drama and movement for religious reasons. This decision is completely outrageous in a modern society where all British children, regardless of their home life, should have entirely equal opportunities at school.

The benefits of the arts in learning are not subjective.

Studies have proved conclusively that teaching children to read music and play an instrument in their early years can increase their IQ. Hands-on participation in art and design is essential to building an understanding of the visual world. Drama makes sense of a complex emotional world, and interpretive movement can be considerably more beneficial than many sports in promoting body awareness, fitness, balance and a sense of beauty.

As usual, this is a class problem. Children in private schools enjoy these essential developmental subjects in abundance. It’s in state schools, where box-ticking

attainment is the primary goal, that they slip into oblivion. Lack of resources is blamed: no teachers in the key subjects, no musical instruments, no space for art studios, no dance or drama provision. But in truth the real driving force is a core government policy that sees only STEM subjects as being worthwhile to the economy in the future.

The short-sightedness of such an attitude is staggering. To regard the arts as non-academic diversions is preposterous. In our post-industrial nation, the rise of creative industries is becoming increasingly key to our To possess a creative economic growth and our interna- understanding – that is tional profile. what makes a person whole There should be no separation between ‘hard’ subjects like science and technology and the ‘soft’ ones of the arts. They have been inextricably linked from Leonardo da Vinci through the Enlightenment to the revolution in art and science that began in the 1960s, whose philosophy was based on the reinvention of both.

Deciding to prise them apart now — in search of some technological utopia where we lead the world again instead of playing catch-up with countries where the pupils are whacked on the knuckles for getting their sums wrong — is a decision we will come to regret.

A child needs to be able to interpret the world before they can start to contribute to it. To possess a creative understanding — that is what makes a person whole.

Without a grounding in the arts, pieces will be missing.

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The EPQ is a way for pupils to demonstrate their enthusiasm and capacity to focus

Do your own thing The EPQ, a long project for sixth-formers on a subject they choose, is increasingly popular, says Stuart Dalley

Since its launch in September 2008, the Extended P ­ roject Qualification (EPQ) has proved enormously p ­ opular across the country. While all types of school have entered candidates, independent schools have been particularly enthusiastic. In its first year, just 27 independent schools offered this course of study — which is a sort of mini-thesis on a subject of the pupil’s choice — and they entered only 125 candidates. By last summer, 242 independent schools were offering it, with 2,423 of their pupils submitting work. It was therefore no surprise to read Barnaby Lenon, chairman of the Independent Schools Council and former headmaster of Harrow, extolling its virtues in a recent Daily Telegraph article; he described an EPQ in subjects such as medicine or architecture as a ‘formida19 SEPTEMBER 2015 | SPECTATOR SCHOOLS | IN ASSOCIATION WITH BREWIN DOLPHIN

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ble demonstration’ of pupils’ enthusiasm for their subject when it comes to university applications.

But the EPQ shouldn’t be seen as the preserve of fiercely competitive independent schools. Entries from other sectors have also risen year on year, and the statistics point to a notable expansion of interest from city academies and free schools, which saw a rise from just 213 entries in 2010 to 12,356 this year. This rise is repeated in grammar schools and secondary comprehensives, although here the increase isn’t as dramatic.

So what does an EPQ entail? It is an extended piece of writing which is honed and researched by the student and at the end presented by them to a gathered audience. It presents pupils, often in Year 12, with the chance to pursue a topic of study which is entirely of their own choosing and unconstrained by an exam syllabus.

With its emphasis on independent research and selfmotivation, the EPQ is attracting many of the brightest and the best. St Paul’s Boys School says it allows ‘pupils to work independently, pursue their intellectual passions in depth and develop a wide range of intellectual skills’.

Of course, many independent schools already offer a range of enriching activities, and this extra qualification adds to the burden of work, when it is difficult enough to balance the demands of three or four A-levels alone. So why are schools so keen to push the EPQ? The key factor of course is that it impresses leading universities. Cambridge University’s website states that it welcomes the introduction of the Extended Project and ‘would encourage you to undertake one as it will help you develop independent study and research skills and ease the transition from school/college to higher education’. This is backed up by a research report from the 1994 group of universities, which says: ‘A large majority of departmental admissions tutors expect to recognise it as a positive attribute when selecting among applicants with similar levels of achievement (both high-fliers and those at the borderline).’ Amid fierce competition for university places, the EPQ is one way in which pupils can make themselves stand out. It is worth Ucas points, can be referenced in a Ucas statement, and can form the basis for questions at a university interview. This is all positive when it comes to securing a coveted place.

However, for many, the motivation is less calculated.

The EPQ allows pupils to do something totally different, and gives them an opportunity to explore new fields of study. Even EPQs connected to a mainstream subject open up a wealth of choice beyond the confines of a fixed exam syllabus. For pupils wishing to study medicine, engineering or architecture, an EPQ gives them the chance to prove their enthusiasm for these subjects. In some cases, pupils may choose not to write their EPQ report, but instead to compose or perform a piece of music or produce a piece of art. The options are endless.

With exam reform at both GCSE and A-level now in progress, and schools under continued pressure not only to maintain and improve exam results, but also to equip their pupils with that little extra ‘something’ when it comes to university applications, I wouldn’t expect to see interest in the EPQ wane anytime soon. On the contrary, it may come to be a key part of the sixth-form pupil’s academic and personal profile.

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guage) awareness, slow information processing, issues with working and long-term memory, and sometimes other learning difficulties.

So how does an understandably anxious parent help? If you suspect your child has dyslexia, the first port of call is your child’s class teacher.

A collaborative relationship with school is fundamental: ask whether they agree that there is a problem.

If they do, ask what support your child is receiving in school and how best you can help with homework.

The last thing a child who struggles with words and numbers wants is to come home exhausted and frustrated to find that mummy has morphed into a teacher, Mrs McGhastly, who launches into an overenthusiastic rigmarole of practising sounds, times tables and so on. Failure to engage stresses everyone, including the hamster.

Crucially, to help your child you will need patience. In spades. Learning is anything but a linear progression and for primary-school children with reading difficulties, concepts and skills may need to be continuIt’s a controversial subject – but you shouldn’t let that stop you ously revisited for them to become embedded and automatic. Develfrom getting the help your child needs, says Mary Anne Hansell op a routine. High stress levels are not the sole domain of the parent — a child will often suppress his or her frustration and sense of failhe term ‘dyslexia’ has always been emotive, ure during the school day, which may lead to emotional and it remains so. Julian Elliott and Elena outbursts at home. Homework will be achieved more Grigorenko’s book The Dyslexia Debate successfully after a period of ‘decompression’, which (2014) has done nothing to dispel the con- may include some quiet time and a spot of fuel. troversy. In a recent paper, ‘Why ChilDyslexic children often perform best when they can dren Fail To Read’, Sir Jim Rose, an apologist for dys- absorb information through more than one sense, along lexia, said, ‘Dyslexia continues to come under fire as a the lines of the Chinese proverb, ‘I hear and I forget, I myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an see and I remember, I do and I understand.’ It is encourexpensive invention to ease the pain of largely, but not aging for the child to understand that how they learn is only, middle-class parents who cannot bear to have their just as important as what they learn. Boredom is often child thought of as incapable of learning to read for rea- the biggest hurdle when it comes to reading. There is sons of low intelligence, idleness, or both.’ Rose empha- always a danger that a book that is within the reading sises that both environmental and genetic factors influ- capability of a dyslexic child is dull or age-inapproprience reading ability and finishes by saying, ‘Dyslexia is ate. Thus some careful investigation and consideration is not yet well enough understood as an extreme reading worth the effort. The publishers Barrington Stoke now disorder for which we have precise solutions,’ which isn’t have an excellent range of high-interest books in an a particularly reassuring conclusion. Whatever the cause, easy-to-read format for different levels of reading abilearly identification of pupils who are struggling to learn ity. Audio books can usefully increase a child’s receptive to read and write remains an obvious ambition. and expressive language skills.

Dyslexia falls under the umbrella term of SpecifGetting your child to write may be one of the hardest ic Learning Difficulties (SpLD). A helpful and up-to- things you have to do. Do not expect too much too soon. date overview of SpLD, including dyslexia, is provided Choose a topic that interests your child. Help to generby the British Dyslexia Association. Put briefly, chil- ate ideas. Teach your child to check their own work, paydren with a dyslexic profile experience difficulties with ing attention to any specific weak areas. If handwriting is reading, spelling and writing. Characteristics include poor, and your child cannot touch-type, scribe for them impaired phonological (the sounds that make up lan- or explore speech-to-text software.

Lessons in dyslexia

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The purpose of homework is to consolidate. Minimise potential misunderstandings over homework by asking that tasks be emailed home or printed out and stuck into your child’s homework diary. Think about where homework should take place. Starting at a clear, distraction-free table may also prove helpful for those who are prone to scatter their books. Divide homework tasks into manageable chunks. Read instructions aloud and practise a couple of examples. Make sure there are breaks between tasks. Use a countdown timer. Be wellorganised — dyslexic children tend to find organising their lives challenging. And simplify life by ensuring that everything needed for the next school day is packed up the night before and placed by the front door.

Exams are every parent’s — and every child’s — bête noire. Dyslexic children simply cannot cram for exams and need to start revising much earlier than other children. To chunk learning into small bite-sized bits is just one ploy. It can be useful to ask a child to reflect on what works for them and what doesn’t, and why.

So what other help is out there for parents? Local Dyslexia Associations run by volunteers can be immensely helpful in providing support and encouragement. Another excellent resource is the Parent Champions website, with useful tips for reading, spelling and memory training.

There is also help available in the form of independent specialist teachers, who can be found either through the national index of tutors held by Patoss, or through the British Dyslexia Association.

Since the introduction of the Children and Families Act 2014 and the new Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice (SEND), class and subject teachers at school, supported by their school’s SEN coordinator, are responsible for regular progress assessments, and support should follow. Parents should be fully involved in and informed about any special educational provision deemed necessary, including the need for specialised evaluation by, for example, an edu- The last thing a child who cational psychologist, or speech and struggles wants is for mum to language therapist. morph into a ghastly teacher Tremendous help is also available from ‘assistive technology’.

Learning to touch-type is one of the most useful skills a child with dyslexia can acquire. Touch-type Read and Spell is a tried and tested method and touch-typing centres, which often run intensive courses during school holidays, may provide convenient alternatives. There is also a wide range of apps for dyslexia — just search online you will find a wide choice, or the BDA have also put together their own list.

Finally, the Council for the Registration of Schools Teaching Dyslexic pupils (CReSTeD) maintains a register of the many schools and establishments that cater for children with learning difficulties. Initially confined to independent schools, CReSTeD has extended its work into the maintained school sector. CReSTeD also provide details of teaching centres where children can find additional support outside their day-to-day schooling.

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Boys will be boys, girls will be girls, snakes will be snakes: Benenden, left, and Papplewick

School portraits

drive from Lyme Regis — means that the school also offers all the benefits of a rural education (as highlighted

by Constance Watson on page 18).

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Snapshots of four notable schools,

by Camilla Swift and Katy Balls

North Berwick High School Edinburgh may boast

Benenden Founded in 1923, Benenden school in Kent

began life as one of many all-girls boarding schools. But as other similar schools gradually introduced day pupils, Benenden stuck to its guns, and is now the only allboarding girls’ school in the country. It argues that the boarding ethos means that it can ‘treat education as a seven-day experience’, allowing girls to learn both inside and outside the classroom. As well as achieving consistent exam results, with 61 per cent of this year’s A-levels awarded an A* or A, Benenden offers a wide range of extracurricular activities, ranging from EPQ (see page 31) to lacrosse, a chamber choir and a model UN. In October the school will also launch its own CCF (combined cadet force) unit — only the third girls’ school in the country to do so. If you’re after an all-round education for your daughter — particularly if you live overseas – Benenden should be on your list.

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Colyton Grammar School Kent is famous for its grammar schools, but Devon has Colyton Grammar, a good bet for anyone looking for a mixed state school that delivers good grades and a well-rounded education.

Having spent 465 years as a grammar school, since 2011 it has been an academy. In 2014 it was the second-highest placed state school in the Telegraph’s A-level league tables, and came in fourth place overall. This year, 84.5 per cent of their results were A*, A or B. But as well as good exam results, the schools also boasts excellent facilities including an arts centre, a sports centre and an eco-woodland reserve. Not only that, but its location in the village of Colyford, in East Devon — a ten-minute 34

FourPortraits schools_Spectator 2015_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ of Schools four Sept notable schools

some of Scotland’s most prestigious private schools including Fettes and St George’s, but just down the road from the capital lies one of the country’s top state schools. Founded in 1893, North Berwick High School is a mixed state senior school set in the heart of East Lothian. The school regularly ranks in the top 20 of Scotland’s best state schools when it comes to academic excellence and this year new government statistics show it was the best in the county for numbers of Highers achieved per pupil. Sat between an extinct volcano and the sea, the picturesque school also boasts facilities to rival the capital’s private schools, with playing fields, an all-­weather artificial pitch and an expansive music department.

What’s more pupils have the chance to play against their Edinburgh peers in the school sports leagues.

KB

Papplewick School Many all-boys prep schools have

given in and started taking girls — but Papplewick isn’t one of them. Set in 15 acres of land just opposite Ascot racecourse, this independent school for boys aged six to 13, which offers day, weekly and full-boarding options, has the benefit of being just close enough to London without being in London. Unsurprisingly for a school full of little boys, the main focus is on keeping them occupied and busy (or as they put it, ‘working off their energy’). As well as all the normal sports (their rugby, football and cricket teams are all top notch) they also offer scuba diving, polo, real tennis, clay pigeon shooting, golf… For the less sporty, there is photography, cookery, chess, and the ever-popular snake club (see above), The academics are excellent too; this year pupils have won scholarships to Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Wellington. But the most-coveted award — the KnatchbullHugessen prize — goes to the boy who has shown the ‘greatest enthusiasm for life, contribution to the community, and above all kindness to others’.

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