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Tag Archives: comprehensive education
Time for a new Great Education Reform Act
27 years ago, Kenneth Baker’s 1988 Education Reform Act changed the direction of travel of English education. It introduced an element of school choice and Local Management of Schools, established more autonomous City Technology Colleges and Grant Maintained Schools as … Continue reading
Resisting selection
Thanks to the prime minister, it seems that educational selection is back on the agenda again. The grammar school issue in Kent and elsewhere is one aspect of the debate but it’s worth remembering that the segregation of learners by ‘aptitude’, ‘potential’, test … Continue reading
Posted in Education policy, Politics
Tagged Clyde Chitty, comprehensive education, David Cameron, Education, Equality, grammar schools, Jane Addams, selection
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Demonstrating high achievement in comprehensive settings
Comprehensive schools and colleges can face a challenge when trying to show how well their highest achieving students do and how many of them there are. They can suffer from ‘bog standard’ syndrome and the assumption that all their students … Continue reading
Posted in Education, NewVIc
Tagged A levels, comprehensive education, Education, Newham Sixth Form College, NewVIc, selection
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Inspectors make the case for comprehensive colleges
A report by the national education inspectorate makes a strong case for comprehensive sixth form colleges rather than vocational colleges. The case is based on evidence that comprehensive colleges are more socially mixed and achieve better results. The report has … Continue reading
People’s College and Top Academy: which is best?
Imagine two colleges, let’s call them People’s College and Top Academy. We want to compare them, so we turn to the national performance tables which tell us that the average A-level point score for People’s College is 200 (C-) compared … Continue reading
Learning to love liberal education
Talk given at the The Future of Liberal Arts conference at King’s College London on 14th October 2014. A video of this talk is available here: http://www.newvic.ac.uk/futureliberalarts/ (select ‘Liberal Arts in Schools’ starting at 3:33) I want to start by saying that … Continue reading
The oath and the compass
It sounds like the title of a medieval thriller; the brotherhood of educators send their top monks out to roam the world having sworn to serve learning and they solve all sorts of intractable problems with the help of a … Continue reading
How can we reduce educational inequality?
Meeting organised by “working towards a national campaign for education” at the Mechanics Institute, Manchester on 23rd September 2014 during the Labour Party conference. Many thanks to Sarah Williams for her work in organising and promoting this meeting. Speakers: David … Continue reading
Finding Labour’s Education Mojo
Less than a year before the general election, has the Labour Party developed winning education policies? Tristram Hunt’s latest speech ‘The Choice in Education’ was a bit like a pre-tour band rehearsal. A range of material was tried out, some … Continue reading
Post-16: education’s wild frontier
Sixth form education in England has become the wild frontier for selection and marketisation with a plethora of new providers, whether 11-18 academies or 16-18 free schools trying to outdo each other in setting ever more exclusive entry requirements and competing … Continue reading
Labour’s vocational vision: two-nation thinking wrapped in one-nation talk?
The Labour party wants to position itself as the party of skills and vocational education. Party leader Ed Miliband and shadow minister Liam Byrne have both made recent major speeches on this issue. Clearly, any party standing on a ‘one … Continue reading
Market madness #1 Oversubscribed?
A series of short posts about the marketisation of public education: #1 Oversubscribed? “6 applicants for every place”…”heavily oversubscribed”. These sorts of claims are often used to establish how popular, and by implication successful, schools and colleges are. They should … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Education policy
Tagged Colleges, competition, comprehensive education, marketisation, oversubsribed, selection
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A tale of two boroughs
I want to start by telling the story of 16-18 education in two London boroughs; a story which illustrates some of the things I think we should be concerned about. Borough A was an economically disadvantaged area where most secondary schools … Continue reading
The comprehensive college
Why do we persist in describing our sixth form college as comprehensive when the term has been unfashionable for some time and there is no requirement to have an inclusive admissions policy? We’re proud to be comprehensive and, for us, … Continue reading
Unashamedly egalitarian
If you had the choice before birth of the type of society to be born into but didn’t know your status in advance, what type of society would you choose? No doubt most of us would choose a more egalitarian … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Education policy
Tagged comprehensive education, Education, Equality, marketisation, Social mobility
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Eddie Playfair 