Education Secretary Nicky Morgan hasn't yet explained why she thinks Academies are the answer to failing schools. In fact, of course, they are an ideological expedient with very little educational thinking behind them. the ones we have vary hugely in type, quality and success.
The reason this is important is because there is a crisis in education and the political fixes so far designed aren't dealing with it. The Sutton Trust have produced their report "Missing Talent" - the high achievers (top 10%) at primary school who, after five years of secondary education, rank outside the top 25% of pupils in achievement terms. That is some 7,000 pupils each year according to the Sutton Trust, and the largest proportion of these are white, working class boys.
There is more to mull on and consider in this important report, and the New Statesman gives an early commentary. There are no easy or pat solutions, but in an age which has so vigorously set itself against formal academic selection, it is worth considering the words of the left-wing writer Iris Murdoch, in her contribution to the 1975 Black Papers:
Selection must and will take place in education and those who banish rational methods of selection are simply favouring irrational and accidental ones. The children who will be lost forever are the poor clever children with an illiterate background….Why should socialist policy, of all things, be so grossly unjust to the under-privileged clever child, avid to learn, able to learn, and under non-selective education likely to pass in relaxed idle boredom those precious years when strenuous learning is a joy and the whole intellectual and moral future of the human being is at stake?
There's an open goal still waiting to be scored in by the party with some credible answers to raising educational attainment amongst bright pupils in secondary schools.
The reason this is important is because there is a crisis in education and the political fixes so far designed aren't dealing with it. The Sutton Trust have produced their report "Missing Talent" - the high achievers (top 10%) at primary school who, after five years of secondary education, rank outside the top 25% of pupils in achievement terms. That is some 7,000 pupils each year according to the Sutton Trust, and the largest proportion of these are white, working class boys.
There is more to mull on and consider in this important report, and the New Statesman gives an early commentary. There are no easy or pat solutions, but in an age which has so vigorously set itself against formal academic selection, it is worth considering the words of the left-wing writer Iris Murdoch, in her contribution to the 1975 Black Papers:
Selection must and will take place in education and those who banish rational methods of selection are simply favouring irrational and accidental ones. The children who will be lost forever are the poor clever children with an illiterate background….Why should socialist policy, of all things, be so grossly unjust to the under-privileged clever child, avid to learn, able to learn, and under non-selective education likely to pass in relaxed idle boredom those precious years when strenuous learning is a joy and the whole intellectual and moral future of the human being is at stake?
There's an open goal still waiting to be scored in by the party with some credible answers to raising educational attainment amongst bright pupils in secondary schools.
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