This is the moment. The teacher with the Bleeper has legs like an ostrich and takes the stairs three at a time. Within 30 seconds, he has reached the classroom which has called for help and there, he wades into the confusion. The trouble is Terence.
This is the secret that everyone knows: the children of poor families are far less likely to do well in school than those whose parents are affluent. For the last ten years, this has been almost buried in denial. “Poverty is no excuse,” according to the Department for Education. Neverthless, it is the key. As everyone knows.
The greatest dream of all good experts is to find a government who will listen and turn their research into reality. Some succeed. Peter Mortimore did. But the greatest frustration for any expert is to have found a government who finally listened – and ended up misunderstanding.
Once upon a time, in the late 1960s, well-meaning politicians accepted the
most progressive idea in the history of British education. They decided to
establish a national network of new schools which would deal equally with
all children, providing a free secondary education for all students of all
backgrounds, without favour of class or ability. They called these new
schools ‘comprehensive’.
At its root, the idea of a comprehensive school rests on the possibility of using bright middle class children as an asset for the educational system, to be distributed like fertiliser to help the poorer children grow. But does it work?
Lord Baker is laughing . He is recalling the dark suspicions he aroused when he ran the department of education in the late 1980s. He dismissed them at the time as the whining of an establishment that couldn’t cope with change and he went ahead and rewrote the rulebook for Britain’s schools – standard assessment tasks, league tables, national curriculum, parental choice, local management of schools and, later, Ofsted.
They really don’ t know . The world of education is rather like the world of the Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena. A few years ago, the magazine totted up the number of reports which they had been sent from around the world that year describing bizarre and inexplicable events. They compared the total to the number of similar reports which they had received the previous year involving various freaks and flying saucers and concluded that the world had become 3.5% weirder.
There is a small boy in the playground, probably about eight years old, and he is crying while his young mother stands and looks away. In a flat voice, she says “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. “Shut your mouth”. He cries on. She turns and leans into his face. “Shut your mouth or I’ll slap you.” He shuts his mouth and starts to cry through his nose instead, and his mother looks away again.
The little thief sits on the old park bench with his chin on his chest and his feet in the dust, wrapping a long blade of grass around the knuckles of his hand and trying to explain his dream. Do you know the thief’s dream? He wants to go to college.
