In an earlier post, I mentioned my views on top-up fees. As well as attracting a representative of the Socialist Workers Students Society, I also attracted a comment from Simon, who shows he can argue clearly and logically without recourse to banal rhetoric. I'm sorry Sarah but I'm just a bit long in the tooth been there done it still have the t-shirts. Debate is not forwarded by parroting the slogan-of-the-week from Socialist Worker.
However, and Simon please don't take this as a personal attack, what struck me was that the comment contained one or two sweeping assumptions. I do agree that the bar has been raised in terms of entry to jobs, and that a degree is necessary where A Levels used to be sufficient.
But I am a socialist. This means many different things to many different people, but to me it's about recognising that as individuals we prosper when society prospers, and that society cannot prosper when opportunity and decency is denied to members of our society.
I'm afraid I don't live in a society where everybody is ready, willing and able to go to University, if only the funding package were right. I live in a society where one in ten adults is reported to be functionally illiterate; and where children arrive at Primary School unable to eat with a knife and fork, or conduct a simple conversation. Nearly half of sixteen year olds will not get five A*-C at GCSEs. Many are so alienated form the education system that they won't even take them. Many are dropping out of school at fifteen or younger.
Where I live we have gangs of teenagers whose sole raison d'etre is getting their puff and hanging around street corners being intimidating (and, just for the record, skunk doesn't induce feelings of laidbackness in addicts ). There are areas elsewhere where the current generation of teenagers is the third for whom permanent unemployment is the norm.
The reason I believe so passionately in pre-school and Early Years education is not so that the academic will be even better educated and socialised (although it would be a desirable by-product). I have a socialist Utopian dream whereby every child starts nursery at 3 and continues in an Early Years centre until seven, when they will start formal school. I don't believe in the hot-housing of 4-year olds. until the age of 7 they should be learning by play, by discovery, in an environment with a high adult-child ratio. Why is it that the typical adult-child ratio in Reception 1:30 or at best 1:15, yet a University tutorial group may only comprise six students?
My socialist utopian dream seems so simple, and yet I know it is so difficult. Give every child a chance between 3 and 7, and you have a chance of a society where almost every young person and adult feels that they have a role and a purpose. Where they are not hopelessly alienated from the system before they reach double figures. Not just in order to go to a third-rate University to do a meaningless subject, but actually to play a part in society. (The last I heard there were 100,000 vacancies for skilled workers in building and allied trades).
A child that is alienated at 7 is unlikely to opt into the system later on. When I was Chair of Governors I had to exclude a seven year old for violence, from a school that normally welcomed children excluded from elsewhere. It is a thoroughly horrible thing to do, a heart-sinking and eye-opening moment. You try to rationalise that, by being excluded, the child will get special attention, home tuition or a place in a Pupil Referral Unit. But you know with the LEA resources stretched to breaking point it would not be anything remotely like an education. That was eight years ago. I don't know what happened to the child. But I can guess. The inevitable trajectory must be to illiteracy, drugs and criminality.
Conversely I was involved in a conversation with the steel pan teacher. Somebody enquired after a couple of former pupils, who, I gathered, came from a dysfunctional background and were out-of-control. By then, in their late teens, the girl was playing in a top London steel band, the boy was a useful boxer on the local amateur circuit. A conversation with my cousin's husband the other day, who for many years gave up his own time to coach the school teams, and now teaches in a school where every child is a member of an orchestra - they actually have year orchestras - in a state school - reinforces the importance of extra-curricular activities.
Yes, Higher Education is desirable and should be defended , but if I ran the country I would invest in quality education for under 7s, and turn the arts and sport from cindrella to core subjects. The economy suffers if we don't have a highly skilled elite, but the economy suffers when so many resources are needed to clean up failure
Over a period of nine months I audited many schools in an Inner London Borough. One secondary school contained teenage boys that were physically intimidating, and eyed me with suspicion and hostility. I'm sure they would have robbed me if there hadn't been two burly security guards permanently stationed at the front gate (I hovered close to them when I took my smoke break). Another secondary school had taken a zero tolerance approach to violent behaviour, and was showing a record-breaking recovery from Special Measures. This ensured that the majority of children got a decent education; the flipside was that it left the irredeemable to pursue a murderous path through their neighbourhood
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