On the face of it it’s hard to think of a more unlikely pair of political twins than Tony Blair and the woman who is regarded as a certainty to be our next prime minister, Liz Truss. But they have at least one thing in common. When Blair was asked what his priority in government would be he replied: “Education, education, education”. When Truss was asked a similar question she replied that she wants to be “the education prime minister”. Something else they share is that they were both deeply unhappy with the state of education as they found it. But that’s where their similarities end. Their recipes for improving education for our children could scarcely be more different. Whose side are you on?
Both Blair and Truss would agree on one fundamental: too many of our children are being served badly by the system. And it’s not only the experts saying that. It’s the children themselves. A survey of 10,000 young people in ten countries, published this week by the charity Theirworld, found that almost half of the UK students questioned believed they ended their education without the skills they needed to compete for decent jobs in today's world. What most frustrated them was the "outdated, old-fashioned curriculum". That bleak judgement was shared by fewer students in much poorer countries including Nicaragua and Nigeria when they were asked the same question. As for British parents, more than 65 per cent of those who were polled by You Gov said the current system put too much emphasis on exams and did not prepare pupils for life. About a third of children do badly at GCSEs. Critics of the system say the effect is that many of those children see themselves as failures.
The Office for National Statistics published more worrying data in a report this week. It said that children who had grown up in poverty went on to earn a fifth less than those whose parents could afford to send them to private schools. The average salary at the age of 30 for those who had qualified for free school meals was £18,847. For those who had gone to private schools it was £40,317.
The Blair government had been in power for only a year when it passed the 'School Standards and Framework Act' which made it illegal to open any new grammar schools. It also made it possible to close down existing grammars by allowing people who lived in their catchment areas to vote in a ballot to close them down if they so wished. Truss, by contrast, wants to see more grammars and more of the brightest children from state schools getting into the top universities. She says Oxford and Cambridge would have to grant an interview to every sixth former with three A*s at A-level. And she has also promised to replace failing academies with a new wave of free schools and improve maths and literacy standards.
Her critics say her proposals are wrong-headed and unworkable. Those critics include Alice Thomson of The Times, who calls them “as elitist as Rishi Sunak's £450 Prada shoes.” She points out that only 5 per cent of state-funded children go to grammar schools and “even with the blessing of No 10 it is unlikely that more than a handful of new schools will open because there just isn't the cash for them.” As Thomson points out, the number of students who manage three A*s at A-level is tiny: fewer than one per cent of those sitting the exams in 2019. That adds up to a total of 3,000 children. And only 1.18 per cent of the sixth formers applying to higher education go to Oxford or Cambridge.
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