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Toby Young: New state boarding school in West Sussex is opposed by unholy alliance of Trots and Tories, but deserves our support

Published on May 16, 2013,

Toby Young says the plans for a new state boarding school in West Sussex has resulted in an unholy alliance of opponents from the left and the right but, based on the success headmaster Greg Martin has achieved so far with disadvantaged primary school pupils, he thinks the school deserves a chance. This is an extract from the Telegraph…

He [Greg Martin - headmaster of Durand Academy] already runs a very successful primary school in Lambeth – last year, 90 per cent of the pupils attained level 4 or above in English and maths, compared to a national average of 79 per cent. That’s particularly impressive when you consider that 58.9 per cent of the pupils are on free school meals. He’s now hoping to duplicate these results at secondary level, but in an innovative and unusual way. Instead of simply opening a secondary academy in Lambeth, he’s hoping to set up a state boarding school in West Sussex that won’t cost parents a penny. He believes that this is an excellent way of giving inner-city children from poor backgrounds the best possible start in life. (He sets out his argument in detail here.) (more…)

 

Gove v Rosen: grammar wars – the shoot off

Published on May 11, 2013,

Earlier this week in the Guardian Michael Rosen had a pop a Michael Gove, accusing him of creating tests that will do nothing to help children, but everything to fail them. In it, he criticised the idea that grammar can be either right or wrong. Michael Gove hit back, saying the Guardian “has a style guide, a team of trained subeditors and a revise subeditor as well as a night editor and a backbench of assistant night editors to ensure that what appears under his – and everyone else’s – byline is correct English”. Michael Rosen has responded, again in the Guardian. Here are some extracts from the exchanges…

From, to set the scene, this is from Michael Rosen’s original article: (more…)

 

‘Illiterate’ letter wins anti-Gove professors an award for bad grammar

Published on May 4, 2013,

A “simply illiterate” letter penned by 100 academics attacking Michael Gove’s planned changes to the primary school curriculum has been named the inaugural winner of the Idler Academy’s Bad Grammar awards, a new prize established to “spread public knowledge of good grammar”. This is from the Guardian…

The professors, from universities including Nottingham Trent, Leeds Metropolitan, Oxford and Bristol, published their letter in national newspapers in March, warning of the dangers of Gove’s national curriculum proposal. But according to the judges of the first Bad Grammar awards, authors Toby Young, Harry Mount and Nevile Gwynne, they made the mistake of using adjectives as adverbs and mixing singulars with plurals, rendering it “something of a struggle” to understand parts of the letter. (more…)

 

Toby Young: Liz Truss’s call for more formal, French-style nursery education is spot on

Published on April 23, 2013,

Writing on his blog in the Telegraph, Toby Young suggests the reaction on Twitter to Liz Truss’s comments on nursery education show ignorance of both of what she actually said and of evidence into nursery education. He also suggests that while those complaining on Twitter are mainly middle class, it is the poor and disadvantaged who stand to gain most from Truss’s recommendations…

The Twitterati reacted with typical ignorance to Liz Truss’s interview in the Daily Mail in which she called for a more traditional, French approach to nursery education. It was Truss’s comment that toddlers are “running around with no sense of purpose” in some English nurseries that seems to have wound them up. (more…)

 

Private schools ‘failing to create academies because they fear idea is just a fad’

Published on April 20, 2013,

Some private schools are refusing to set up academies because they fear they could be a fad that will be reversed by the next government, the former head of Harrow School has warned. This is from the Evening Standard…

Barnaby Lenon, now chairman of the Independent Schools Council, said some headteachers also fear they will lose pupils if they set up a high-quality state school in their catchment area. (more…)

 

‘Children can’t think if they don’t learn facts’

Published on March 21, 2013,

Following news of yesterday’s letter from 100 academics criticising Michael Gove’s proposed curriculum reforms and the emphasis on learning facts, the Telegraph today carries two articles  disagreeing with the letter’s authors.

First this from writer Harry Mount suggesting that learning by rote is “at the heart of all learning’… (more…)

 

The state school scramble: up to 13 applicants per place as thousands set to miss out on preferred choice

Published on March 1, 2013,

Up to 13 children are competing for entry to the country’s best state schools amid a desperate scramble for places today. Tens of thousands face missing out on their preferred secondary schools amid mounting competition on National Offer Day. This is from the Daily Mail…

Competition is particularly fierce in areas of the country including Kent and Buckinghamshire where some parents are already planning appeals after their children failed to get into grammar schools.
 (more…)

 

Toby Young defends the new history curriculum – and attacks the existing one

Published on February 22, 2013,

Toby Young thinks the criticism of the new history curriculum is misplaced and suggests change is long overdue. This is from the Spectator…

I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era’. (more…)

 

Toby Young: The unpleasantness I suffered setting up a free school

Published on February 20, 2013,

Following Michael Gove’s letter to the Information Commissioner expressing concerns at the impact making public the details of new free school proposers might have, Toby Young has written about the unpleasantness he suffered in setting up the West London Free School. This is from the Telegraph…

The NUT shop steward in my part of West London (a charming gentleman who’s one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party) circulated a document to the local council on NUT-headed paper falsely accusing me of, among other things, sleeping with prostitutes. I wrote about that episode here. Fiona Millar wrote a blog post for her anti-free schools website accusing me of trying to evict disabled children from a special school in Hammersmith so I could take over the site. You can read that blog post – and my response in the comments – here. And a delightful BBC disc jockey said on twitter that he could “happily punch to death” everyone who appeared on the BBC2 documentary about my efforts to set up a free school, even though the documentary prominently featured my four children throughout. You can read my reaction to that outburst – and others provoked by the documentary – here. Needless to say, there are countless other examples. (more…)

 

Michael Gove’s ‘U-turn’ on GCSEs is a necessary tactical retreat if he’s to win the education war

Published on February 8, 2013,

Toby Young believes Michael Gove has made a minor adjustment to one policy in light of the opposition it attracted. And he believes if it helps secure the consent of the educational establishment to all his other reforms, it will be well worth the short-term embarrassment. This is from the Telegraph…

Michael Gove is receiving a drubbing this morning, accused of doing a “U-turn” on his proposal to replace GCSEs with the new, English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs). But I prefer to see the more modest proposals announced today as a sensible compromise rather than a humiliating climb down – and not just because I’m a Michael Gove loyalist. Sometimes in politics, it’s necessary to beat a tactical retreat in order to win the war. That’s what the Secretary of State has done today. (more…)

 

Toby Young: Latest school league tables prove Michael Gove’s education policies are working

Published on January 25, 2013,

Author, columnist and co-founder of the West London Free School Toby Young believes the latest league table results are a vindication for Michael Gove’s education policies. This is from the Telegraph…

There’s good news for the Government in the school league tables published today. Yes, more English secondary schools are deemed to be “failing” – 195 based on last summer’s GCSE results, compared to 107 based on results in 2011. But that’s because the Department for Education has raised the floor target. Last year, a school was said to be failing if fewer than 35 per cent of its pupils got five or more GCSEs at grade C or above including Maths and English in 2011, whereas this year the threshold for 2012 exam results has been raised to 40 per cent. Had the same floor applied this year, the number of failing schools would have increased to 251 – which supports Michael Gove’s view that introducing tougher floor targets raises standards. (more…)

 

Toby Young: Contrary to reports, the Tories don’t have any plans to privatise state education

Published on January 11, 2013,

Toby Young believes the story in yesterday’s Independent - Revealed: Tory plan for firms to run schools for profit – is “wrong in almost every particular”. This is from the Telegraph…

To begin with, private companies are already allowed to run state schools for profit and have been since Labour passed the 2002 Education Act. I get tired of repeating this, but the first Secretary of State to allow a for-profit company to run a state school was Ed Balls. In 2007, he permitted EdisonLearning, a profit-making education management organisation (EMO), to enter into a management contract with Turin Grove School, a failing, local authority-run comprehensive in Edmonton. (I first blogged about this during the 2010 general election campaign when Balls shameless attacked Michael Gove for wanting to allow for-profits to run taxpayer-funded schools, glossing over the fact that he’d done precisely that three years earlier.) (more…)

 

Are free schools working?

Published on January 5, 2013,

Writer John Harris describes free schools as the ‘biggest experiment in education’ but wants to know if they are actually working and who is really paying for them. This is from his in-depth article in the Guardian…

The outskirts of the county town of Kent may not be the obvious place to witness the unfolding of a new world order. But on a Wednesday afternoon at Tiger primary school in Maidstone, you get a sense of how fast things are changing. Charlotte Jia, a 34-year-old from China’s Liaoning province, is teaching 30 five-year-olds Mandarin with the aid of a song (“Hello my friend/Goodbye my friend/Thank you my friend/Goodbye my friend”). Mandarin is taught in a growing number of primary schools, often thanks to the Hanban/Confucius Institute, an outgrowth of the Chinese state that sees to the teaching of its language and culture across the world. But here, Chinese murals and proverbs adorn the walls of every classroom, and even subjects such as maths are taught using a traditional Chinese abacus technique. (more…)

 

Tough exams and learning by rote are the keys to success, says Michael Gove

Published on November 14, 2012,

Learning facts by rote should be a central part of the school experience, the education secretary, Michael Gove, will argue today in a speech which praises traditional exams to the extent of arguing they helped spur the US civil rights struggle. This is from the Guardian…

In the address, titled In Praise of Tests, Gove describes the ideological underpinning to his planned shakeup of GCSEs and A-levels, a philosophy which will further delight educational traditionalists but is likely to prompt criticisms that he is seeking a return to the teaching styles of the 1940s and 50s. (more…)

 

Discipline and aspiration: a profile of West London Free School

Published on October 22, 2012,

West London Free School was founded by writer Toby Young and opened last year by London Mayor Boris Johnson. It is seen by many as a flagship of the free school movement and as such draws fans and critics from across the spectrum. Here is an extract from a profile this weekend in The Daily Mail which seems impressed by the strict disciplinary regime at the school…

Cicero said ‘a mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than a field, however fertile, without cultivation’. So it is perhaps fitting that his head is on pupils’ blazer badges at one of London’s newest and most audacious schools. (more…)

 

One-in-four free schools ‘suffering shortage of pupils’

Published on October 12, 2012,

It has been revealed that at least a quarter of the Government’s flagship free schools which opened this year are heavily undersubscribed. Figures show that one-in-four schools – set up and run by parents groups, charities and faith organisations independent of local council control – are suffering from a shortage of pupils. This is from the Telegraph…

(more…)

 

Toby Young on free schools as the research lab of state education (and do you want a job?)

Published on October 8, 2012,

Toby Young’s free school is about to expand into primary education. He argues it’s the perfect place to test new approaches to teaching and learning. This is from an article he wrote last week in the Guardian, inviting interest for the roles of head and assistant head in the new school…

As the co-founder of the West London Free School (WLFS) – a four-form entry secondary in Hammersmith – I’ve had plenty of arguments about the pros and cons of the coalition’s education reforms. After three years, I’ve concluded that the strongest argument for free schools is that they provide a protected space within the taxpayer-funded sector where teachers and educationalists can try out new things – the research and development wing of state education, if you like. By allowing schools like the WLFS to innovate and experiment – and monitoring the results – we can eventually discover more effective ways of teaching and learning and, by extension, drive up standards across the board. (more…)

 
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