Unit III. Public vs. Private

Main topic: Who shall provide and control education? Additional topics: Private or public; Boarding schools; Uniforms; Exams; Financing the education.

MAIN TEXT 1

THE END IS NIGH FOR ‘STATE’ EDUCATION

(John O’Leary, The Times, March 20, 1999)

State education faces widespread privatisation after David Blunkett issued an unprecedented order yesterday to remove key services from a falling local authority.

The Education and Employment Secretary sent consultants into Hackney, in East London, following the second damning inspection report in 18 months. The borough is expected to be the first of many to lose its historical monopoly of local services.

Labour ministers are rushing in where their most radical Tory predecessors feared to tread, talking of breaking up an empire worth more than £20 billion a year. A new generation of entrepreneurs is waiting impatiently to take over the reins.

More than 100 firms, charities and public sector groups responded to advertisements in The Times and other newspaper for contractors to take over education authority services. The Government’s approved list of about 20 firms will be published next month.

The key function of supporting school improvement and the provision of language teaching for Hackney’s many ethnic groups will be in private hands by the end of the school year. But Mr Blunkett has not ruled out the privatisation of whole local authorities if an accelerated programme of inspections uncovers further incompetence.

With King’s Manor School, in Guildford, Surrey, already awaiting takeover by the commercial arm of a city technology college, and with ministers preparing for an extension of private sector involvement in education action zones — their “testbeds for innovation” - in the classroom the Government is consciously blurring the definition of state education.

The latest phase of Tony Blair’s radical education agenda strikes at a traditional bastion of Labour support all but a handful of the 150 education authorities are controlled by his own party. Next month, schools will be given the freedom to buy in services, regardless of the level of town hall support.

Within five years, state schools could be managed and supported by a variety of private firms, and their teachers paid according to performance on limited-term contracts.

Downing Street advisers such as Andrew Adonis, a former Financial Times Journalist, have been driving the privatisation agenda. But Mr Blunkett claims the credit for the most extensive private sector experiment conducted so far — the 24 “action zones” in which schools have been taken over as partnerships between companies and local government in poor-performing areas.

Ministers have been preparing the ground for more than a year, emphasising that the standard of service, not the provider, would be their only concern. Before leaving the Department for Education, Stephen Byers said that councils had “no divine right” to run schools. In January Mr Blunkett announced that he would call in the private sector where there was evidence of failure.

Nine more authorities are to be inspected in the next few weeks. They include the bottom three in the secondary school league tables: Hull, Knowsley and the London borough of Islington. Another vulnerable authority is Liverpool, which had its inspection brought forward by the Office for Standards in Education.

Like Hackney, most of the candidates for takeover serve areas of social and economic disadvantage. But Mr Blunkett told a hostile local authority audience: “Mostly it is in disadvantaged areas where pupils have had a lousy deal for far too long.”

Hackney was the obvious place to start the revolution. The scene of protracted political chaos, its education service has been the object of sustained criticism since Tory ministers sent the first “hit squad” into Hackney Downs School in 1995. Gillian Shephard eventually ordered the closure of the former showpiece grammar school amid allegations of mismanagement by the education authority.

The borough soon attracted the attention of Labour ministers. When Ofsted found its education services “in turmoil” in 1997, Mr Blunkett dispatched his own squad to the town hall. But Richard Painter, the businessman who led the improvement team, clashed with council officials and reported at the end of his term of office that serious weaknesses remained.

Ofsted's reinspection report, published yesterday, acknowledged some improvements, but said progress was “slow, insufficient and fragile”.

Hackney’s chief executive, Tony Elliston, resigned last week in anticipation of the report, which criticises the impact on schools of his management reorganisation. Ofsted is most critical of Hackney's School Improvement Service - the key to the strategic role envisaged for education authorities by the Government.

The candidates to take over Hackney’s services are all British, ranging from the non-profit Centre for British Teachers to unnamed private companies and at least one local authority. But American firms, such as Sylvan Learning Systems, which recently won the contract for administering the theoretical section of the driving test, are also hoping to break into the British market.

In the US, businessmen such as Michael Milken, the junk bond millionaire, see big opportunities in public education. Parallels are being drawn with the growth of private healthcare as large firms trumpet the investment potential of their involvement in schools. Mr Milken owns a share of the Spring Group, which operates as a recruitment consultant in the British education market.

The Edison Group is the best-known of the American raiders. One of the original bidders to run King’s Manor School, it runs more than 50 US schools and is negotiating to take over others in the North of England.

With budgets totalling £21 billion, education authorities will be an attractive proposition for many companies, but Leon Boros, of Capital Strategies, which publishes an index of education companies, said that relatively few were capable of running entire authorities. “I would expect to see consortia being formed with successful authorities to ensure that the necessary experience was available,” he said.

Capital’s index shows education-based companies such as Nord Anglia, which runs independent schools and inspection teams, outpacing the stockmarket average.

Within five years, a Labour government may be presiding over a school system that would have been the envy of Sir Keith Joseph and the architects of privatisation. Peter Smith, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said ruefully: “The Tories would never have dared to privatise education by bringing in firms operating for profit.”

MAIN TEXT 2

HACKNEY CARRIAGE

(Editorial, The Times, March 20, 1999)

David Blunkett, the Education Secretary, is, Patricia Hewitt told the House of Commons yesterday, “minded to direct” Hackney councillors to contract out a number of important education services and effectively render impotent its local education authority. It would be a huge surprise if Mr Blunkett did not move in this direction. For the second time in less than two years he has received a damning report on the quality of education in that London borough. On the first occasion he responded by sending in a “hit squad” and ordering the LEA to make a number of drastic improvements. Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, having returned to the scene of the crime, now concludes that progress has been “slow, insufficient and fragile”.

The criticism that Ofsted has directed at Hackney’s inappropriately named Schools Improvement Service is so devastating that the Department for Education and Employ­ment can hardly offer the council any more opportunities to administer its schools ineffectively. Not to intervene now would make a mockery of the new powers that ministers took upon themselves, with very considerable fanfare, after the election. It would render hollow the Prime Minister’s emphasis on “education, education, education”. As the Secretary of State concedes, “the persistence and severity of the LEA’s failure makes urgent action a necessity”.

That action must not be of an incremental nature. Many Hackney councillors, numerous trade unions, and several Labour MPs will press Mr Blunkett to place another LEA, a charitable institution, an ad hoc consortium or any other organisation except one explicitly linked with the private sector in charge of these education services. Tony Blair and Mr Blunkett should not listen to those who have been responsible for a state of affairs that only external investigation would ever have brought into the spotlight of publicity. Diane Abbott, the local MP, has accused ministers of “experimenting” in Hackney. It is very hard to conceive that any such innovation could produce worse results for her constituents than they suffer at present.

Nor should the Government assume that Hackney represents a horrendous and completely isolated example. The tone of Ofsted’s comments were unusually direct but their wider themes can be seen in a number of other local authorities, especially in inner cities. The quality of schooling is often a lottery depending on location. Even the injection of large amounts of extra money or resources has not done much to raise standards. The instinct of ministers has been to believe that LEAs, once they know that shortcomings will be exposed, will sharpen up their show rather than risk outright replacement by outsiders. The Hackney debacle demonstrates that such an assumption might be unduly charitable.

Mr Blunkett should not hesitate to act on behalf of such children. This is, though, a short-term solution. Although condemned by some as the “privatisation” of education it is also, in another sense, nationalisation. Ministers cannot hope to supervise 24,000 schools and stamp out shoddy practices by imperial edict. The wider question concerns the extent to which services under the control of LEAs can be delegated directly to head-teachers. It is also hardly desirable if in this case inevitable, that local democracy should be sidelined. Mr Blair has long acknowledged that reform of local government, based on elected mayors, is essential. The Hackney affair should make the Prime Minister redouble his attempts to oblige Cabinet colleagues to support him.

ASSIGNMENTS:

I. Language

1. Explain in English and then translate the following words and expressions into Russian:

Text 1

The Education and Employment Secretary, borough, the Office for Standards in Education, Ofsted, to trumpet the investment potential of involvement in schools.

Text 2

LEA, to stamp out shoddy practices.

2. Translate the following expressions into Russian:

Text 1

Public sector groups, to take over education authority services, a takeover, to blur the definition of state education, limited terms contracts, to drive the privatisation agenda, all but a handful of the 150 educational authorities, to buy in services, to break into the British market, to outpace the stockmarket average, to operate for profit.

Text 2

To contract out a number of important education services, to render something important, to receive a damning report on something, to sideline local democracy.

II. Contents

When carrying out the following assignments, please make use of the previously discussed words and expressions, as well as the following expressions:

To claim the credit for, to call in the private sector, to serve areas of social and economic disadvantage, the subject of sustained criticism; to bring into the spotlight of publicity, the injection of larger amount of extra money or resources.

1. Please briefly outline the situation which has made it necessary for the Government to revert to market principles in state education.

2. What measures have been taken by the Government to improve the quality of education provided by the poorest-performing schools?

3. Compare the situation described in the texts with the one that you encountered in your own school. What measures would be of use in Russian schools and what measures are not applicable in Russia at all?

ADDITIONAL TEXTS

CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

(John O’Leary, The Times, May 07, 1999)

For all Labour’s overtures to independent schools, one phrase still rankles with those in the sector. Justifying its proposal to abolish the Assisted Places Scheme, the party’s 1997 manifesto said: “The educational apartheid created by the public/private divide diminishes the whole education system.”

The image of apartheid was resented by private schools, especially since most recent developments actually showed much more integration between the state and independent sectors. As well as a host of informal partnerships and sharing of facilities by different types of school, more pupils than ever were moving between the two systems.

The Assisted Places Scheme was not responsible for all of this traffic by any means: about a quarter of the beneficiaries received all their schooling in the private sector. But the new education market and independent schools’ success in attracting “first-time buyers” meant that it had become much more common to move between different types of school.

Some parents chose preparatory schools as the best chance of winning a grammar school place; others switched from state to independent for secondary education; and there was movement in both directions after GCSE. Many teenagers opted for the greater freedom of sixth-form colleges, but more moved into the independent sector to find the best possible preparation for A-level.

All these things are still happening, of course, but last week's census by the Independent Schools Information Service suggested that the traffic was declining. Despite the Government’s improved relations with independent education, some of its policies appear to be encouraging the divisions its manifesto decried.

Although schools which lost their first tranche of assisted places this year have succeeded beyond all expectations in keeping up their numbers, the social mix is bound to change. A 3 per cent drop in the proportion of children entering from state schools may be just the first step in a more serious long-term decline. Parents have been receptive to fundraising efforts to create more bursaries, but even that may wane as the abolition of the scheme becomes a distant memory.

Fee rises running at twice the rate of inflation will make it more difficult for middle-income parents, let alone those who would have qualified for assisted places, to afford independent education. Bursars have said that increased salary bills will make it impossible to keep this year’s rise below 5 per cent, especially with investment in buildings and equipment at record levels.

Perhaps the most surprising change, however, has been the decline in previously buoyant recruitment into independent school sixth-forms. In the past ten years, numbers have risen consistently, from fewer than 30,000 to 36,000 17-year-olds in ISIS schools in 1998. In January, however, they were down, and the overall decline in sixth-form numbers was greater than any other age group.

David Woodhead, the national director of ISIS, said that schools were feeling the effects of poor recruitment at secondary level in the early years of the decade. But Rosanne Musgrave, the president of the Girls’ Schools Association, had an additional and highly plausible explanation: that parents who might have paid for two years' independent education were now saving up to pay for university tuition fees.

With a quarter of the student loan means-tested from this year, tuition fees are far from the only expense parents may be asked to meet when their children go on to higher education, as the vast majority of independent school pupils do. Many families already find that they are paying as much for the student years as they did in independent school fees. These sums can only rise, and with them the likelihood of parents having to persist with state education.

As more and more parents opt for the private sector in the earliest years of education — pre-preparatory schools were again the fastest-growing this year — more children are likely to spend all their school years outside the state system. Those whose parents can afford it may move from one stage of independent to the next, often with reserved places in associated schools. Less affluent families, meanwhile, find it increasingly difficult to dip into the system as they have in recent years.

The Government’s answer, to be announced shortly, is to expand the number of partnerships between state and independent schools, encouraging local authorities to use the independent system to supplement their own facilities for academically able pupils as well as those with special needs. Laudable though such initiatives are, they do not provide the same diversity of experience that a child receives by switching between the two systems.

The language of Labour’s manifesto was unfortunate, but it remains true that the public/private divide diminishes the education system. It is ironic that, however unintentionally, some of the Government’s actions are helping to widen that divide, and it will take more than a new set of partnerships to close it.

WALLS DO NOT A SCHOOL MAKE

(Hilary Fender, The Times, January 18, 1993)

Anthea Saxon’s Viewpoint last week was worrying in its assumption that splendid buildings (and the budget to maintain them) guarantee a good education, hence her choice of a co-educational school for her daughter.

The reason our parents choose to send their daughters to a single-sex school is not because of our bricks and mortar (fine Victorian, but not everybody’s taste) but because, as a girls’ school, we can offer a highly specific preparation for the outside world to girls. This means that everything we do, whether academically or pastorally, is geared to their particular needs.

In sweeping general terms, girls mature faster (at least until they are about 16), they tend to be gentler and more compliant, they want to please and are concerned about being wrong. Boys, on the other hand, demonstrate more outward confidence, are louder, more aggressive and more direct and many show a natural desire for leadership. Research has shown real differences in brain development too, with auditory, visual, spatial and linguistic variations according to sex.

A good school should help to develop a child in the widest sense, but it is almost impossible to do so effectively if you are trying to be all things to all pupils, especially during adolescence when pressures to be attractive, thin and popular are stronger than the pleasures of displaying intellect. Clever women, in fact, often learn to disguise their intelligence.

At the heart of the matter is confidence, a quality that women tend to lack and which they need in abundance if they are to compete successfully and happily later on. We have to learn to be a little bit pushy, to believe in ourselves and not to be afraid of sometimes being wrong. Greater self-confidence leads to better examination results, too.

In mixed classes, the boys tend to monopolise (a recent survey showed that, on average, only one in four questions in co-educational classes come from girls). Dispiriting and outfacing for the girls, it encourages all but the bravest to retire early from the contest. In a single-sex school, it is simply less of a battle and a few small personal victories can change a child's perception of herself for ever.

Academically, the reaction of girls and boys to individual subjects can be as diverse as their characters. In my own area, history, girls tend to love the people and the drama, while boys are fascinated by battle.

If a child is truly to enjoy a subject, it is essential to follow and stimulate their particular interests, but balancing a detailed look at the Armada campaign with an analysis of Elizabeth’s relationship with Philip of Spain is difficult indeed.

These intellectual differences are even more obvious in those subjects that girls are supposed to be bad at, such as maths and the sciences.

In maths, we find that girls mature very fast and understand very complex ideas at 13 or 14, before slowing down to a more gentle progress, while boys seem to have this mathematical spurt two to three years later. Because we have only girls, we have the chance to teach them as much as they want during this growth period so that they have a sophisticated grounding at the time they need it most. Last term, all our maths A-level students gained A or B grades.

On a personal level, the huge advantage of a single-sex school for girls is that they can simply be people. They are under no pressure to conform to a female stereotype. They don’t have to worry unduly about their looks; they will make friends because they are liked for themselves. These relationships build confidence, provide a sympathetic rock during the turbulence of puberty.

In every subject, the basic lessons need to be learnt well if success is to follow. Life is no different — and a girl must find self confidence, self worth and self esteem if she is to progress happily and capably through it.

Complex lessons indeed — and buildings alone are not enough.

BOARDING SCHOOLS’ VALUES ‘COULD STEM RISE IN VIOLENCE’

(Ben Preston, The Times, May 5, 1993)

The values upheld by boarding schools — trust, truth, co-operation and community — could help the country distinguish between right and wrong at a time of rising violence, a headmaster said yesterday.

John Haden, chairman of the Boarding Schools Association, told its annual conference in Ambleside, Cumbria, that such values were “a key issue for a nation searching for ‘what is right’, disillusioned by the antics of politicians and shocked by murder, theft and destruction at the hands of British children”.

With pupil numbers expected to fall over the next decade, Mr Haden said boarding schools must celebrate their values while ruthlessly reviewing their role. A plan published yesterday to help schools cope with declining demand for traditional boarding and slow economic recovery says some will have to consider mergers, becoming co-educational, taking day pupils, closing uneconomic sixth-forms or scrapping certain subjects.

The association, which represents 425 state and independent schools, is issuing the advice after last week's results of the independent school census which showed the biggest slump in boarding since records were kept.

Mr Haden, principal of Wymondham College, Norfolk, told the conference: “John Patten, the education secretary, has asked schools to put a greater emphasis on spiritual and moral issues. Boarding schools address these every day, not just in chapel services but in all the complex relationships which make up school life.

“Boarding schools uphold the values of trust, truth, co-operation and community. Most boarding schools adopt a clear religious position and are equipped to pass this on to their pupils.” Parents did not always know best and some turned a blind eye to children using drugs and alcohol.

Boarding schools helped foster leadership qualities which were “highly valued in many adult worlds, from those who lead the Cheshires in Bosnia to whose who build export markets across the world. Leadership was not a popular theme in the freewheeling 1960s or the individual ethic of the 1980s. Today it is of central importance.”

The association's strategy document, “Taking Your School into the 21st Century,” says that boarding schools will be affected by the slow pace of economic recovery, increased competition from state schools, demographic trends and falling demand from the armed services following planned reductions in manning levels.

Planning can minimise and contain the resultant decline in boarding, it says. Schools must regard themselves as businesses and target likely growth areas such as boarders from Europe and children of divorced or separated parents.

A UNIFORM VIEW OF THE CLASSES

(Alexander Davidson, The Times, January 4, 1993)

Today’s clamour to compare the examination grades obtained by pupils of different schools ignores one basic fact: academic performance often bears no relationship to that person’s subsequent achievement in the workplace.

What distinguishes one school from another is the broader social education on offer. But how can parents make the necessary comparisons?

Apart from the obvious — a school’s intake, its resources, whether it is fee-paying or state — the biggest give-away and measure of all these things is the uniform.

Head teachers, trying to make school clothes less elaborate and therefore less expensive for parents, rarely get rid of the uniform altogether. They are sure that this would destroy the school’s corporate identity and make discipline harder to enforce. Instead, some heads convert to the standardised school uniform stocked in every chain store: dreary grey trousers or pleated skirt, light grey pullovers, striped ties.

These clothes are practical and cheap. But any school wearing this uniform appears much like any other, and pupils find it harder to identify with their own institution.

Our top schools are not allowed to succumb to such mediocrity of dress sense. The pupils dress with panache, even in those establishments boasting liberal dress regulations, such as Gordonstoun or at Ampleforth College, where stylish tweed jackets are quite in vogue.

Eton College would draw the line at that. Etonians resemble head waiters in their black tail-coats, gaudy striped trousers and quaint bow or white tape tie. But their brightly coloured socks denote membership of special clubs, and there is licence to dress still more freely if an open-minded house-master is on duty.

Harrow, too, dresses more freely than in the old days. Not before time, some of the rules have been abolished, like the formidable memory test administered by senior Harrovians for new boys, which mainly covered how many buttons pupils were entitled to wear undone as they moved up the school.

Straw hats, at Harrow and elsewhere, still have snob value, but this is said not to carry the weight that it did. Harrovians often now carry their boaters, rather than wear them — or forget to bring them to school altogether.

However, when children have no uniform at all, as at Holland Park Comprehensive, west London, they face the pressure of trying to dress like their peers.

That unwritten dress code is as rigid as any uniform which a school may impose, and it may cost the parents a lot more. The pupils can be miserable, too, deprived of an outlet for their rebellion. In contrast, the Etonian can and will “sport white triangles”, leaving his shirt tail hanging out. Girls at Harrogate Ladies’ College toss their berets into the tree tops on Sunday walks, scoring a bull’s-eye when the headgear settles high.

The thrill invariably comes, not in the act itself, but from the breach of uniform regulations which it represents. Alarm bells need ring only when reaction against school-wear goes deeper.

Pupils no longer have their skirts measured for length while kneeling for assembly. Nor must their shoes be unpolished, to avoid the sin of vanity in seeing themselves in the reflection. But the uniform is often frumpish and a young girl cannot tolerate this.

A former sales assistant at Lewis's of Liverpool reveals that girls from a nearby convent school, shopping for their uniforms there with their mothers, often refused to buy the more hated items. The miscreants, when back at school, would then pretend that the missing uniform was out of stock or unaffordable. “Angry nuns would ring us up to check current availability and prices,” the shop assistant says.

School uniform may be a mark of social status to the outside world, but it is a hundred times more significant within the school's four walls. Members of Harrow’s philathletic committee still wear gaudy waistcoats at prizegivings to represent their elevated status in the school’s hierarchy.

The younger scholars at Westminster School, when taking part in their ritualistic obstacle race, dress in the mildewy and ragged gowns resurrected annually for the purpose. Boys of every age at King's School, Rochester, wear ties variously denoting status. No outsider knows or cares that King's scholars wear an exclusive silver tie with red Tudor rose, while minor scholars have a mere black one.

However, to judge school uniform in terms of its relevance to the outside world is to miss the point. School uniform, as the social tradition it represents, is not measurable like examination grades. Its subtleties are appreciated best by those who have attended our traditional schools, who have experienced it for themselves.

These are the guardians of our school uniform, whether they admit it or not. They would no sooner annihilate it than they would set fire to the paintings in the National Gallery.

The same goes for those sensitive souls whose memories of school uniform are bitter. When the author, Roald Dahl, noted in his autobiography that the wing collar he wore at Repton was so stiff that he felt obliged to chew it, he was paying his old uniform the compliment of publicity by recalling it.

Without a doubt, the most practically-minded of adult enthusiasts are the imposters who buy an Old Harrovian tie, or something similar, purely as a means of social climbing. The great public schools turn a blind eye. It is the minor schools that object most strongly. For instance, any prospective buyer of the old boys’ tie for Sir Joseph Williamson's Mathematical School, Rochester, a state school, must first have his name checked against a register to establish he is bona fide.

The British school uniform tradition takes such fads in its stride. Why else do Westminster boys still know to wear jackets unbuttoned, with flaps out of pockets, and to thrust their hands in jacket, not trouser pockets, while their contemporaries in state schools neither know nor care for such matters of etiquette?

Why else, indeed, do boys at Charterhouse, where caps have been abolished, still occasionally touch an imaginary peak?

School uniform has a lot to answer for, which is why it will always be around. It creates future memories of love or of hate, and usually something of both. It is the symbol of our schooldays, sticking in the mind when the book-learning has long since been forgotten.

SIX COUNTIES THAT RETAIN THE 11-PLUS

(Fran Abrams, The Independent, May 4, 1995)

This month 600,000 pupils in England and Wales will sit down to take the first ever nationally administered tests for all 11-year-olds. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, pupils are already preparing for the tests they must take next year.

The papers drawn up to assess these different groups of children are very similar, with each covering the requirements of the national curriculum in English maths and science. But there is one big difference: in Northern Ireland they are used to select pupils for the grammar schools which still exist in most areas of the province.

At Cairnshill Primary School in Belfast, parents expect their children to work towards the tests for several months beforehand. Although the two papers are taken six weeks apart in October and November, they are already anxious.

“We are under a lot of pressure from parents,” says Lynne Campbell, one of the teachers who takes final-year classes at the school, which is based on a new private housing estate where expectations are high. “If the children don’t start their test work next week, questions will be asked.”

While selection is far less of a hot political issue in Northern Ireland than it is in England, most of those involved agree that the tests have a major effect on the later stages of primary education. At Cairnshill pupils will take two practice papers each week in the run up to the tests, and teachers will spend much of the remaining time going over the answers with them. Later on, there will be revision work to do at weekends in addition to the regular daily homework, which is also geared to the tests.

Even then, many parents will not be satisfied with the work the school sets for pupils. The area is “tutor-mad”, Lynne Campbell says, and some pupils will have private tuition twice a week. Cries of “But my tutor says…!” are common in the classrooms at Cairnshill.

An accident of history allowed Northern Ireland to retain the selective system that used to exist all over the United Kingdom. In 1977 ministers announced their intention to eliminate selection at 11-plus and gave the province’s education and library boards two years to plan how they would make the change. But in May 1979, the Conservatives were elected and the proposal was dropped.

Even so, time has not stood still in the past 16 years. Two years ago, the old verbal reasoning tests were replaced with the current variety based on the national curriculum, a change that seems to have led to an increase in the market for private coaching.

This week the Department of Education for Northern Ireland launched a consultation on further changes which would increase the number of 11-plus grades from four to seven and cut the comments that primary schools are able to make on pupils’ transfer forms sent to secondary schools. This would ensure that selection is based as far as possible on exam grades alone.

Ministers must also decide soon how to assess what national curriculum level pupils have reached at 11. They must choose between three options: a further test, to be taken in the spring after the 11-plus, the existing classroom-based assessment or a mixture of the two.

There is little flexibility within the system, although children who have been ill or had other problems during the tests can cancel their first attempt and try again without ever knowing their original results. Grammar schools must select on the basis of test results and can only take other factors into account when choosing between pupils with the same grade.

Of the 26,000 children who transfer to secondary schools each year, 18,000 take the tests. A quarter of the entire cohort are awarded an A-grade, 10 per cent gain B, 10 per cent C and 55 per cent D. An A guarantees a grammar-school place and a B or a C may win one, but a D almost always means a child will go to a high school instead. About a third of pupils go to grammar school.

More pupils in Northern Ireland leave school with five or more A-C grades at GCSE than do so in England and Wales - 49 per cent, compared with 43.6 per cent. However it is hard to assess whether the school system or the province’s strong belief in the importance of education is responsible for this - and it must also be noted that a higher number leave with no qualifications at all.

There are a few alternatives available to parents. In recent years the province’s integrated schools, which are non-selective, have been seen as the next best thing to grammar school and have attracted many children who just failed to make the grade.

For those living in the Craigavon area, there is a completely different system, known as the Dickson Plan. Here, children do not take an 11-plus test but transfer to junior high schools instead. At 14, the most academic pupils transfer to senior high schools and the rest have the chance of attending a technical school.

But there does not seem to be a huge number of parents in the province looking for alternatives. On the whole, they seem to accept the system and there is no strong lobby pressing for a move to comprehensive education.

Teachers’ unions, on the other hand, are less keen on the status quo. Brian Gilliland, principal of Cairnshill, says many teachers would like to see something like the Dickson Plan implemented across Northern Ireland. “But the grammar school system is so entrenched in this part of the world and the lobby for it is so strong that it is difficult to see it breaking,” he says.

SHOULD PARENTS PAY FOR STATE SCHOOLS?

(John O’Leary, The Times, September 29, 1999)

As a political animal, John McIntosh, the headmaster of the London Oratory School, will have been well aware that asking Tony and Cherie Blair for £45 a month to help to pay for their sons’ education was likely to cause a stir. Every move the school makes is scrutinised in the finest detail, from its reaction to late returns from holiday to the behaviour of its pupils on the streets of West London. Even Mr McIntosh, however, cannot have expected the uproar provoked by last week’s letter to parents, seeking voluntary contributions to make good a projected budget shortfall of £430,000.

In Labour circles, he was accused of mismanagement and moral blackmail. Those who disapproved of the Blairs' choice of a grant-maintained (GM) school miles from their home revelled in the Prime Minister's discomfort.

Others saw the incident as an illustration of the problems of the former GM sector and the underfunding of state schools generally by a Government whose stated priorities are “education, education and education”.

Two questions have emerged from the furore to puzzle parents and trouble Mr Blair. The first is whether the Government is keeping its promises on the transformation of state education, and the second is where the boundary should lie between basic state provision and the extras provided by parents and private companies.

The answer to the first question must surely be that it is too soon to tell. Those in the public services may wish that Labour had fought the last election on a more adventurous manifesto, but the adoption of the Conservatives’ spending plans was a key factor in its landslide victory. Though Gordon Brown's early Budgets softened the blow for education, there was never going to be a bonanza in the first two years of the new administration.

The £19 billion committed in last year’s comprehensive spending review is only now beginning to flow into schools, much of it aimed at specific initiatives. Some, as happens in local government, is being diverted to other areas. With Mr Brown insisting this week that he will not release the Treasury’s purse strings to ease the strain on public services, it cannot be taken for granted that even the unprecedented financial commitment made to education will provide all that parents desire.

Assuming that it does not, most parents who can afford it would rather make a modest donation than see the standard of provision fall. Many have been doing so for years, although few on the scale of the London Oratory’s £30 a month. Others have been giving up their time for quizzes, fetes and the myriad fundraising efforts that have been keeping schools in computers and sports strips. The two-tier state system that Mr McIntosh’s critics have been predicting this week is already with us to some extent, because of the vastly different parental and community resources on which schools can call.

The position of former GM schools such as the London Oratory is especially delicate because they are having to adjust to a new, tighter funding regime. To ease the transition, the Government has done more than many of the schools expected, but they are losing some of the money they have enjoyed in recent years. Whether by careful husbandry or what their critics see as previously over-generous provision, they have been able to employ more teachers than other schools and offer facilities that parents will be loath to lose.

Where should the line be drawn between public and private funding? Head teachers and governors have suggested that the Government should be responsible for “core funding” while parents may supply the extras. In practice, the distinction is increasingly difficult to draw. Both books and computers are essential for schools, for instance, but The Times schemes are adding to schools’ resources to the tune of millions of pounds. In the London Oratory’s case, parents’ money may go on teachers’ salaries, paid up to now from state funding. Are they to be sacrificed for the sake of ideological purity?

Surely the only sensible test is the one suggested by Mr Blair on Sunday: that schools must not put pressure on parents to make donations. Parents are quite capable of deciding for themselves how to spend their money.

HOW CAN IT COST TOO MUCH TO EMPLOY ME?

(Barry Jones, The Times, July 15, 1995)

I am a 49-year-old teacher made redundant two years ago, and since then have found my chances of a job denied not by my experience, but the economic pressures on schools.

Although primarily a teacher of English, during my 22 years in teaching I have taught all age ranges and most subjects, including adult GCE to O-level standard, and have taught adult non-readers and English to foreign students.

I moved to the Isle of Wight four years ago. When we first arrived, there seemed a fair amount of supply teaching available and I worked in several schools, including a very enjoyable 18 months at one of the high schools.

I was encouraged by the then deputy head to apply for the post that I had been filling on a temporary basis, which was about to be made permanent. Unfortunately, they also needed a head of the sixth form and the teacher appointed happened to offer English as a main subject, which meant that my services were no longer required. That was in July 1993.

Since then there has been nothing and I have been forced onto unemployment benefit. Three head teachers have told me that I am too expensive to employ now that local management of schools is fully implemented, a situation two other teachers I know of also share.

If the counsellor in the jobcentre is to be believed, many other teachers are in a similar situation.

Surely, if people are being discriminated against because their age and experience make them too expensive to employ, then a local authority’s claim to be an equal opportunities employer must be invalid.

I put his point to my local Conservative MP and to the Director of Education. They both acknowledged that discrimination in favour of younger, and therefore cheaper, teachers was happening.

I have applied for three jobs on the Isle of Wight this year, and, despite my experience, have been unable even to obtain an interview — on investigation it turned out that all three vacancies had been filled by newly qualified teachers.

I also applied for many jobs on the mainland and, although for some I was given an interview, once again the posts were given to newly qualified teachers. This must be more than just a coincidence.

During the past few months, I have tried to find suitable work, but to no avail. I have been on a job review workshop, where I took a differential aptitude test and scored 85 per cent. I was told I was suitable for all manner of quality jobs — the trouble is that there is no work.

I have attended a job search seminar, which was useful and left me feeling quite invigorated. I have put much of what I learnt there to practical use, with letters of application, CV presentation etc, but again to no avail, because there are simply no jobs.

I contacted Wight Training and Enterprise (WTE), which advertises a service for those who want a change of career, or those who are returning to the job market. WTE directed me to the careers service, where I was given a career interview and subsequently a written assessment. This told me nothing of any use, nothing new.

The only other thing they sent me was a booklet on Voluntary Service Overseas! So much for helping people to make a career move or get back into work. The hard fact is that there seem to be no jobs around that meet my skills and experience.

My family and I are willing to relocate. We have had our house on the market for more than two years, but there appear to be very few buyers for family homes in the middle price range, despite the fact that we have dropped the price by over £20,000.

So we cannot move to where there might be more work, and I cannot get work here. At the moment we feel trapped. I hate being on benefit and want to get back into the job market — I have been working since 1962.

In conclusion, I want to make clear my feelings about how this Government has failed me and people like me. I am in good health, with many years of good working life left, and much still to contribute to the young people passing through the education system.

And what do I find? As a direct result of the Government’s education and economic policies, I cannot find work, and must try to support a family on state benefits.

What a waste of my talent and skills this is. What a drain on the country's coffers, what a loss to the education system and young people's futures, to keep qualified people such as myself away from the very thing they do best.

UNIT IV. THE HIGHER EDUCATION

Main topic: What is special about graduates? Additional topics: UK vs. US higher education; Further education / Open University.

MAIN TEXT

WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT GRADUATES?

(Sir John Daniel, The Independent, January 7, 1999)

The period since the 1992 HE Act restructured our higher education system has been marked by growth, change and introspection. As universities have attracted more people and absorbed more public money, questions about the purpose and benefits of higher learning have become more pressing.

The aims of universities are usually stated as teaching, research and service to the community. Graduates are universities’ most important output. So a simple way to judge the value of universities is to ask what is special about graduates. How does a university degree change people?

People have tried to answer this question in various ways. Patricia Lunneborg, for her engaging books OU Women and OU Men, interviewed a very diverse set of OU graduates and recorded their comments about how university study had changed them.

I was particularly impressed by one graduate, who remarked with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation that after doing an OU degree he could no longer see fewer than six sides to any question. That's a good description of the skill of critical analysis that has always figured prominently in the purposes of academic study.

Other researchers have used questionnaires to ask large numbers of graduates about the effects of doing a degree. One such survey last year produced a rather surprising result. The responses, which came from graduates of all types of institution, were broadly similar except to one question. Asked how much university study had changed their lives, OU graduates reported much greater change than graduates from other universities.

At first this seemed to me an odd result because OU students tend to be older, and lead more settled lives, than conventional graduates. But I suppose that really explains the difference.

Young full-time students, who are in transition to adulthood, find it difficult to distinguish the impact of degree study from the general process of maturation. OU graduates can identify more readily the particular effects of study on their lives. The most common word they use, when they describe these changes to me at degree ceremonies, is confidence.

A better understanding of the world gives us greater confidence in everyday life and newly acquired competencies make us more confident at work.

Much of the debate about the outcomes of degree study now focuses on the notions of competencies and skills. In the UK the Dearing Report proposed that as well as cognitive skills, an understanding of methodologies and a capacity for critical analysis, graduates must acquire a set of key skills of general relevance. These skills relate to communication (oral and written), the application of number; information technology, working with others, improving one's own learning performance; and problem solving. There are many ways of grouping graduate competencies. In their book The Bases of Competence Skills for Lifelong Learning and Employability, the Canadian authors Evers, Rush and Berdrow identify the essential graduate skills as managing self, communicating, managing people and tasks, and mobilising innovation and change. They find that students and graduates are most confident in managing themselves and communicating. They are much less sure of their skills for managing people and tasks and for mobilising innovation and change, although these skills are much sought after by employers.

Employers’ perceptions of the skills of graduate staff in several English-speaking countries have been studied by Professor David Robertson of Liverpool John Moores University. He presented his conclusions, What employers really, really want, at the recent conference of the Society for Research in Higher Education. Employers are fairly happy with graduates' skills in communication, disciplinary knowledge, teamwork, IT, and in interpersonal relations and leadership.

What they find lacking are the complexity skills that graduates need to operate successfully in today’s global environment. Progress is not linear, so people must be comfortable managing ambiguous situations where many events and trends are interlinked. This means living with provisionality and emergence - so you can make decisions even when you know that new developments such as electronic commerce may invalidate them.

Employers also note weaknesses in cross-cultural sensitivity. Other cultures and ethical frameworks must be seen as legitimate, not merely different. Complexity skills are particularly difficult to express in the precise language of competencies. But graduates who can see six sides to a question have already developed considerable competence in complexity.

Their next step is to learn to make choices and to operate confidently while maintaining a spirit of scepticism.

ASSIGNMENTS:

I. Language

1. Explain in English and then translate the following words and expressions into Russian:

The 1992 HE Education Act, graduates, OU graduates, conventional graduates, a degree ceremony, competencies and skills, cross-cultural sensitivity.

2. Translate the following expressions into Russian:

To absorb public money, critical analysis, to figure prominently in the purposes of academic study, to do a degree, to lead a settled life, full-time students, to distinguish the impact of degree study from the general process of maturation, cognitive skills, key skills of general relevance, to mobilise innovation and change, disciplinary knowledge, teamwork, complexity skills, to manage ambiguous situations, provisionality, to invalidate sth, ethical framework.

3. What do these abbreviations stand for? Please decipher and explain:

HE, OU.

II. Contents

When carrying out the following assignments, please make use of the previously discussed words and expressions, as well as the following expressions:

The purpose and benefits of higher learning, teaching, research and service to the community, graduates of all types of institutions, to identify the particular effects of study on sth, to manage self, to manage people and tasks, to be sought after by employers, interpersonal relations and leadership.

1. How does the author describe the general purposes of higher education?

2. What type of graduates does the author speak about? In what respect are they different?

3. How are the effects of higher education assessed by the graduates? The employers?

4. Write a composition, assessing the effects your stay at the university has had on you and the skills you still need to achieve to be able to enter the job market. Please try to be honest with yourself in the judgement.

ADDITIONAL TEXTS

A TALE OF TWO KNOWLEDGE FACTORIES

(Peter Scott, The Times, February 8, 1993)

Take two universities: Oxford, more than eight centuries old, and Chicago, which celebrated its centenary two years ago. They are alike in size and reputation: Oxford has 13,000 students, which is big compared to most British universities; Chicago is just over 11,000, tiny by American standards and dwarfed by several near-neighbours in the Mid-West.

Oxford’s 19th-century fame as the home of dreaming spires and lost causes is now enhanced by its 20th-century status as a powerhouse of scholarship and science. Chicago, with its 61 Nobel laureates, is sacred academic turf for sociologists, who recall founders of their discipline such as Everett Hughes and surviving grand old men like Edward Shils; for economists (especially those who lean to the free-market right like Milton Friedman, its most famous economics professor); and nuclear scientists (a plaque by the football field commemorates the world’s first chain reaction by Enrico Fermi's team).

But the two universities are unalike in tradition and organisation. In a turbulent and diverse America, Chicago has remained peculiarly true to its first president’s exhortation to its faculty to be “one in spirit”. Its most famous president, Robert Hutchins, pioneered the study of “Great Books” as the core of a liberal undergraduate curriculum. In the fastness of its Old World antiquity, Oxford has abandoned any holistic pretensions and plunged into single-honours specialisation.

Yet in an organisational sense, Oxford retains an integrity Chicago has lost, or never had. Like all British universities, it remains predominantly an undergraduate institution. Fewer than 3,000 of its students are postgraduates. Oxford’s research may be internationally renowned, but its laboratories take second place to its colleges.

In Chicago, it is the other way round. Less than a third of its students are in its undergraduate college. The remainder are studying in the four graduate divisions and six professional schools. Chicago awards more MBAs than BAs. And, with its annual output of more than 300 PhDs, it is, in the best sense, a knowledge factory.

The comparison between Oxford and Chicago is telling, and timely because the American “research university”, of which Chicago is an atypical but glorious example, is the model towards which Oxford, along with a dozen of Britain’s other top universities, is subtly being nudged. Four years ago, the Advisory Board for the Research Councils proposed a tripartite division of higher education: into “research universities”, those with some research, and teaching-only (or mainly teaching) universities. After three rounds of research assessment by the Universities Funding Council, the list of winners and losers is beginning to look permanent. Britain’s shadow “research universities” already exist. And there are few surprises. They are Cambridge, Oxford, the fragments of London, Edinburgh, and a few others.

Of course, the UFC’s successors, the new higher education funding councils in England and Scotland, are planning parallel exercises to measure teaching. The first round of quality assessment will take place later this year. But there is a key difference. Research assessment leads to large resources being channelled towards successful universities; the equivalent teaching assessments, as presently envisaged, will merely pat the worthy on the back and slap the wrists of the unworthy.

Britain’s semi-deliberate shuffle towards a “research university” premier division may run into unforeseen difficulties. First, the parallel between American research universities and their British shadows is far from exact, as the comparison of Oxford and Chicago illustrates. Undergraduate education is more central, even in Britain's most elite universities, partly because our secondary schools have avoided the collapse of standards common in many American high schools; and partly because postgraduate education and professional schools are much less developed on this side of the Atlantic.

Second, American research universities are plagued by doubt. As Chicago’s retiring president, Hanna Gray, put it in a recent speech: “The single most serious problem of our universities is their failure to adhere steadily to their purposes.”

So there is a danger that just as American research universities are reaffirming their commitment to undergraduate education and faith in the homely virtues of institutional integrity, their British equivalents may be moving in the opposite direction. In his valedictory address to the University of California's regents, another retiring president, David Garder, took special pleasure in his efforts to strengthen undergraduate education by increasing tutorials and seminars and cutting class sizes.

Third, the American liberal arts college, sometimes held up as a model for the “teaching universities” now emerging in Britain as a result of the ravages of research assessment, is difficult to reproduce on this shore of the Atlantic. The difficulty, of course, is money. Famous colleges like Bryn Mawr or Oberlin possess physical and financial resources which few of even our best universities enjoy. To expect a beleaguered college of higher education to emulate their efforts is cruelly absurd.

Foreign models must be properly understood — and in their national contexts. Elements we like cannot simply be stripped out and imported. The allure of the United States, which on even the meanest account must contain at least ten of the world's top 20 universities, is bound to be powerful. Further education colleges too are about to jump on the transatlantic band-wagon, reinventing themselves as community colleges as they slip the local authority leash.

But America is far away, and Europe is close by. Just as we exaggerate, or misinterpret, the merits of American higher education, so we tend to underestimate the achievements of European universities. Universities on the wrong side of the Channel and North Sea are dismissed as overcrowded mass institutions under the thumb of the state, which is generally a gross caricature. Today that is perhaps a better description of our own institutions.

Without turning our backs on America, we need to pay more attention to other European models. Standards are no lower than in Britain. Indeed, a Europe-wide assessment of economics courses gave the highest marks to Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Swedish universities and colleges have recently been given much greater autonomy; their quango-equivalent of the funding council has been abolished. A powerful government commission has just reported on ways to improve undergraduate education.

Of course, using European rather than American models has policy implications. The most obvious has to do with funding. The favourite panacea of the more gung-ho vice-chancellors is charging for tuition. But while this is not as common in the United States as these enthusiastic privatisers pretend, it is almost unknown in Europe.

OPENING UP THE GATES AT OXBRIDGE

(Simon Targett, The Financial Times, April 24/25, 1999)

Oxford and Cambridge admit roughly half of their undergraduates from fee-paying independent schools: it is a statistic that embarrasses the universities because less than 10 per cent of Britain’s children are educated privately.

Over the years, the two ancient universities have tried to correct this imbalance, notably by dropping the exclusive entrance examination, which was thought to play into the hands of private schools able to lay on extra tuition for their pupils.

In the last year, the universities, under pressure from a government running an education strategy for “the many, not the few”, have taken further steps.

Oxford has sent out a recruitment video to every state school, while Cambridge has distributed glossy posters aimed at wooing pupils who had never thought once, never mind twice, about applying to one of its elite colleges.

But for Peter Lampl, a self-made millionaire who is behind the government’s scheme to build bridges between the private and state sectors, this is all “just bootstrap stuff”, which will not change the ratio of private to state school pupils with an MA (Oxon) or MA (Cantab) after their name.

It is for this reason that he is putting some of his personal fortune into a series of summer schools - located at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Bristol and Nottingham, two top “redbrick” universities - so that bright pupils from comprehensive schools can get a taste of what it is like to go to a top class British university.

Lampl, who made his money as founder and chairman of the Sutton Company, an investment and private equity firm, went to state schools in Reigate and Cheltenham before winning a place at Oxford in the 1960s.

After finishing his chemistry degree, he moved into management consultancy, travelling to the US and Europe with the Boston Consulting Group, and it was only when he returned to the UK in the mid-1980s that he discovered state school pupils were no longer dominating entry to Oxbridge, as they had in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The change - a result of state schools switching to comprehensive status or, in the case of direct grant schools, joining the private sector was alarming. Among other things, it meant that the universities were probably missing brilliant students from poor backgrounds.

“My best mate’s dad was a bus conductor from the Rhondda Valley and it’s frightening to think he might not get through the system today.” The friend, whom Lampl chose not to name, is now a fellow of the Royal Society, a professor at Nottingham University and, according to Lampl, “may win a Nobel prize one day”.

Lampl commissioned some research, and uncovered what he calls a “horrific statistic”, highlighting the fact that the problem facing Oxford and Cambridge is not just the balance between private and state schools but also between selective and non-selective state schools.

“If you take out the kids from selective state schools,” Lampl says, referring to grammar schools with the 11-plus test and comprehensives such as the London Oratory, where Tony Blair sends his two sons, “then the number of kids that get to Oxford from what I would call genuine comprehensives is about 20 per cent”.

That, he thinks, is shocking and a massive waste because the evidence is that talented pupils are being denied access to Britain's best universities.

Oxford might not have topped the Financial Times league table of top universities, published earlier this month, but it beats Cambridge in the international reputation stakes, according to Lampl.

“Oxford and Cambridge have got an incredible worldwide reputation - particularly Oxford, because of the Rhodes scholarship,” he says. “If you get into Oxbridge, you’re made in this country.”

He debunks the myth that state schools do not produce good enough candidates. “If Oxbridge reflected A-level performance, then it should be at least two-thirds state and one-third private,” Lampl estimates, explaining that 69 per cent of pupils achieving at least three A grades at A level come from state schools.

So, given that state school pupils are good enough for Oxford and Cambridge the next step is to persuade more pupils to apply - and his method of persuasion is the summer school, modelled on the recruitment system favoured by US “ivy league” universities.

At a summer school, sixth-formers spend a week as university students, going to tutorials and social events. Everything is paid for, including accommodation, meals, transport and tuition.

Two years ago, the Sutton Trust, Lampl’s charitable foundation, funded an Oxford summer school for 60 pupils from state schools with no recent record of sending pupils for admission among the dreaming spires.

Of these, one-quarter entered Oxford as undergraduates last year. Boosted by this success, the trust doubled the number of places last year, and extended the initiative to Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham. From this group, 31 per cent of Oxford participants and 36 per cent of Cambridge participants have been offered places on the highly competitive undergraduate courses.

This year, there will be 250 places on the Oxford summer school, 120 at Cambridge, and 75 at Bristol and Nottingham.

Lampl would like to see the Oxford summer school provide for 1,000 pupils. “If that happened - and Harvard’s summer school has about 1,500 - and let us say that around 30 per cent got in, that’s 300 kids, and it’s not just symbolic: you would be impacting on the whole university.”

He knows, however, that there can be no overnight transformation - and partly because of this, his own children, still only infants, will be educated in the private sector.

“I’d like to send them to state schools, but my wife is having none of it,” he says. “If you go to one of the top 100 independent day schools, which account for about 25 per cent of entrants to Oxbridge, your chances of getting to Oxbridge are about 100 times better than they are if you go to a comprehensive.”

What would shake things up would be wholesale reform of the admissions system. Lampl would like to see Oxford and Cambridge follow the American system.

“Oxbridge does next to no recruitment,” he says, especially compared with Harvard. There, at the oldest US university, some 60 full time admissions officers are employed to look for good candidates. In Oxford and Cambridge there are just a handful of admissions people, plus academics in the colleges with part-time responsibility for admissions duties.

Lampl would welcome positive discrimination in the UK of the kind that is popular in the US. “Harvard says, ‘We’ll take a kid from the inner city and they may have lower academic achievement, and we know he’s not going to get as good a degree as a kid from a top private school, but he’s going to go out into the world and he’s going to make a huge difference’.”

Lampl estimates that Oxford could spend just £1.5m to have a US-style system, adding that the sum “is not a lot when you think it is selecting the future leaders of society”.

Until that happens, Lampl fears that Oxford and Cambridge will not witness any deep-rooted change in their students

“I’m a meritocrat. I believe in genuine equality of opportunity, but I think we’re a long way away from it in this country.”

LEARNING CURVE FOR LIFE

(Alan Tuckett, The Times, May 16, 1997)

Adult learning is an untidy business. There is now cross-party consensus that the creation of a society in which people learn throughout their lives is essential if we want the UK to be economically competitive. There is increasing agreement with the argument of the 1996 European White Paper Growth Competitiveness Employment, which highlighted the importance of learning for citizenship and of promotion of social cohesion.

Adults now account for three out of four college students and the bulk of people learning in the workplace. Despite year on year cutbacks in local education authority budgets, thousands of students continue to learn in community settings and, with the National Lottery Charities Board injecting funds into the voluntary sector this year, prospects look good.

There is much to celebrate but we can scarcely feel complacent. It is unlikely that we shall achieve the targets for lifetime learning set out in the National Targets for Education and Training.

The CBI points to the long tale of underachievement in the skills and knowledge base of the British workforce. In The Learning Divide published by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) to coincide with Adult Learners Week next week, Naomi Sargant reports that more than a third of adults say they have done no learning since they left full-time education and eight out of ten see no likelihood of taking up learning in the next three years.

Part-time and temporary work, and self-employment, are growth areas in the labour force yet only 70 per cent of employers recognise responsibility for training their part-time staff, and just 40 per cent train temporary workers, while self-employed people find it hard to find time for updating. Adult Learners’ Week attempts to address the challenge of reaching more and different learners.

Regional independent television will cover outstanding adult learners’ awards — telling stories of students such as 98 year old Esther Leonora Clark from Glossop in Derbyshire, who organised her own French conversation class or Lin Li who arrived from China in 1990 and has studied her way into a job in accountancy.

The BBC is launching a major three-year campaign to encourage people to become IT literate. “Computers Don’t Bite” combines prime-time broadcasting, a BBC learning package online or on CD-Rom and the chance to study locally. Channel 4 will be looking at all the learning going on in pubs.

There is a free national telephone helpline (0800 100 900) available during the week offering advice on studying. There are 5,000 local events, ministerial and parliamentary receptions, and line dances all over the country this Saturday. David Blunkett is learning French with French embassy staff on the London learning bus on Monday morning, and the Orange Book Trust will be launching Orange Reading Groups at bookshops, libraries and adult centres.

By the end of the week 50,000 people are expected to have called the helpline, up to half them long-term unemployed.

Many others will be put off by financial barriers. The vast majority of adults study part-time yet grants favour full-time students and part-timers have to pay their own fees. Unemployed people risk losing benefits if they want to study for more than 16 hours a week, and LEA discretionary grants are disappearing.

No one designed our post-school education and training system with adults in mind. As a result, a key factor affecting your chance to learn is the quality of advice on offer.

The last Government recognised this when agreeing to set up a free “learning line” planned for September. Labour identifies the importance of advice in plans for a “university for industry”. It also recognises the importance of the workplace in reaching new learners. Next Wednesday is Learning in the Workplace Day, and NIACE will report on research sponsored by the EdExcel Foundation which looks at the key role of supervisors and line managers. If you are in work you are likely to ask your boss for advice on what and where to study - yet far too few people know what is on offer.

Labour’s plans to introduce a “learning account” worth £150 for people without post-school learning experience is based on the success of employee development schemes at Ford Rover, Lucas and hundreds of other companies which have recognised the economic sense of supporting workers to learn anything they want to, knowing that skills learnt in one sphere spill over into others.

There are powerful local initiatives, too. “Learning cities” are springing up all over the country, all drawing on the partnership of business and industry, education and training to improve learning opportunities. From electronic village halls in Manchester to the collaboration of Tesco and Microsoft to provide computer centres in supermarkets, the new technologies offer a recognisable potential to include people as well as to exclude some.

And yet the learning divide persists. No single measure can close it. Once adults have had a good learning experience, there is no stopping them. Sharing that experience more widely is the challenge. Imagination, energy and a recognition that there is more to education than schools and universities, all help. But inevitably, so, too, would additional funding.

THE LIFELONG LEARNING REVOLUTION STARTS HERE

(David Blunkett, The Independent, February 26, 1998)

Last weekend’s meeting of the world's leading industrialised nations in London agreed on the importance of lifelong learning if individuals and business are to meet the challenges of globalisation in the new century.

The Green Paper is designed to make a reality of this aspiration, with its radical and practical proposals for learning in the information age. It is as important to our economic and social policy as the drive to raise school standards, and the New Deal for the unemployed.

I am a living example of how lifelong learning can bring about success, whatever an individual's background. That is why I am committed to making it easier for people to learn and to update their skills by creating an individual learning revolution, including the University for Industry, individual learning accounts, and our new advice line - Learning Direct - which is already up and running. We recognise that people will increasingly want to learn at home or in work using modern media such as the Internet and digital television, as well as in more traditional colleges.

This is not to underestimate the importance of colleges and universities. Far from it; they are central to our vision. Having provided further education with an extra £100m for next year and higher education with £165m above Conservative plans - we have already started to redress the neglect of the last few years. The Green Paper will be accompanied by our responses to Lord Dearing's report on higher education and Baroness Kennedy's report on further education.

I want to see the development of high standards in further, adult and higher education so that students can be confident about the quality of teaching they receive. It is important that all lecturers are committed to good teaching and have the skills to deliver it. Improvements in standards, access and accountability in these sectors are essential to help break down the barriers which stop people from learning and employers from tackling their skill needs.

But we must also recognise that lifelong learning will never become a reality without a willingness to embrace change. Small firms are increasingly important. The expectation of jobs for life has given way to worries about job insecurity. Helping individuals and firms meet these challenges requires radical thinking, and today’s Green Paper represents just that.

No previous government has launched for consultation a programme of measures which link new, practical means of delivery with the mechanisms for giving individuals expectations and choice. Building on existing expectations and excellence, we offer through the University for Industry and digital and interactive communication, together with individual learning accounts, a new approach to learning in the 21st century.

The University for Industry has the potential to do for skills in the new century what the Open University has done to open up degree access. By offering courses from basic to advanced skills, it can harness modern technology to improve vocational skills through workplace or home computers, in learning centres, libraries and colleges.

With the increased need for portable skills, individuals will need to take more responsibility and have more choice in developing their education. They will need to “top up” learning at different stages in their adult lives. We will make real our manifesto commitment to kick-starting a million individual learning accounts today. But that is only the beginning. I am confident that introducing new ILAs will herald a more radical transformation in learning and attitudes to learning - with the cards embodying the philosophy and practice of lifelong learning.

Where the industrial revolution was built on capital investment in plant and equipment, the information revolution of the 21st century will be based on knowledge and human capital. It is crucial that we develop a leading role for Britain in the other new industries which will spring up in the new millennium. The Green Paper emphasises the importance of lifelong learning to creativity, culture and self-improvement as well as economic success.

In addition, we will be building on Investors in People, opening up a new dialogue with employees on the skills needed for the future and developing the combined academic and vocational expertise in putting behind us the divisions of the past and building structures fit for the future.

Decisions on further investment will be delivered as part of the comprehensive spending review to be concluded this summer, to coincide with the end of consultation on the Green Paper.

This is the first time that any government has produced a comprehensive strategy for lifelong learning. We will be judged on our success in preparing people for the challenges of the new century by enabling them to benefit from world-class education and training.

WE MUST MAKE THE POACHERS PAY

(John Edmonds, The Independent, February 26, 1998)

Britain has consistently missed the bus when it comes to training for the majority of the workforce. Much to my regret, David Blunkett has passed up a golden opportunity to tackle this problem, with publication of the Government’s much delayed and much watered-down discussion document on lifelong learning.

We were promised a White Paper detailing action on providing learning for 40 years in the home and workplace. Instead, we have a weak and ineffectual Green Paper which, in effect, rules out any government action in this important area for the next four years.

Why the change of heart from a government committed to “education, education, education”? According to David’s advisers, it was the wicked Treasury. Chancellor Gordon Brown simply would not provide the extra resources to fund new lifelong learning programmes. Rather than put up, ministers prefer to shut up altogether, on a policy that is vital to our industrial performance in the 21st century. As a nation, we are extremely good at producing an academic elite from an education system that has not been geared to the educational needs of the majority. But that elite has then shown scant interest in training the rest of the workforce.

Far too many of our young people leave school at 16 without any qualifications, compared with our main rivals on the Continent. The cultural difference in attitudes to training is identifiable, even in the language used. In Britain, post-16 education is viewed as “staying on”, while the rest of Europe describes leaving high school at that age as “dropping out”.

The figures for 16-year-olds leaving with basic intermediate qualifications (GCSEs) show alarming weakness when compared with our main European rivals. Only 26 per cent of the UK working population have such basic qualifications, compared with 49 per cent in France and 55 per cent in Germany. And British companies have a long tradition of poaching skilled staff rather than training their own. Many companies regard it as more cost-effective to poach. In a typical German workforce, average employees receive up to 40 hours off-the-job training a year, compared with 14 hours here at home. In Germany, all vocational training is free to the employer, whereas in Britain employers must pay.

In Germany, training is systematic, and is appropriate for an individual's chosen career. Here it is a free-for-all which depends not just on your career, but also on the attitude of your employer, and a lot of luck.

Despite this unsatisfactory state of affairs, ministers plan to leave employers free to do as little as they like regarding lifelong learning. Laying no obligation on them to provide any will mean continuing the failed policy of the past.

Reliance on voluntarism lies at the root of the UK’s failure to match skill levels and career opportunities abroad. It also explains why so many workers with so much potential never get the chance to develop their talents to the full. Too many people are in dead-end jobs because their learning came to a dead end at 16.

A more powerful approach is needed to make the poacher pay, if we are ever to climb the training mountain facing us. All employers should be required to invest the equivalent of 2 per cent of their pay bill in training, and that should be backed with financial penalties on any employer who falls short.

I accept that unions in the past should have done much more to promote learning opportunities. We have now put that right, and when bargaining in the Nineties we negotiate about building skills as well as paying bills.

Labour has accepted that there does need to be a revolution in training, but without the mandatory involvement of the employers there can be no successful transformation to lifelong learning in the workplace. Once again, we are letting the poachers get away.

THE NEW COLLEGE TRY

(Jodie Morse, Time, January 8, 2001)

At the Rosemont Elementary School in Baltimore, college prep begins early. How early? Starting in prekindergarten, students take some of their lessons from tenured university faculty. Undergraduates serve as teachers’ aides, and kids spend their summer vacations studying on the campus of a nearby college. When students graduate from the fifth grade, they get a handshake and a diploma from a university president. So it was understandable that when a visitor recently toured the school, a bespectacled third-grader asked, “Excuse me, Miss? Are you a professor?”

Not long ago, few Rosemont students were considered college material. Reared in downtown Baltimore’s roughest ZIP code, almost all of them live in poverty. The lucky ones could expect to take classes someday at a community college, but nearly two-thirds of students in this troubled district don’t make it through high school. On standardized test conducted three years ago, not a single Rosemont student read at grade level.

But after a poor showing on a state exam landed Rosemont on Maryland’s list of failing schools, a neighbor volunteered to help. Though Rosemont is still part of Baltimore’s public school system, the school is now managed by Coppin State College, a public institution situated just down the street. The college does everything from hiring Rosemont’s principal to wiring its classrooms to giving its students their annual immunization. Result: last year more than 90% of Rosemont first-graders read at grade level or above. Says Frank Kober, a professor of education at Coppin State: “We had to ask ourselves, ‘If we didn’t help, who would?’”

That question drives what may be the next big thing in education reform: so-called K-16 partnerships, in which colleges work to improve K-12 schools. More than a century ago, universities and their local public schools talked at every turn. In those days before the SAT, many colleges designed their entrance exams, down to which passages from Homer students ought to be able to translate, and high schools tailored their lessons accordingly. But as the nation’s public schools swelled and colleges started recruiting applicants from farther afield, universities lost touch with their neighborhood schools. Over time, the relations became icier, with schoolteachers carping that all they got from colleges were airy theories of school reform, spun from on high.

But in more and more places today, the connections are palpable and practical. Colleges are once again helping neighborhood schools by designing curriculums and training teachers, helping write academic standards and mounting capital campaigns. Some universities are starting charter schools from scratch on their campuses. Five years ago, just two states ran K-16 programs. Today 24 do, according to the Education Commission of the States. That’s on top of scores of partnerships involving private colleges.

Universities are using more than conscience as their guide. When students show up for freshman year ill prepared, colleges pay the price. Today half of all college students must take at least one remedial course at an annual cost of $1 billion to the nation’s public universities. And with the recent ban on affirmative-action programs in Texas and California, outreach is no longer optional. Universities in those states now go door to door not only to recruit minorities, but also to ensure that they complete all the necessary course work and paperwork to get admitted. And with many public schools complaining that their new teachers are poorly trained, K-16 partnerships give universities a proving ground for their education students.

In Maryland’s university system, educators credit K-16 outreach for a drop in remediation rates and a rise in SAT scores and minority enrollment. In a pilot program in Oregon, high school and state college educators are redesigning college-entrance requirements so that admission will hinge on a portfolio of student work graded on a uniform scale. In the California State University system, 54% of freshmen had to take remedial math courses in 1998; the following year only 48% did so.

The payoffs have been even greater on the local level. Consider El Paso, Texas, where one-third of the adult residents cannot read English and last year only 75% graduated from high school. Ten years ago, the University of Texas at El Paso joined with that city’s community leaders and three of its largest and lowest-performing school districts. Today UTEP’s mark is apparent everywhere, from the schools’ cheery hallways (the once drab corridors are papered over with student artwork) to test scores.

University and local officials secured more than $30 million in grants and helped overhaul the district’s curriculum and teaching methods. Some schools wiped out uninspired drills and worksheets in younger grades, and high schools began pushing students to take three years each of rigorous college preparatory math and science. Before UTEP stepped in, just a small percentage of students took Algebra II and Chemistry; now more than half do. Compared with 1994, when just one school in the university-aided districts netted an exemplary rating on state exams, last year 18 did. Most important, the university ascribes this year’s 3% increase in student enrollment to the partnership’s efforts.

The university has benefited in other ways. Teachers in training, who used to crowd into cavernous auditoriums for class, can spend their days on-site at the K-12 public schools. Several mornings a week, a professor lectures in a borrowed room and then the education students fan out to classrooms to perfect their new skills. Says Sally Blake, an associate professor of education at UTEP: “Now I can see what actually works in the classroom with real students and teachers.” Henry Levin, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says that “universities like to cop the attitude that they can make public schools better overnight.” But after working hands-on in those schools, “they become a lot less brash rather quickly.”

Coppin State in Maryland devoted much of the first year of its partnership with Rosemont to mundane matters like making sure the school had working telephones and a fresh coat of paint. The college also took on the more daunting task of educating the school’s parents. Coppin offered child-rearing classes to Rosemont parents, but the instructor soon realized some of the parents had trouble reading the handouts. After surveying school parents about their educational needs, Coppin began helping some work toward high school diplomas.

In other cases, it’s the teachers who need tutoring. Working with a Los Angeles-area high school, a math professor from California State University, Dominguez Hills, spent weeks fashioning an algebra unit in which students would operate a fictive bakery. But half the teachers fell back on their familiar lesson plan. Why? They reportedly felt their algebra skills were not sharp enough to let them field student questions.

Even more jarring, especially to those in academe who enjoy the permanence of tenure, is the dizzying rate of turnover in struggling public schools. Take the partnership between a high school in California’s central valley and a neighboring community college, which won a five-year, $ 300,000 grant from the state. By the second year, 85 % of those involved with the project had left. Says Dave Jolly, who administered the grant for the state: “The principal, the vice-principal and most of the best teachers were all gone.” The partnership fizzled.

Improving public schools without affronting those who run them is a delicate enterprise. And the K-16 movement has spawned more than its share of bruised egos and snubbed feelings on both sides. After a committee chaired by Georgia State University Provost Ron Henry spent months drafting a list of academic-content standards, not a single school district adopted it. Instead, the Atlanta school district drew up its own, albeit similar, guidelines. Says Peyton Williams, the deputy state superintendent of schools: “There’s a quiet kind of resistance.”

And sometimes there is a noisy kind. At Marian Manor Elementary, one of the participating El Paso school, a fifth of the teachers quit rather than follow the new plan, which required them to attend meetings in their free time and spend their weekends at workshops. But more often the tensions are subtler tussles over turf and authority. “Now I answer to two bosses, the college and the school district,” says Russell Perkins, Rosemont principal. “And sometimes I just have to tell them not to look over my shoulder.”

But Perkins, his bosses and his teachers think it’s worth enduring a little friction to hear stories of students like Rosemont fourth-grader Briana Hopkins. Though her mother dropped out of college after two years and her elder brother forsook higher education for a job as a maintenance worker, Briana spent last summer taking enrichment classes at Coppin State and tells her mom now she wants to go off to college one day. Says Briana’s mother JoAnn: “If going to college had been stressed earlier, it could have been totally different for me and my son.” And now it may be for her daughter.

UNIT V. THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION

Main topic: The importance of education Additional topics: Controlling bodies; Class division in education.

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