Schools

Thursday

10 Mar 2022
Katy Balls
Katy Balls
The hidden victims of lockdown: an interview with the Children’s Commissioner

When schools were closed during lockdown, it wasn’t only education that suffered. The classroom can offer an opportunity to identify children in danger of abuse, with tens of thousands of pupils on the at-risk register. Take away schools and this safety net vanishes. Now and again, stories emerged of just how badly things went wrong: for example, the murder of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes at the hands of his stepmother. ‘If that little boy had been in school, I do believe there would have been an extra chance to hear him,’ the Children’s Commissioner, Rachel de Souza, tells me, when we meet at The Spectator’s offices to discuss her mission to help the hidden victims of lockdown. ‘The safeguarding effect of him not being in school meant his voice wasn’t heard.

The hidden victims of lockdown: an interview with the Children’s Commissioner
Andrew Adonis
The case for state boarding schools

My philosophy of education has always been simple and I believe it unites right and left: namely, what wise parents would wish for their child, so the community should wish for all children. It’s a paraphrase of R.H. Tawney, who — being a socialist — said ‘state’ rather than ‘community’. I much prefer ‘community’ since it is an injunction to us all, including to local government, charities and social organisations, as well as to the state and its servants.

Thursday

16 Sep 2021
Toby Young
Toby Young
Has Boris Johnson given up on free schools?

For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a moment of great pride. We gathered in the assembly hall, surrounded by the politicians and officials who’d helped us, to celebrate the school’s tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’d achieved. Not only has the school thrived — it is now part of a growing academy chain — but where we led, others followed. As the first school of its type to be approved by Michael Gove, WLFS showed what a determined group of volunteers could achieve, and there are now more than 600 free schools. Contrary to the predictions of the critics — too many to mention — this is one education policy that seems to have worked. The Department for Education hasn’t published school level GCSE and A-level results for 2020 and 2021, but the 2019 exam data casts free schools in a good light.

Has Boris Johnson given up on free schools?

Thursday

2 Sep 2021
Anthony Seldon
Have we let exams become too important in shaping schools?

I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’ ‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’. Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed of their professionalism, were teaching physics GCSE, rather than physics, and Spanish A-level, rather than Spanish.

Have we let exams become too important in shaping schools?
Nic Rackow
Zoom schooling sounded like fun – until reality kicked in

Inever realised how much I enjoyed the sweaty, overcrowded journey into school until it was replaced with a half-asleep crawl from my bed to my desk, 30 seconds before my first lesson was supposed to start. It’s a routine which most of us students have had to get used to since March last year and it was a massive change. When we were first sent home from school, it wasn’t with a fanfare, but with a bleak mass email and assurances from our teachers that we’d be back after Easter.