Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Brighton Schools lottery





Brighton and Hove Council has become the first education authority in Britain to allocate secondary school places by lottery. Nothing could better demonstrate the failure of British social policy since 1945.

Probably the most popular state secondary school in Brighton is the one in the pictures - Cardinal Newman, a Catholic establishment. It is odd how so many people who are vehemently anti-religious are happy to send their children to church schools when they recognise that church schools tend to provide a higher standard of education. A friend of mine sent his daughter there and was livid when she decided to become a Catholic - he would have been less put out if she had been in trouble with the police, got pregnant or become a drug addict. What did he expect?

How things have changed - at one time Catholic schools were notorious for having the roughest pupils and severe discipline. Newman is over-subscribed with Catholics and Anglicans, so if you aren't eligible and can't afford to go private, the fate of your children will depend on the Council's lottery.

The background to this needs to be spelled out. Troublesome children tend to come from deprived families. Usually this means poor families and these tend to have concentrated in particular parts of the city, mostly the large housing estates on the edge of town. So the schools that include these estates in their catchment areas have more than their fair share of troublesome children, whose presence disrupts entire classes. Not only do they make it difficult for anyone to learn anything - they also drive away many of the best teachers, and the entire setup discourages potentially good teachers from entering the profession at all.

Parents who are concerned about their children's education want to avoid living in the catchment area of schools whose intake includes children from the council estates. It isn't snobbery - they only want to make sure that their children do not waste their time at school and keep away from bad company. The effect of this is to drive up house prices - really, land values - in the areas away from the council estates, within the catchment areas of what have become the better schools.

The council's lottery policy will ensure that every school in the city will have its quota of disruptive children and that everyone who goes to school in the state sector will have to put up with such children in their classroom and have their education damaged in consequence.

The real question that has to be asked, though, is why, more than sixty years after World War 2, we have spawned a permanent and growing underclass, whose children so many of the rest of us are desperate to keep our own well away from? This is the extent of the failure of British social policy.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The Zombie Train that refuses to die

The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer