Dear Damian Hinds, spare schools those Protestant virtues of charity and thrift
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Loading... - Sabina Daniels
- 25 Sep 2021
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One of the odd things about being a parent is that we get a pretty good picture of what’s going on in our children’s schools but it’s hard to know whether this is a peculiarity of that school or part of a pattern. This is ideal for you, because when a story surfaces about something going wrong in a school, it’s up to you to say whether it’s typical or just a one-off.
For the past few months, I’ve been hearing and reading reports of cuts to school budgets, with consequent cuts in staff, subjects being taught, and maintenance of school premises. You and your department have tried to tell us this isn’t really the case and we have been served up the Protestant virtues of moderation, thrift, charity and efficiency instead. It suddenly becomes something noble that publicly maintained schools are levying parents for glue.
Coming from the same ideological outlook, Sats, Ebacc and progress 8 have imposed a hierarchy of worth on what subjects under-16s should study, with the arts being downgraded as less necessary than “tough” subjects such as English, maths and science – which have been made tougher just to prove they really are tough.
Again, as parents, all we can do is read the reports from our own school governors and wonder if the glue levy is just in our hard-up school. We muse on why an older child was able to make a real breakthrough in his learning by doing drama or music at GCSE, but a younger sibling hasn’t got that opportunity. Oh well, we say to ourselves, it’s just the luck of the draw in our school.
For the last few years, some of us have said that one of the problems with primary school Sats is that they push some schools – usually against their best intentions – into “teaching to the test”. When we make this claim, it’s not based on data – that would be extremely hard to collect: only long-term observations in a significant number of schools across England would give us that. Instead, it’s based on what teachers and parents say when we meet up and talk. It’s very clear that this phenomenon of teaching to the test is not the fault of individual class teachers but a consequence of assessment being tied into Ofsted inspections and league tables. Mysteriously, it’s taken until this month for Ofsted to concede this is the case.
One way parents can get a broader picture can be to talk to each other on social media; another is if someone with a bit of traction in the mainstream media does a survey. Purely anecdotally, I’ve been reading many reports saying that music is fast becoming a non-subject, a non-qualification and a non-activity in many schools. Or worse: the only pupils who can take music are those whose parents can afford it.
Meanwhile, the Times Educational Supplement was able to secure the views of some 5,000 school governors and found, for example, that 64% reported cuts in support staff, 55% cuts in teaching staff, 55% cuts in subjects on offer, 42% increase in class sizes, 42% cuts in spending on premises and (from a different source) real terms spending per pupil has been cut by 8% since 2010.
How would you describe all this, Mr Hinds? Raising standards? Investing in the future? Or a shameful decline in the quality of education being offered to our children?
Yours, Michael Rosen
