In this week’s New Statesman, Melissa Benn returns to consider Lynne Reid Bank’s classic novel, The L Shaped Room, fifty years after it was first published.…
Monthly Archives: September 2010
…and this…..
Excellent piece by Simon Jenkins this morning on the many many wrong turnings of governments and politicians on education, localism, fairness etc over the years. There is now a real opportunity for the new Labour leader, if he or she is brave enough, to suggest something quite radical and rational on the schools front. It would not only be the right thing to do, it would be massively popular.…
……….and this………….
And another excellent piece on unchristian practices in successful faith schools…….…
I wish I’d said that ( 2)
Great piece in today’s Guardian about exactly what’s wrong with the government’s education agenda. It is in fact part of a speech by Huntingdon headmaster Peter Downes, in favour of his anti free school motion that was carried overwhelmingly at yesterday’s Lib Dem conference. The argument is put with utter lucidity; hence its inclusion in my ongoing series……
Here goes:
The academies bill was rushed through parliament in July with a speed and urgency normally reserved for anti-terrorist legislation. In spite of that, the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords managed to bring about some helpful amendments and they deserve our thanks for that.
However, the substance of the act we now have on the statute book is potentially a very significant threat to the stability, fairness and viability of our educational system.
Before the election, Michael Gove was quite explicit: “My aim is to transform state education in this country irreversibly for the better.”
However laudable the intentions, I think it is hasty and misguided to promulgate an irreversible reform of education within 11 weeks of coming into power.
In any case, Gove’s educational vision is based on a number of fallacies. I want to concentrate on just five.
First, he is very keen to liberate schools from “local authority control”. Local authorities do not “control” schools. They used to. When I first became a secondary school head in 1975, the LA told me how many teachers I could employ and how many administrative staff. They organised the cleaning and the grounds maintenance. But the educational world has changed. LAs today do not control schools. It is the head and governors who make the vast majority of the decisions as to how the school functions. The LA is there to provide a whole range of services and support, including: curriculum advice and challenge; coordination of admissions; and the cost-effective provision of enough school places for children coming through the system.
Clearly some LAs perform these functions more effectively than others but there is no justification for dismantling a structure that has an essential and invaluable role.
The greatest interference in schools today comes not from local authorities but from central government: a highly prescriptive national curriculum and shelf-loads of guidance; an oppressive inspection regime; an obsession with targets and putting schools into categories; and a never-ending stream of education acts and hundreds of regulations.
Gove’s accusatory finger of excessive control should be pointed at central not local government.…
Thought for the day
On a recent discussion on pensions and retirement, Newsnight chose, rather ingeniously, to flag up the age of every speaker in brackets after their name. A joke? A way of putting content in context? Both, perhaps.
It certainly made me think, if I am ever involved in an education discussion on that same programme, I will suggest that they put the name of the school each participant send/sent their child/children to after their name. No, not the name of the school they went to, interesting as that is. But their choice of school as a parent, a better indicator of their preferences/values etc. Yes, of course, I see the complications; children switch schools; siblings go to different schools etc
Let’s say we could reduce that technical difficulty, reduce the description of choice to essences, I doubt that the programme makers or some others taking part on the programme would agree to it, for a whole host of reasons.
However, I still think it would be worth doing and including the presenters. School choice is interesting. It’s also rather revealing. If the Main Presenter starts laying into a head teacher, say, about the poor performance of urban state schools and yet we see after his/her name ( Cheltenham Ladies College) just to use a random and most unlikely example….is that not a useful, qualifying fact for us to throw into the equation; one that might provoke a momentary ‘ hang on a minute, what’s going on here..’ kind of response? Similarly, if a leading liberal commentator advocates comprehensive education for the nation’s children but we see they sent their own children to a fee paying school…. and so on.
I’ll let my loyal blog readers know if anything comes of this idea….…
The trouble they’ve (not yet) seen
Read Melissa Benn’s latest piece in Public Finance magazine on the looming protests against Coalition policies.…
Selling off the schools system
Michael Gove says his education policies will help Britain’s poorest pupils, but will they just compound the social divide? Read Melissa Benn’s latest feature in this week’s New Statesman.…
Better late than never: the great Theodore Dreiser
Below, a piece I wrote about eighteen months ago, for an ongoing series on normblog and which I never put up on my own site.
So here it is:
It is not always easy to write about a favourite book or even to understand why some works are so much more meaningful to us than others. But with Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser’s second and intensely tragic novel, I am acutely aware of how much of the book’s power is, for me, tied to memories of the last days in the life of my mother, Caroline Benn, proud American, socialist, scholar, lover of 19th-century novels and a great admirer of Dreiser.
In the autumn of 2000, when she was dying of cancer, slowly and painfully but with tremendous humour and bravery too, my mother and I talked with the intensity of those who know time is fast running out. It may even have been her who urged me to read Jennie Gerhardt. I had seen her taking notes on the novel, part of her research for her sadly unfinished final project, to write a history of socialists and the socialist movement in America. Jennie Gerhardt is largely set in Ohio, her dearly loved home state to which she returned for a long visit every year.
Analytical to the last, my mother saw Dreiser’s novel largely as a forensic dissection of a particular moment in American capitalism while I admitted to bouts of uncontained weeping at the cruelty of the story’s conclusion, the human tragedy of Jennie herself.
It’s obvious to me now, and as it was to her then, that my profound sadness was intimately connected to her terminal illness and – a slightly different thing, this – our shared knowledge of her imminent death. Dreiser writes powerfully of the simple tragedy of mortality itself – rich or poor, his characters expire acutely aware of their existential isolation – but he also touches directly on the poignant truth that, however vulnerable a mother may be, she is always, if a good mother, in some way more protective of her child than of herself.
In one of the saddest parts of the book Jennie Gerhardt is forced to hide the fact of her illegitimate daughter Vesta’s existence from her rich lover, a decision she comes bitterly to regret and so revoke, only later on to lose Vesta to a childhood illness just at the moment she needs her most.…
Latest writing
THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY
The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War
PETER MANDLER, 2020
Oxford: Oxford University Press
361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145
Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.
In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.
On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…
Latest news & events
A Cold War Tragedy
Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’
Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.
More information here.
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