And another thing…

Amen!

You’re right, of course.

However, to call this an Assisted Places Scheme is disingenuous.

The original Assisted Places Scheme, you might remember, offered financial support to allow bright children to attend private schools if their families couldn’t afford it. There was no hint of setting lower standards – the schools themselves applied the same standards, so nobody was discriminated against. It was a brilliant engine for social mobility. And Labour abolished it as soon as it came to power. I try to avoid intemperate languate when I comment here, but this was an act of wanton cruelty, verging on barbarity.

A real new Assisted Places Scheme would do great things for social mobility. As you rightly identify, a lowered-standards scheme would not.

Absolutely agree.

Access to higher education should be on merit not to meet a quota

I got to Oxford from a state school – first member of my family to get a degree.

I didn’t get any special help. I just had an aptitude for learning and I got there.

Ability and merit – not quotas and social engineering (to get a quick headline)

I couldn’t agree more!!

I also didn’t go to university and I also don’t have a degree.

And guess what – it’s entirely down to my own lack of application when I was a teenager too. Nothing to do with background and everything to do with laziness.

Now, I have a teenage daughter. I desperately don’t want her to make the same mistakes that I made. I fear she might – but no “assisted place” scheme is going to make a difference to that.

Sorry Tim. Just for once you are talking total crap. The assisted place scheme in operation until the accession of Messrs Blair and Brown, who both had a privileged education, took many gifted children out of educational poverty and gave them an education worthy of their precocious talents. Your Party has poured billions into an unresponsive state system and managed to lower educational achievement nationwide. At this time, you have laid yourself open to the charge of idealogical envy. If the State cannot or will not provide opportunities for the gifted child, then creating a method by which such a child can receive an education worthy of the child should be celebrated, not abhored.
PS. I didn’t go to uni through ennui either

Agreed. Most sensible thing I have ever read on this blog. Keep it up Tom.

Tom I agree with you. I failed my 11 plus and went to a secodary modern school.
It was a very good school and I feel I had a better state education than my children.
No one should be given a place they do not deserve. Labour have wrecked this country with their social engineering and we do not need any more.
I was given a great basic education that enabled me to make my way in life.

I still think a Grammer type school for the brightest on selection. and then either a tech school or a bsic school that I had.

On the whole it improves scocisl mobility, and if my children had had the same availabe I am sure they would have done better.

Thank you Tom for speaking your mind on this.

We need more of this from more politicians of all parties.

I don’t know the precise details of the proposal but you are talking bunk. It’s not a level playing field at school level. Working class children go to crappier schools and so will be more likely to get lower grades. Just because you were not posh and were lazy does not mean that hard-working working class children should suffer. You have a severe logic problem here which is nothing to do with people thinking you might be ‘a tory’.
If Universities choose purely on grades then those children who went to the best resourced schools (private) will always win – regardless of ability.

Charlie, of course you have a point, but you really think that artificially improving pupils’ exam grades is the way to improve things?

Well put. You may not have benefited from a university education, but clearly your parents instilled a valuable commodity, severely lacking among the current cabinet, known as ‘common sense’ into you. Sure, anyone can disagree with another about ideological difference, but some ideas are just plain dumb no matter what side of the spectrum one is on.

[...] A new Assisted Places Scheme would be patronising and misguided [...]

I think the story about this scheme is probably garbage – like the scheme itself, but have a fair few comments about your post here.

I think comments should always be shorter than the blog post – so if you want to read, I’ve stuck them on my blog : http://tinyurl.com/non8vg

Charlie Beckett – so what would you suggest should happen about:

a) Those brighter (posh) kids who have the ability to go to Uni, but can’t get in because they had parents who gave them a better standard of living and so have to make way for youngsters with lower academic achievements?

b) Who fills the vacancies for the types of job that those with fewer academic qualifications are more apt for?

The only guaranteed is that the grades of people who graduate from our universities would not be as good, which would have a serious knock-on effect in all areas of employment and reduce our clout in the world, requiring us to ‘import’ even more skilled people than we already do and, ironically, more less skilled people and tradesmen as well because ours have gone to study Mayan pottery instead of bricklaying, plumbing and carpentry.

The terrible news (good news for socialists) is that there will never be a ‘level playing field’ because some parents will always earn more than others and live near better schools and spend a lot of time with their children so they learn that way too.

Why not legislate to restrict the amount of time parents can spend with their children just so they don’t learn too much and become well-adjusted, happy, clever, neighbourly souls and so don’t have an advantage over the parents who spend all night down the pub?

The only solution is: good schools for all children.

But that costs a lot of money and needs political will. Plus the fact, if everyone feels ‘equal’ then New Labour’s job is done and they can go home. All the feminists and ‘gay’ rights activists will be sad and bored. The whole “I’m offended” industry would collapse, sending hundreds of thousands onto the dole.

You’ve just not thought this through, Charlie Beckett!

Well said, Tom. Great to hear your views, rather than the party line.

I blogged about this earlier today, including a quote from the ‘Head of Widening Participation’ (eh?) for a major institution:

“Treating everyone the same way is not appropriate and not equitable”

What’s your view on that?

There is certanly a class war in the Labour party. I thought Labour stood for self improvement, but they just want to pull down everyone to the lowest level.
Not all people can or will achieve the same. The way some scorn people on low paid jobs is very sad.
My fear is the Tories will do no better as they appear afraid to take on the leftie nutters. Its then our children that suffer.

The problem is that if you had two children, virtually identical in everyway, and each with the same intelligence, and sent one to private school and the other to state school, the one privately schooled would come out with better grades. Why is this? Because private schools have more money, and can therefore allocate more resources to individual pupils, so they learn better. Which is the reason people send kids there in the first place, is it not?

The problem with the present admission service is that it assumes that one pupil who earns BBBBB from one school is as capable as someone from another school who earns BBBBB. The truth is that a pupil who can get BBCCC at a state school would probably get something like BBBBC at a private school. Therefore is it not clear that university admission is overall tipped in favour of middle-class (more specifically private school) pupils?

Perhaps Mandelson’s plan isn’t the best way to go about it, but something needs to be done, and it should be up to the government to think of it.

Tom, there have been some articles that you have written recently where I have had to check my browser to make sure I was on the correct political page, this included.

I too am an 11+ failure going to a comprehensive. I sent my daughter to a private school, just to put my cards on the table. As someone who is an avid reader of blogs, as a generalisation, one is struck by the quality of the English, articulacy, spelling and punctuation, by and large. I am sure many of us were state educated.

I also read recently that those educated at state schools with lower A level grades do equally well in their degrees as compared to private school children.

I personally do not like the use of artificial means for social engineering purposes. It is patronising and demeaning, in my opinion.

However an idea worthy of debate.

Define “brighter”.

Four weeks before my exams the maths teacher came out with the classic line “Just do what you want, but leave your books open in case the head master comes in”.

When you have some people taught by the best teachers in the country and others by lazy wasters, perhaps the exams results need to be looked at with the true ability of the pupils in mind?

(and yes I escaped to uni from that dump. I’ve been told by people involved in the local education now that the standards are even worse than they were back then!)

Of course, these stupid schemes are being promoted by a party which knows it will not be in power to implement them. It’s just written to draw up dividing lines:
Tories: nasty
Labour : nice.

The University drop out rates show many who go there are totally incapable of coping… I can see this proposl making drop out rates soar..

I’m undecided whether this is silly season stuff or not, however I thoroughly agree with you here, Tom.

It’s also hard to not appreciate the irony though that, Tom Harris MP, who has (eventually) worked hard to move himself up from a very poor, working class, background, to become a respectable (;-)) member of the community (an MP), on a salary far higher than the national average has, by doing so, scuppered his own children’s chances of getting to university, because of his own Party’s policies. And this, according to Mandelson, will improve social mobility. FFS

I entirely agree Tom, I went to a comp so presumably would’ve been eligible under this scheme, but the simple fact is I wasn’t quite clever enough to get the higher grades (and I worked my arse off).

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind seeing a scheme whereby state-school students are given priority over their private-school counterparts IF they have the same grades. The trouble with things like interviews or looking at extra-curricular activities is that private-school-educated professors pick private-school-educated pupils who have been pushed by their parents in to ticking all the right boxes in terms of extra-curricular stuff.

Well Tom, as you didn’t attend University you didn’t experience sitting in a class with torpid rich kids whose parents had spent tens of thousands of extra pounds to coach them through enough Higher Exams to get a place in the University.

As they were unable to study off their own backs and had never passed an exam the hard way (ie by learning the subject as opposed to practicising old exam papers), they floundered at University where there was no-one to pay to give them that little bit of extra help. So they disrupted everyone else by mucking about and spent the entire year trying to get the lecturers to give them hints about what was in the exam.

Ignoring the torpid, disruptive rich kids; the evidence consistently points to pupils from state schools performing better than those from private schools at University, based on entrance qualifications.

“The problem is that if you had two children, virtually identical in everyway, and each with the same intelligence, and sent one to private school and the other to state school, the one privately schooled would come out with better grades. Why is this? Because private schools have more money, and can therefore allocate more resources to individual pupils, so they learn better. Which is the reason people send kids there in the first place, is it not?”

No people send their kids to private schools mostly for social reasons. They want to maintain or buy higher social status for their kids.

There are, of course, educational reasons too. Private schools do boost pupils Highers or A Level results. However again, the parents aren’t paying £18,000 a year so that their kids remember 5% more Trigonometry on one particular day; a skill that they will probably never need again for the rest of their lives. They are paying £18,000 a year so that their kids leap ahead of someone else’s kids to get a coveted place in prestigious university, preferably on a prestigious course. So I would argue that even the better education argument is a canard, it is about maintaining the higher social status of their children once they leave school.

Totally agree.

I’d also be worried that this may hinder schools from improving.

If, as a parent, you thought that the quality (for want of a better word) of the local school meant lower exam results were needed would you push so hard for improvement?

Perhaps a better way is to pick the best and the brightest out as early as possible and give them the support they need to achieve?

Triffid

I think your comment is a bit nonsensical. Can you ever imagine this happening in practice?

If a parent knew that school X was worth two more points, why would they try less hard to work with the school and their children?

It could easily work the other way and their child would then realise that a place at Medical School might be in their grasp, rather than Biochemistry, etc.

Equality for all… Is that really a difficult notion for people to understand?

I feel really sorry for those kids whose home life leads to various difficulties such as single handedly bringing up younger siblings or having to work to get additional household income but we cannot legislate for the masses based on a few heartbreaking examples.

PS. Please post on the half million RIPA requests made for non-terrorism related incidents such as dog fouling…

Tom, I agree. But wasn’t this the case during the Tories?? I personally went to a grammer school but had an assisted place (where someone else paid towards it). If I had not, I would not have gone.

The real reason imo that “middle-class” children do better is that the attitude of the parent is that you should study. My parents instilled the value that education is important, whereas I find the “lower-class” parents don’t overly care what their children do!

Disclaimer: Blatant generalisations used. There are exceptions!

Chris Upon Thames,

I don’t know. Most parents would do anything to see their child succeed (and I’m not knocking that.) Pretty sure someone would try to work out “the maths” on places.

However, the main problem with the proposal I think is still basis of what we view as equality. Do we want everyone to have the same chance of success or everyone to get the same result?

I think we want everyone to have the same chances. The school system can’t deliver this because the private provision will always produce better results or else they would be out of business.

There is a visible disparity between what school results tell us and what university results tell us. That is because the school system is distorted by an overly influential private sector.

Given that Universities need to be delivering the best possible graduates, it would seem obvious to me that they discount the grade inflation that comes with privately education when assessing pupils. If they know that someone with AAA from a private school is more likely to get a 2:1 than someone with ABB from a state school is more likely to get a First, why should they ignore this fact?

I guess it is bit like actuarial judgements. We may not like the fact that young men pay more for car insurance than old women. However it is not unfair, even though some young men are good drivers and lots of old women are menaces on the road. On the same vein we don’t expect that old women will drive badly because they have already paid for cheap insurance.

Chris, are you off your medication again?

Using statistics like this (or using statistics at all, but that’s another story) is insane. Stats tell us that minorities do better at university than whites, should we grant all places to minorities?

Girls do better at school than boys (because of girls?) so should all female A-level results be suitably discounted?

We have a level playing field but some people’s parents can afford better kit, so what? That’s no reason to start changing the rules or raise one end of the pitch.

If you have a point, please make it in a civilised way.

I am trying to unpick my way through your non-sequiturs.

It is not insane to use information that the advantage that private school pupils get at school, disappears by the time they finish university. Since we know this and since universities have a mandate to get the best possible results, any university that adjusts for this will get better students and better results.

I am at a loss to understand the relevance of your point about minorities. And I think you are not really making any sort of point at all about girls.

I do hesitate from sporting metaphors: it is too easy to use them to jusitfy unthinkingly one’s own opinions, as you have so ably shown… However to continue your metaphor, should a football team only play the players with the best kit and ignore better players hampered with cheap boots?

Once you have got your thoughts in order, I would appreciate a reply.

I am probably older than most of those who have posted comments so far. I went to the local grammar school after passing the 11 plus, and eventually to University. My children went to the local comprehensive. I felt they were not pushed enough, but they did OK. But now that same school is a disaster! Discipline is non existent and results dire. I declare an interest – my grandchildren go to private schools. As an aside, I was amongst the first to do the new A-levels: maths, applied maths, and physics. Twenty five years later, one of my sons also did A-level maths. It was not much more demanding than the O-level I had taken years before. God knows what the standard is today. After A-level but before University, whilst waiting for National Service, I taught maths in a secondary modern school. The facilities were poor, but the determination of the children and their teachers was a joy to behold. Many either transferred to the grammar school, or did O-levels at the modern and then went to the local tech. About ten years later, I met a pupil I had taught who told me of his pride at going to university and of his will to succeed (by evening classes in the first instance) after having failed his 11-plus. Social mobility was higher then than now. People succeeded by their own and their families efforts. Where have we gone so wrong?

Chris, you presented the metaphor of car insurance, I thought I would present my opinion in a similar vein.

Your idea is that the output of universities is the key thing here (I think – apologies if I have misread your intention) I may or may not agree with that but it is the selection procedure that we really disagree on.

Pupils with financially advantaged parents may well do artificially well in exams and so get into university perhaps in place of someone who may ultimately have done better. So what? That is why parents pay to have their children better educated. No matter how good the state system there will always be a potential advantage to wealthier parents via private tutors etc.

This is not a bad thing. To get back to a metaphor, should the kids who have trained hard with good coaches be overlooked by the team manager because they have had that coaching?

Parents already try to ‘game’ the system by paying for private schools or moving to a good school district. What you are suggesting is micromanagement of a national standard to try to weed out the slightly worse rich kids from the slightly better poor ones.

We should have in place a system that treats people equally and as equals. That humans are not inherently equal is no reason to abandon your principles.

PS. I never have my thoughts in order.

Universities, like schools, are measured on the success of their teaching (as well as on the success of their research which is not particularly relevant)

I assume that a university’s purpose is not really to be a finishing school for the upper and middle classes, but to turn out the best-educated graduates.

If they know that some school leavers appear to be better than they actually are, and we can see that private education is a consistent indicator of being oversold, then the universities ought to take this into account or they will pick the wrong students.

I don’t think a sports team should overlook a well-coached player if the intention is to produce a successful result that week. However if the aim of the coach was to pick the players who had the best potential in six or nine years time they would be off their trolley to pick the kid with the extra learnt technique over the a kid with potential and commitment.

Did you hear the radio report this morning from St George’s Medical School? They have been taking students with lower than standard A Levels, if the student can show that they have achieved well in an adverse situation. It is too soon to see what difference this is making in final results and clinical training, but St George’s are already saying that the exam scores have equalised by the end of the First Year!

Universities are publicly funded institutions. Private schools, firms etc. can have selection criteria if they so wish but public must be for the people. To this end the criteria for entry has to be results.

To second guess the exam boards (even though they need it!) is not in the universities’ remit. We have standard exams with standard results.

What would you say to pupils being privately educated for 5 years then moving to a local, underfunded comprehensive for their exams? They would not only over-achieve compared to their peers they would then get an increase because of the school they went to. Madness this way lies.

Incidentally, school results are nowhere near the best way to find out who will do well at university or in life. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

As you say Tom, the way forward is to improve the education in state schools.

Having gone to a comprehensive, and been lucky enough to have excellent teachers in the main I did end up at University and come out with a degree.

Though it was also helpful that I came from a home in which education was valued.

If I could, I would re-introduce grants. Being burdened with debts isn’t a good way to entice people to go into further education.

On the keeping places for the low scorers, all that is likely to happen is that more students will fail, assuming universities don’t lower their standards, this won’t help the student nor the universities.

Olden Labour will always favour lowering grades to allow the ‘disenfranchised’ to feel they’ve succeeded.

This is because they have a bizarre belief that being poor is the same as being thick.

I am not surprised that people who pay a fortune for the advantages that private education buys fight tooth and claw to keep them.

The world functions by making judgements about the quality of information. If the information you receive consistently shows that pupils from private schools underperform at University relative to their state school contemporaries, it would be remiss of the Universities to ignore this.

Universities are, of course, self-governing institutions. They also operate and recruit students and staff in a global market. It is not in their interests to dumbdown their intake by allowing an oversold intake.

You have a standard test that anyone can take with independent blind marking and these results you decide will inform your decision about who you allow into your institution.

Why are you making the universities the ones who do the levelling up? You are then letting the job market or any other part of society that uses exam results have to work out if a school was good or not.

The perfect solution would be to have marking done by people who know if the school the person came from was private/public/deprived and adjust their marking criteria accordingly.

And while we’re at it, why not adjust university results based on whether you had the finances to study all the time or if you had to hold down a job while studying.

I want to be treated as me, I feel better for having triumphed over adversity to make the grade and thus probably worked harder than my silver-spoon university friends (or not, I’m lazy) so maybe the university results are a product of working class people working hard rather than “an overly influential private sector”

If this is the case, or even if it isn’t, what you are suggesting is harming the prospects of this generation of kids based on the fact previous generations who came from the same district were lazy. There is nothing fair or equitable about that.

I would also like to point out that in the current climate even middle class kids recognise that it is tough to get anywhere without a degree and so are much more likely to work hard at university than there forebears.

Why should anyone bother reaching for the bar if they know it’ll be lowered?

Tom: why reach for the bar if the rich kids have pinched it?

There is a lot of self-justification going on here. Why are people so keen to reinforce privileged positions?

I am also astonished by the constant association of poverty and laziness. It’s damn hard to get into University in a school where 90% of the kids have no idea or wish to. The fact that kids from these schools do make it, is testament to how hard they have to work.

I also think it is utterly laughable to suggest that poor kids will be harmed by this. This is tortuous logic: of course the real people who fear this are those who use private schools to buy advantage and suddenly realise that they will have to play on a more level playing field.

Tom: I never had you as a sink-or-swin, trickle-down sort of guy. Why are you peddling such tosh? The bar is still there, no-one is proposing unconditional entry to universities: I think a proposal that looks at the real potential of students is good. I accept that this shouldn’t be too crude, but the facts speak for themselves.

A good point Tom, but my comment was aimed at Chris…

Chris seems to think that the output of universities is all that’s important. I can’t agree. I think ‘the ends justifies the means’ is a dangerous concept – on both sides of the assisted places argument.

It just reminds me too much of companies/councils having quotas of minorities or disabled people or women or any other group that needs a patronising step up in life over everyone else.

I think you’ll find that all anyone actually asks for is a fair crack of the whip and I can’t see any assistance scheme as fair, can you?

Whilst I understand your concerns about positive discrimination schemes, I think I am proposing something that is evidence based.

Private schools distort the market in educational achievement: it is their raison d’etre. They ensure that there is not a fair crack of the whip for the majority. And, crucially, the evidence points to it.

University education is currently rationed on the basis of school results. The only logical reason for doing so is that they are the best indicator we have of actual intelligence and application.

Something that would refine this to take out a very well known and explicit distortion, which is obtained on an unfair basis, looks like a good idea to me.

I am not proposing quotas or postive discrimination, I am saying that some attempt to remove the effects of this distortion to get closer to actual intelligence and application would be a good thing.

@Chris upon Thames

“Private schools distort the market in educational achievement: it is their raison d’etre. They ensure that there is not a fair crack of the whip for the majority.”

Only the government can ensure that there is not a fair crack of the whip for the majority.

Chris, I think you’ll find the laziness I spoke of was aimed at previous generations of rich kids who knew they could cruise through life never having to work hard due to daddy’s money. I agree that these kids may have accidentally gained an education while playing at being the dilettante in boarding school and gained access to higher education at the expense of a better candidate who didn’t have the breaks.

What these proposals do is punish/benefit people based on what people who previously went to their schools did. That is, in every way, wrong.

If you want true equality you would have to randomly assign each child a school and have them attend, away from friends, family and anything else that could affect their exam results.

[...] appointed a dancing tsar whilst Subrosa has a blog about the Ofcom report on Scottish Broadcasting. Tom Harris hits out at the proposed assisted placement scheme that is allegedly being considered by Lord [...]