It is handy to have some crunchy stats on the current state of British Education:
* 11 year-olds: 25% leave primary school without sufficient ability in reading and writing to tackle the secondary school curriculum.
* 14 year-olds: almost 30% do not reach the expected levels in English, Maths and Science to tackle GCSEs.
* 16 year-olds: almost 60% do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in all the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.
* After 11 years of state education at a cost of over £75,000 per child, pupils are leaving school functionally illiterate, innumerate and unskilled:
* 40% do not achieve at least a C grade in GCSE English.
* Some seven million adults in England cannot locate the page number for plumbers in an alphabetical index to the Yellow Pages.
* 47% would be unable to achieve a grade G at GCSE maths.
* The OECD finds that Britain has the second highest level of low-skilled 25-34 year olds in the 30 countries of the OECD – twice the level of Germany or the USA.
(see this page). I always believed that in a world of the internet, in a country with a free press, statistics like these would be widely known. Unfortunately neither parents nor politicians wish to face the reality of the British education system today. The Labour Party has a visceral hate of private education to the extent that a politician like Charlie Falconer was told that he could never be selected for a winnable seat because he had chosen to have his children privately educated. The Liberal Party, trying to position themselves to the left of Labour have a broadly similar position.
The Conservative Party is subtly different. Mavericks like Boris Johnson occasionally point out the nakedness of the emperor, but generally they are too timid to take on the Education establishment. Any discussion of the failings of state schools tends to end up looking at the relative success of private schools, and it is an article of faith in the Conservative that to support private anything is to throw away votes. I think that the Cameroons secretly like to have a failing state system, because this means that their own offspring, privately educated, have huge advantages over the rest of their cohort in the job market. Politicians may look to their own jobs first, but the jobs of their offspring are not far behind.
Maybe I am being too cynical. Certainly many people realise that state schools fail not only bright kids, but average ones too. But as the main parties agree to keep any radical reform of Education off the agenda things will remain dismal. No wonder that nearly all new jobs created in the economy have gone to foreigners. As the Economist points out "in the two years from the spring of 2005, 540,000 foreigners have found jobs in Britain while 270,000 British workers have lost them." (here).
One of these days a politician will speak out about this subject without hypocrisy. I am not going to hold my breath.
