As I was saying. OMG!!!
Theresa sodding May. You couldn't make her up. Nobody would believe it.
Let's just tick off a few of the more pressing problems facing the country at the moment.
- Well there's Brexit and the Three Wise Monkeys who are supposed to be sorting it all out for us.
- There is the NHS in terms of both the junior doctors' dispute and also the general desperate lack of funding
- Then there's Syria. The US and Russia are trying to sort out some sort of solution.
- There is also the more general question of the Middle East including Palestine and the Saudi bombing of the Yemen, and the part played by the British arms trade in this.
- There is also, as Jeremy Corbyn pointed out at PMQs, a serious housing crisis in this country.
- There is the question of HS2 and what should happen about it.
- There is the question of a third runway at Heathrow: yea or nay.
- There is the question of zero-hours contracts.
- There is the badger cull.
- There is... Oh I can't be bothered to go on.
Any of these problems must be worthy of her attention? Yes? Well just you wait a minute. The most important and pressing thing at the moment is none of these. The most pressing problem at the moment is whether we should allow the reintroduction of grammar schools. You really couldn't make it up. Life imitating fiction? This is life imitating serious drug fuelled fantasy.
For a start where did it come from? I mean successive governments have been buggering about with the education system since I don't know when. Academies? What's that all about? Free Schools? Bollocks, basically. Any system which is more complicated is going to be more expensive and also more unwieldy. Take for example Gauleiter Tate and his school. sorry academy, in Margate. Kid's wearing the wrong shade of black? Send 'em home. One parents said he was going to complain to the LEA. Good luck with that mate. It's an academy. Nothing to do with the LEA. Giving headteachers more control will drive up standards. Oh yeah? How about giving them more teachers, smaller classes and better facilities? Would that not help? Heads in LEA schools are pretty powerful anyway but there is a limit to what you can achieve with the resources you are given. And austerity has cut the money available to Local Authorities. It's quite simple really.
Into this unholy porridge which is our education system in England Mrs May is proposing to add some more interesting ingredients. She wants it to be possible for any secondary school to become a grammar school provided the parents don't object. What does she mean by a grammar school? Well it seems to be one which selects by ability at the age of eleven. Why eleven? Because it's always been eleven.
Only it hasn't. The introduction of middle schools in the sixties until their falling out of favour after a peak in 1984 meant that the transition was often at twelve or thirteen depending on the model. There are all sorts of technical reasons why middle schools were not more popular, not least the fact that they had to be, by law, classed as either primary or secondary, when clearly they were neither in the traditional sense, and a three tier education system was never properly adopted. It is instructive that in the independent sector the transition from prep to senior school has, for boys at least traditionally been at age thirteen.
Anyway to return to Mrs May's proposals, which I must say seem very ill thought out, suggest that any secondary school can apply to become selective. What happens if they all decide to do that? If every secondary school in the country has an entrance exam what happens to the concept of a universal education system. What happens to those who don't pass the exam? And what happens if say three out of four schools in a catchment area decide to become selective? Where does that leave the fourth? Will efforts be made to ensure that the quality of teaching in the non-selective schools is as good if not better than in the grammar schools? After all there is reason to think that less able pupils need more help to benefit from the education system than those who are considered more able by dint of an exam. An exam by the way which we are assured will be coaching proof, so that wealthier parents cannot subvert the system by paying for extra coaching for their offspring to help them gain access to the hallowed halls. Schools will also be required to take a percentage of pupils from poorer backgrounds, although the mechanism for this has not been explained. Means testing anyone?
It is clearly a load of old ordure, but if we examine Mrs May's own education history we can see that she went to a grammar school which became a comprehensive while she was there. Obviously the effect on her psyche was so great and the hurt so deeply embedded that only now is it coming back to the surface and she is using her position to exact her revenge and put everything right. Of all the myriad ways she could help the disadvantaged in our society, this is possibly one of the least sensible, ranking alongside offering a free subscription to the Lady to any worker on a zero hours contract, to give them something to read while they wait for the phone to ring; or a buy-one-get-one-free offer on designer handbags to anybody on family tax credit.
However despite this being quite clearly bonkers, it is not the most bonkers suggestion she has made. Even more bonkers is the idea that faith schools should be freed of restrictions on who they accept. Mrs May wants to see more faith schools, particularly Roman Catholic faith schools on the grounds that they generally achieve good results. Catholic bishops are unhappy that they have to accept 50% of non-catholic pupils and therefore will not countenance the establishment of more catholic schools. Removing this restriction would, argues Mrs May, encourage them to open more of their excellent establishments. For Christ's sake what is the woman thinking of? At a time when society is becoming more divisive, when religious hate crimes appear to be on the increase, what better way to heal the rifts than to encourage different faiths to set up their own school and teach exclusively to those of the same faith. I have no time for religion, I think it is fairy stories to control the population, but I acknowledge that not everybody thinks the same as me and to some people it is very important.
However what is also very important is they we each have a respect and understanding of each other's point of if we are all to live in peace on this relatively small island. This will not be achieved by segregated education. Children should be taught together with those of other faiths and those of none, in order that they realise that we are all fundamentally the same. We all sweat during PE, we all fart if we eat beans, we all hate maths on Monday afternoon and so on. Religion can be taught in the context of multi faith comparative religion and ethics also should be taught in schools. I worked for a while with a man, an Irish catholic who, when he discovered that I did not believe in Hell, could not understand why I bothered to behave honestly. His concept of honesty was circumscribed by punishment and threat. He was a genuinely nice man but had no concept of ethical behaviour as a lubricant in society. Why would Mrs May want to perpetuate this?
I might add that I am not personally happy with the idea that faith schools are also state schools. If the different faiths want to indoctrinate their children, then let them pay for it themselves, and I think that if they do then Ofsted should inspect the hell out of them to make sure they are not breeding hate.
The more I see and hear of Mrs May, the less impressed I am. She was a bloody awful Home Secretary and she is shaping up to be a bloody awful Prime Minister. The fact that Andrea Leadsom (remember her) might have been even worse is no consolation.
Please get a grip.
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