Of all countries on Earth, the UK should be the easiest one to spell. Fortunate, as the country has a new ed-ju-cay-shun sekrettary, Lucy Powell, who thinks spelling tests are “draconian” attempts to “micro-manage” the minds of children, and that “creativity” in such matters ought to be encouraged instead. If she was ever admitted to hospital needing an operation on her ilium, but came out having half her ileum removed by an illiterate surgeon, she might change her mind.
Amongst the words Powell finds too “obscure” for children to know are “knight,” “explosion,” “adventure,” and “through”—or possibly “threw,” who cares? Under Powell’s lax left-wing Labour Party regime, the average British schoolkid probably now thinks a “homophone” is someone who doesn’t like gay weddings. One teaching union complains spelling tests leave English schoolchildren feeling “too scared to write.” They make Welsh schoolchildren feel positively suicidal.
The general reaction of the British right towards Powell’s recent call to burn the nation’s dictionaries has been negative. Former Conservative Party Education Secretary Michael Gove, who was responsible for introducing the spelling tests in the first place, called Powell’s dumbing-down drive an exercise in wanting “to bring back stupid.”
During his own time in office, Gove strove to reorient the English school system back towards possessing its traditional academic rigor, with some apparent success. Yet certain educationalists, like Katharine Birbalsingh, famous as “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” disagree that Gove’s reforms had really made English education all that overly academic at all. She has observed that students still only needed to gain a score of 20 percent on their end-of-school math exams to gain a basic pass—and 30 percent of them couldn’t even manage that.
As a former English English teacher myself (as in, a teacher of the subject, in the country of the same name), I do somewhat agree with Gove and Birbalsingh about the need to give children a high-standard academic education here: but only whenever the children being taught actually happen to be academically-brained.
Rather than pretending every child is academic when they’re not, Powell proposes instead pushing increasing numbers, from the age of 14, into a more vocational education, designed to prepare them for life in the kind of jobs their region actually offers. To a certain degree, this makes sense: But, once again, like Gove and Birbalsingh’s views in reverse, only for non-academic children.
Currently, UK adolescents are leaving school more unprepared for the world of work than ever before, with over a million aged between 16 and 24 classified as being NEETs—Not in Education, Employment or Training—with school simply not being to their tastes. Worse, more than 87,000 recent UK school-leavers are claiming PIP (Personal Independence Payment) welfare assistance, often for new-fangled non-conditions like “anxiety,” earning them £100 a week more than a 16-year-old doing the maximum legally allowed amount of part-time work over the same period could. Six in 10 NEETs have never had a job, not even delivering shoes or polishing newspapers, and many don’t appear to ever want one.
Powell pretends to believe this is all down to the failures of Gove. Replying to Gove’s critique of her new policies, Powell maintains that all Britain’s one-million NEETs were simply too alienated by her predecessor’s academic-focused school curriculum to continue turning up to classes, calling the idle cohort “his legacy.”
Doubtless, many NEETs were indeed bored in school. But, likewise, Powell ignores the fact Labour has made it ever harder for firms to justify taking on recent school-leavers by raising compulsory employee-taxes paid by hard-pressed employers. Also, she neglects to address the quite literally perverse incentives of the over-generous welfare state: Besides all the free cash, it is even currently possible for NEET welfare recipients to claim discount sex-toys, courtesy of the tax-payer. You can’t use one of those in class or the workplace, so the users have to stay at home.
There is a more radical option neither side has as yet advocated, though: letting children leave school altogether.
Until 1947, the school leaving-age in England and Wales was 14 or lower, yet these islands managed to produce the likes of Shakespeare, Newton, and Churchill. The age rose to 15, during which era they managed only David Beckham and Ed Miliband. From 2013 onwards, the school leaving-age in England was (effectively) raised to 18, and we’ve notably produced the aforementioned million-plus utterly demotivated NEETs.
Aged 14, Horatio Nelson was already commanding his own boat and shooting at polar bears in the Arctic. Aged 14, your own son isn’t even allowed to use a gas-fired Bunsen-burner in the science lab, in case it kills a few polar bears in the Arctic. The solution is simple: drop the (voluntary) leaving-age back down to 14 again. From my own classroom experience, I know perfectly well that around 30 to 50 percent of British children have no interest in education, get nothing from it, and would prefer to just go out and start earning some money full-time. So let them.
With absolutely zero unemployment benefits available for those aged under 16, their parents couldn’t let them sit around at home all day ordering cut-price sex-aids and sending the bill to Downing Street. Forced out into the workforce early, modish NEET issues like “anxiety” would be more likely to disappear. Under-16s could further be hired upon a special extra-lower “junior minimum wage,” and their employers kept exempt from employer-tax contributions on their behalf, rendering businesses more likely to take a chance on them in menial entry-level roles—finally weaning the nation off its reliance upon imported low-wage foreign labor as a bonus. If adult Eritreans posing as 14-year-olds can stack shelves in British warehouses, then so can actual British 14-year-olds, if they want to.
Educational environments would benefit, with class sizes smaller and filled with those young people who actually want to learn, meaning more one-to-one attention for the academically gifted and major savings for the Treasury. The worst and most unmotivated troublemakers will doubtless have scarpered. Teacher workload would also be lower and morale higher, enabling better staff retention rates. For those children who do leave early and realize they have made a horrible mistake, a route back into learning could always be kept temporarily open.
The policy sounds productive. So why has no major party ever proposed it? Actually, one has. The Scottish Conservatives suggested lowering the leaving-age to 14 only last year, something which makes even more sense in a country where the average person ends up dead at 30 of a methadone overdose anyway.
To listen to the instant negative response from other parties, however, you’d think the Tories had suggested shoving five-year-olds back up chimneys. Left-wing SNP Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth responded in predictable class-warrior terms:
[BLOCK]The Tories should say what they mean—they want to see working class children leave school at 14 and leave academic pursuits to the middle and upper class. … Tory values may be rooted in the Victorian era—but we will not allow them to drag our education system into a bygone age with this Dickensian policy. As ever, what is common sense to the Tories makes no sense to anyone else.[/BLOCK]
It makes sense to me, as an ex-teacher. The trouble is, the left will never allow this to happen.
Powell has called the “one-size-fits-all approach” of Gove’s allegedly over-academic UK school system a “straitjacket” which “has left far too many children branded a failure.” Yes. What the UK could really do with is a tripartite high-school system, whereby academic children attend academic schools, vocational-minded children attend vocational schools, and those who just want to leave school aged 14 to pick potatoes can do so too.
The problem for Powell is that the UK once had precisely this system, and it was working, until Labour deliberately demolished it—through pure class-war spite. Britain’s former schools for academically-minded students were called “grammar schools,” institutions Labour ruthlessly fought to abolish from the 1960s onwards, with the Party’s then-Education Secretary Tony Crosland (who was privately educated) famously vowing, “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f—ing grammar school in England.” Why? Because of an early leftist focus on “equity” over “equality.”
Crosland suspected the only reason academic kids were academic in the first place was because they came from privileged, middle-class backgrounds (like his own), so enjoyed an innate advantage over their poorer peers. Then, they went to grammar school and university and became rich lawyers, whilst the poor kids went to technical schools and became lowly bricklayers, or left at 15 and became unskilled binmen. Thus, grammar schools were largely phased out, with nearly everyone being forced into the one-size-fits-all “straitjackets” of contemporary British high-schools.
In order to truly solve this problem, then, Powell would not merely improve access to vocational training, but simultaneously bring back grammar schools for all the academically bright children—something her own party would never possibly allow her to do upon pure ideological grounds.
If Lucy Powell can solve this conundrum for real, she really will deserve a nighthood.
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