Fiona Millar, worked as a teacher for 10 years in a grammar community comprehensive school, rings with theideological purity of those who are prepared to place motives above outcomes.
I totally believe in her summative closing paragraph, calling for an educational experience which supports and guarantees, success according to each child’s needs and ambitions. She is also correct in recognizing that this is what parents are paying for independent education and many parents choose to ensure this for their children, with no guarantee that their local underfunded and oversubscribed comprehensive school can, the position of many on the Labour left is to penalize these children and their families.
Labour should be identifying and concentrating the primary principles which makes many independent, grammar and comprehensive schools successful, and then ensuring a programme of funding and training to deliver this. For an independent education, success would remove many of the motivating factors and gradually render most of the market for a private education untenable.
Millar’s rallying cry, to “bring children together rather than divide them” should be our aspirational measure of success, not the mechanism by which to achieve it.
Fiona Millar suggests to bring in comprehensive school or college leaving qualification has many attractive features, but it does not sit well in an enabling background for lifelong learning, which needs to be at the heart of Labour’s bold new era.
GCSEs may be a soulless treadmill for children in school who are targeting for higher qualifications, but GCSEs and A-levels are important for entry qualifications which is useful for many jobs and professional courses such as teaching and nursing. Many adults and children have experienced distractions and need to study for these qualifications outside school, often together with family and work commitments.
Ros Morpeth, a former CEO and now presently a trustee of the National Extension College says that, an education charity which was set up 60 years ago with the responsibility to ensure that there is a chance for those left behind to catch up.
Fiona Millar says some excellent points but, as a teacher who teaches international baccalaureate (IB), A-level and GCSE qualifications, I have to highlight that her proposed baccalaureate would need careful design if it were to solve the differences she correctly highlights, for many reasons.
The children of those with greater resources and sharpest elbows will still succeed excessively, whatever the final qualification offered and the differences of outcomes highlighted by Millar cannot be effectively addressed to any significant extent by changing the qualifications rule without also changing the whole structure of the UK’s education system.
Fiona Millar’s article is an important contribution to the discussion about the future Labour government’s education policy.
