Should education be decided in the corridors of power?

According to the United Nations 57 million children globally receive no formal education. Many millions more receive only a very rough and ready education which leaves them barely able to read, write or add up. Most developed nations have cut their funding to support worldwide educational provision and the UK is now the largest direct donor to basic education but the overall situation is critical.

And yet in this country we are in real danger of losing our sense of what a high quality education should consist of. Pressure of rising pupils numbers, inflationary costs, increased costs to cover regulation and compliance has meant a projected 8% fall in per pupil funding in state schools between 2014/15 and 2019/20. 

Britain is ranked only 109th for the proportion of budget it spends on education – just below Kazakhstan and Cambodia. In 2014, the UK government spent 11.78% of its budget on education, while Zimbabwe, which came top, spent almost three times this amount. (As a benchmark, achievement of the UN’s sustainable development goals for education is calculated to require a 20% spend.). In 2015, the UK government spent 4.7% of the country’s GDP on education, down from 5.8% in 2010.

Leaving the turmoil created by recent GCSE and A Level academic curriculum developments aside, the education white paper, ‘schools that work for everyone’ , suggests yet more change on the educational horizon. But will it deliver high quality educational outcomes which serve all our young people?

One of the major reasons why independent schools are so successful is that they can and do devote significant resources to the development of the whole child both in and beyond the classroom. Independent schools such as Canford will seek to use those resources and their greater freedom of action to ensure that the educational experience we offer is driven by more than just financial expedients. We know that academically – and in a broader sense – the personal development of our young people must be rich and diverse if it is to be truly valuable and effective. Our maintained sector colleagues are just as passionate about these issues, but they are starved of resources: four out of every ten academies were in deficit last year and the number of schools with pension deficits doubled.

A high quality education is such a valuable and life-changing asset in so many ways.  Yet a narrow perspective of education and its aims has been asserting itself ever more actively in the corridors of power.

Why A Levels? Dr Stephen Wilkinson - Director of Studies

A programme of reforms to A level curricula initiated by Michael Gove in November 2010 with a White Paper entitled ‘The Importance of Teaching’ resulted in new, linear A level syllabuses phased in over three years. In September 2015, new syllabuses started in English, History, Economics, Business Studies, Computing and the Sciences.

Canford’s approach, given that these subjects account for fewer than a half of our A level entries, was to maintain the AS/A2 approach across all subjects, even where (as is the case for the reformed subjects) the grades that pupils gain in the AS exams taken at the end of the L6 year do not contribute to the final A level grade. By taking this approach, we believe that we are providing the best opportunity for pupils to maximise their grades across all subjects, regardless of whether they are reformed or not. In the second phase of the reforms, beginning in September 2016, the scales have tipped in favour of the reformed subjects, and with all but Maths, Classical Civilisation, Politics and Design Technology now operating as linear syllabuses (that is, with exams only at the end of the course) we have spent much time deliberating and consulting about the best way to incorporate these changes in the way we teach our Sixth Form subjects.

In common with the majority of schools, we have decided that from September 2016 we will continue to expect pupils to choose four subjects from the start of the Lower Sixth, and that we will not be offering AS exams in any of the reformed subjects, including the subject they drop going into the Upper Sixth. While we are conscious of the fact that pupils will therefore not have AS marks available for their University applications in the Upper Sixth, we feel that the overall benefit gained from pupils being able to spend the Summer term of the Lower Sixth being taught, rather than preparing for and taking exams that will ultimately not count towards their A levels, makes course of the action the most appropriate for our pupils as they prepare for ambitious University places.

Needless to add, perhaps, but the benefit and reward of taking a fourth subject, regardless of whether an external exam is taken, will be in the opportunity to study further in another discipline, and add to the educational value that pupils take from their Sixth Form study.