The university where I whiled away my misspent youth had a notoriously tough entrance procedure, full of trick questions to trip up the unwary and humiliate them into the bargain. Oddly, however, the exams you took at the end of your three years weren’t much harder. The reason is clear to me now. The lecturers were far too grand to do anything as dreary as teaching, and the students were far too busy getting drunk. So the authorities had to make sure that they let in only students who knew enough when they arrived to pass their finals three years later.
I’m sure that this eccentric approach has been purged by now. But I was reminded of it last week when I read of the Government’s plan to raise the age at which children can leave full-time education from 16 to 18 — because I have a sneaking suspicion that many comprehensives are operating today rather like my old university operated 30 years ago. The brightest kids could easily sail through their GCSEs almost as soon as they come into the school at the age of 11 or 12. Instead, they spend five years getting more and more bored. But at the other end of the spectrum, at least 20 per cent of pupils couldn’t pass five GCSEs if they were kept in our current school system till they were 94. Or so the league tables suggest.
It’s against this lamentable background, and the monumental failure of the Government to tackle the problem of the failing 20 per cent, that this airy-fairy proposal to raise the school leaving age must be judged. Forget for a moment the billions of extra funding needed. What’s preposterous is the notion that a system incapable of teaching a huge number of children the basics of literacy, numeracy and decency after 12 years of full-time schooling should somehow magically be able to do so after 14 years.
The result of keeping disaffected kids in the system till they are 18 could be catastrophic. Perhaps you don’t recall the last time the school leaving age was raised — in 1972, when it went from 15 to 16. I have wry memories. A few months before going to university, I did work experience in a local school, and watched with incredulity as a bunch of stroppy 15-year-olds who had expected to escape the previous summer were forced to kick their heels for three more terms — and proceeded to run amok. The legacy of that misconceived move lingers still. Is there anyone, apart from dutiful Blairites, who believes that today’s 16-year-old school-leavers are better educated than the 15-year-old leavers of the 1960s?
There is a way to raise the leaving age without going through that pointless chaos again. But it would require a radical reshaping of the entire school system. Here, just for your amusement, is what I would do.
First I would extend primary-school education by two years (mirroring the prep schools in the private sector). That would allow these enlarged primary schools to beef up their arts, sports and music — because the best specialist teachers would be attracted by the chance to take older children to a higher level. It would give primary teachers six extra terms in which to drum the basics of reading and arithmetic into slower learners. And most crucially, it would allow the the decision about appropraite secondary education to be deferred until children were 12 or 13, when it is far easier to know whether a child is cut out to be “academic”.
Those that are academic would pass a wideranging test at 13 and get a “certificate of basic education” (let’s call it the CBE, just to be confusing) covering the minimum literacy and numeracy skills normally needed in life. They would then move to secondary schools that would prepare them for a much tougher and broader set of A-levels than we have at present.
Non-academics would take a different path. They would still work towards their CBEs, but also develop the vocational skills needed to go straight into work at 18. Indeed, they would spend much of each term on work placements: old-fashioned apprenticeships, except in contemporary industries such as IT, food technology and retailing as well as the old blue-collar trades.
“Aha!” I hear the Islington liberals cry. “You are simply reviving the old apartheid system with grammar schools and secondary moderns, albeit with a 13-plus exam instead of the old 11-plus.” Not so. The problem in the old days was the stigma of failure attached to non-grammar-school children. My system would invest the vocational educational route with as much dignity, pride and rigorous standards as the academic route. It is the only way forward if British craft and trade workers are to compete in an increasingly global market place. Ask yourself why London is heaving with foreign plumbers, welders, electricians and carpenters who do a far better job than their British counterparts.
And it’s also the only way forward if we want to stop our educational system from churning out thousands of unemployable teenagers each year. Grafting makeshift vocational courses on to the existing state educational structure is useless.
But such a big rethink calls for political courage. Forget it, then. What the Government has concocted is a headline-grabbing gimmick that applies sticking-plaster to a festering wound. How typical. Is there anyone, apart from Blairites, who believes that today’s 16-year-old school-leavers are better educated than the 15-year-old leavers of the 1960s?
Whatever happened to lacy and racy?
I was shocked by our fashion editor’s piece in Saturday’s Times about what the young women in her department wear in bed. Not the expected racy, lacy little numbers — but “pyjamas, cashmere socks and polo necks”. Polo necks? Girls, girls, girls! If the nation’s vibrant young glamour-pusses aren’t making an effort to exude sartorial titillation between the sheets, what hope for us old codgers? Did Venus intoxicate Adonis with the cut of her jim-jams? Would Paris have whisked Helen to Troy if she’d been wearing socks and polo neck? I urge Britain’s womenfolk to reconsider their nocturnal attire. To imagine that the primary purpose of bedwear is to keep you “warm and toasty” (as our fashion editor puts it) is, in a very literal sense, complete Horlicks. For the sake of national morale, if nothing else, get those socks off!
Frangleterre
The revelation that in 1956 the French Prime Minister proposed to the British Cabinet a merger between his country and ours must be the weirdest news of the week. As someone on the radio said yesterday: “Liberté, egalité . . . er, cuppa tea?” But the more I think about it, the more the idea appeals. Just imagine a nation that mingled British work ethic, humour and music with French climate, wine and culinary skills. A world-beating combination. The trouble is that you can just as easily imagine a country that combined French work ethic, humour and music with British climate, wine and culinary skills. Good grief, we would all have to emigrate to Germany.
On the other hand, if we switched to French cricket at least we wouldn’t have to play the Aussies.
