What The Internet is For

Schoolduggery is a blog brought to my attention in the last 24 hours. According to the Guardian it is the work of a primary school governor in Suffolk. There's a rather impressive post up on the site which collates data showing that the new wave of so called Free Schools have systematically admitted lower percentages of children on Free School Meals (FSM) - the standard deprivation measure used in education - and children with Special Needs than the schools which surround them. If you have any interest in education policy I encourage you to go read it.

The real joy, however, is not to be found in the hugely competent technical posting itself, but in the comments underneath. Toby Young, high profile Chair of West London Free School,  springs into action and starts off with the entirely-reasonable-and-not-in-any-way-confrontational statements that the posting is 'utter balls' and the blogger '..resort[s] to these lies to discredit the free schools policy.'

Schoolduggery then reproduces an email from one of the West London Free School's staff  which confirms the figures she has used came from the school itself.

But our hero returns to the fray, referring to the sender of the email as 'an administrative assistant' (she was the Head's PA, so  presumably answering on the school leadership's behalf) and gamely blustering on shooting from the hip about how FSM and SEN numbers are calculated.

He then gets shot to pieces again by folk who know what they're talking about.

This has everything I want from the 'net: detailed information about technical subjects; rapid exposure of unsustainable claims and a permanent record of a key member of the right-wing chatterati making a total arse of themselves. If there was a God, I'd be giving thanks to her- in the absence of one, I can only bow  in admiration to to Schooduggery .

The Nakedness of Class and the Classroom

I thought I had given up blogging, but some things make you so angry you just have to write something down. Who is to blame for my return to my pointless habit of hurling typo strewn invective into the ether? Step forward Mr.Toby Young and his West London Free School idea.

Everyone needs to be clear what's happening here, so a little background. There is a 'zeitgeist-y' feeling across all welfare services that the old 'top down' professionally defined models of service delivery are falling short. Hence a lot of emphasis on the 'personalisation' of Health and Social Care and of general out rolling of models of greater user and consumer involvement across the piece. Education is not immune to these developments - and nor should it be. Parent controlled schools fit nicely into this zeitgeist, and shouldn't be opposed at all at the level of basic principle.

However, the question of what any school should control, never mind who should control the school, is a bit more complicated. Here we hit that Great British Wall of Silence About the Most Obvious Thing In the World: how class works in an mundane, everyday sense.

The question of school governance, in the abstract, is one that would send most people to sleep. No one chooses a school because it is a Community School, or a Foundation or a Voluntary Aided School or whatever: they choose on the grounds of the curriculum offer, the results and the ethos of the school.

Well, I say 'they choose', but often this isn't the case: the school effectively chooses them through its admissions criteria. Remember, we still have over 150 Grammar Schools in this country, never mind the Church schools, or the way almost any admissions policy can be adopted to manipulate the intake (e.g. there is a vast difference between having a 'distance from school gates' entry criteria depending on where a school is: in a leafy suburb, surrounded by expensive streets, it is selective; if the school is in the middle of a Council Estate you've got a Secondary Modern in the making).

It is for this sort of reason that some of us feel that no school should control its own entry criteria - there has to be an outside body which coordinates entry criteria to prevent unfairness creeping into the system. Traditionally, this has been the local authority. You don't necessarily have to think the LA should run schools, or not all schools anyway, to believe it should carry out this coordinating function. It is perfectly possible to imagine parent controlled schools which exist within such a regime.

But there is another way in which Tony Young and co appear to have found to flout the aim of achieving some sort of rough level playing field: rather than (just) fix the entry criteria - though they have done that as well- they've fixed the actual curriculum offer so it doesn't fit a huge segment of the children who might potentially attend. This is not choice: it is the active and knowing restriction of choice. & it's all about class.

I think more consumer power over welfare services is a good thing - but I don't think that can just be taken as meaning 'let the sharp elbows of the middle classes get their kids to the front of the queue and devil take the hindmost'. I'd be an enthusiastic supporter of any school run by parents - 'the consumer voice' - which had a genuinely comprehensive entry criteria and a genuinely comprehensive curriculum offer.

But what West London Free School is proposing is essentially a way of stealing resources from working class kids for selfish reasons. It's disgraceful.

Two Things Worth Browsing Today

The graphic is from here: it shows the changes in relative compensation between executives and average workers in the US over the last fifty years. Click on it to get an enlarged picture.

Keeping that image firmly in mind trot on over to Will at Potlatch, and consider his sharp eyed linkage of bankers compensation and last night's student protests.

"If bankers had just managed to keep a limit on their already-extreme levels of personal appropriation, then the financial crisis may not have turned into a fiscal crisis. Banks may even have remained a private industry, independent of the state. If George Osborne were just willing to treat higher education as a public good amongst many - in need of a harsh squeeze, but no more (he is, after all, a Tory) - then Churchill's statue may not be dawbed in graffiti this morning. But at a certain point, you have to consider the possibility that going too far is an economic and political strategy in its own right."

The Student Revolt Against Tuition Fees and the Limits of Public Choice Theory

For what seems like decades the Right has claimed that markets or quasi markets in social goods and services protect the interests of consumers, and that public services are inherently subject to being run in the interests of the producers rather than the people who use them unless they are subject to such external discipline. These assumptions have been hard-wired into policy debate to such an extent that they have become all but invisible. In other words, they've become hegemonic.

The problem is defined as the constant danger of 'rent seeking' by public sector providers - exploitation of a monopoly position to rip off or under serve 'consumers'*. The implication is that we need 'contestability'.

Much of the middle level policy debate that takes place around 'public sector reform' in either its New Labour or Coalition manifestations can be boiled down to an argument about which services should be subject to which different kinds of such contestability; how immediate or regular such threats should be; and the degree to which the boundaries between third sector not for profit alternatives and the private sector itself can be blurred in defining potential alternative managers of public services.

Political and policy 'creativity' gets defined as thinking up new ways in which this basic underlying default assumption can be packaged as empowering consumers. Hence the change of emphasis from direct efforts at privatising state services such as we saw in the 1980s to more nuanced emphases on consumer choice of services, as evident in the drift of schools policy over the last decade or the shift to user controlled (a misnomer) budgets in social care. This social care development has the added 'advantage' of blurring another key boundary: between what the state should pay for and what each individual should pay for.

The Browne report is shot through with this kind of thinking, as Stefan Collini so tellingly analyses in the LRB,

"Browne proposes to scrap most of this. In its place, he wants to see a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator. His premise is that ‘students are best placed to make the judgment about what they want to get from participating in higher education.’ His frequently repeated mantra is ‘student choice will drive up quality,’ and the measure of quality is ‘student satisfaction’.....even in its own wildly optimistic terms, this report proposes a hefty cut in funding. In suggesting that the standard fee should initially be set at £6000 (which particular institutions might choose to exceed, though there will be various disincentives, including a ‘levy’ which would claw some of it back), Browne acknowledges that this would not fully replace the value of the block grant even for the most successful institutions. .....‘The purpose of starting the levy at a lower point is to instil a focus on efficiency throughout the system.’ Lots of courses may have to be closed and lots of people sacked, but that must mean, by definition, that they weren’t offering a product the consumer wanted, so good riddance."

This is, of course, manifest nonsense: ask the students. They seem to have a fairly good grasp of the fact that it is the providers - especially the Russell Group - not themselves, the putative 'customers', who benefit from the tuition fee rises. In fact the whole tuition fees plan arising from the Browne report could be seen as a form of provider capture: but one based on introducing quasi markets and 'consumer choice' - the very mechanisms which so called Public Choice theory tends to recommend as antidotes to provider capture. So here we a have an apparent case of the empirical/practical dog eating its own theoretical tail as it were: the whole approach collapses into incomprehensibility, at least when applied in this particular circumstance.

All theories have limits to their applicability. It may yet prove to be the Coalition's regret that public choice theory in Britain reaches its' limits just at a time when they're committed to slashing the state. But then that would leave them 'ideologically naked' as it were, simply cutting for cutting's sake. & that's not a good place for any government to be.





*Does this ever actually happen? Yes. I have direct personal experience of it happening. But does it happen often enough to be thought of as a structural problem which demands wholesale 'public sector reform'? No, I don't think this is proven in any sense, despite various Public Choice theorists having won the Nobel Prize for Economics. So I suspect we dealing with one of those 'true but trivial' issues which have engaged Chris Dillow in recent weeks - but one which is being used, systematically, for directly political ends.

Why Academies (or Any School) Shouldn't Control Their Own Admissions

Here's the lead story from the front page of my local free sheet newspaper:

"A disabled 11-year-old girl has been rejected by an academy school because she poses a “health and safety risk” to other children.

Idayah Miller, from Norbury, was told she could not go to the elite Harris Academy in Crystal Palace because her wheelchair would restrict the movement of other children in the crowded corridors.

In a letter to her parents, headteacher Steve Kenning also said the little girl would suffer low self-esteem because her “academic ability is quite low” and Harris is “a high pressure, high performing academy” where she would struggle to keep up with her friends"

The school's primary admissions criteria seem to be based on a banding system structured by distance, although the precise nature of the banding test, and what proportions of clever/middling/less clever kids they take, is not very clear. 10% of places are reserved for those with a 'aptitude' for technology, the school's specialism. The admission of kids with Special Education Needs (SEN) is described as 'a concession', even though all schools are legally obliged to take a certain proportion of such children unless they can show good reason otherwise.

Plainly, this case would seem to be a decision which offends against the Disability Discrimination Act. But I'm aware of the perils of making legal judgements on specific cases based only on newspaper headlines, so I'll leave that one to the lawyers.

I want to ask a broader question about admissions. 'Banding' is, in certain defined circumstances, especially in big cities, a perfectly reasonable way of allocating school places. It just means you test them and then, assuming equal proportions of kids with different ability levels have applied to different schools, allocate them places which leave each school with a broadly similar entry cohort. It can be a way of attempting to slow down the drift back towards a covert form of the old Grammar/Secondary Modern divide which is so evident in so many inner city areas.

But doesn't this case illustrate that if you let individual schools do the banding that they'll just use it as means of covert selection and rejection of 'low ability' pupils? As someone comments in the local newspaper article - would the school have rejected Stephen Hawking if he was in a wheelchair?

Meet the Academy Sponsor: Cameron's favourite carpet fitter it would appear.

I'd quite like it if one of the more mainstream leftie blogs picked this up, so I'm going to link to Liberal Conspiracy, Hopi (who, like me, doesn't live that far away), TCF and Don Paskini in the hope of attracting more coverage of this case and the general issue.

On Watching Some Windows Getting Broken as a Family Group

Interesting times last night - not just at Millbank, but here at Chez McMenamin. Now, time was when Mrs. McM and I would have happily sat watching a few broken windows at Tory HQ on TV, chugged away at the Merlot and gleefully quoted Jim to each other ('If there's a lesson in life we should all learn is that students must never break windows unless they're members of the Bullingdon Club.').

We are both behind the students, both recall that sometimes - but only sometimes - riots do work and, lets be frank, we are both perfectly aware that there seemed to be almost as many camera operatives in Millbank as there were occupiers so the world was getting a rather skewed view of the demonstration. The violence was all a bit small scale to be truthful - not a Poll Tax Riot in miniature at all. We both have memories of being caught up in .....well, lets call them 'spots of disorder' in our youth and early adulthood: she still dines out on the Greenham fence she pulled down and we both have various memories of seeing bottles, bricks and fireworks being tossed around on various demos - and of running away, frightened, from police charges. So our reaction to the events was perhaps entirely predictable.

But what was different last night was the presence on the sofa of a young master McMenamin who is fourteen tomorrow. Now he is a well behaved boy with a lifetime's training in doing the decent thing and a default assumption that violence only really happens in video games, despite living in a not entirely salubrious part of South London. He knew the students were marching - and indeed rioting - for him. He was wide eyed with excitement as the glass window broke, cheering on the students as if they were his football team, just high on the apparent disorder.

His mother and I shifted in our seats uncomfortably, and started murmuring things like,

'...that lad with the wedge haircut has made a mistake not to have a scarf over his face, he'll be nicked before the end of the evening and probably chucked off his course as well...';
'...have we ever explained what kettling is?' ;
'..of course its important to have a spare battery for the mobile if you do get into a sticky situation, just so you can ring someone.."and
'...actually, it's really frightening when things kick off like that and you don't know how to get away from it..."

He calmed down and asked us what we really thought of the TV news pictures. I looked at his Mum and she looked at me. I cleared my throat to launch into some lengthy dull diatribe from half remembered EP Thompson on the long English tradition of 'negotiation by riot' when Mrs.McM quietly spoke up,

" I wouldn't want to smash windows, and I wouldn't want any of my family to do it...but I'm glad it has happened".

We went to our beds a family united on that thought.

University Fees: Driving Down House Prices in the Long Term

Righty-ho: as widely prophesied, it has come to pass: the state isn’t simply cutting stuff, it’s withdrawing from whole areas. Specifically it is withdrawing from funding most undergraduate tertiary education.

Frankly, this is a surprise to me - in its' sequencing at least. I thought they’d first go for Social Care for the elderly. But the same three card trick is likely to be played in that field as well: first issue ominous but anonymised threats of financial Armageddon; then set up a commission or special study to look into creating opportunities for creating individual debt obligations to cover the gap; and then sit back and wait for the providers to conclude that their only hope is to persuade the ‘consumers’ that the only serious game in town is to take on additional financial risk personally. Bingo! You’ve re-defined the boundaries between the obligations of the state and the basic social finance requirements of individuals. Something similar happened in pensions and housing a generation ago.

& therein lies the problem. Well, therein lies the problem if, like me, you’re 52 year old father of two kids who’ll go to Uni in the next seven years and also the son of a 88 yr old in a registered care home. Oh, and did I mention that the mortgage doesn’t get paid off till I’m 63? Don't talk to me about the 'squeezed middle' matey, I got there some time ago...

I can pay my mortgage. I can make a contribution to Mum’s care home fees. I can even give the kids a bit towards their Uni costs (crossed fingers). But, fuck me, I’m going to struggle to do all three things. & I got an essentially free tertiary education, and Mum does qualify for quite a bit of public subsidy in that care home.

So how is it going to be for the next generation up - the people who’ll enter working life with huge debts from tertiary education, increasingly ageing parents (that’ll be me, I suppose) and the need to somehow acquire a mortgage and a home in their late twenties or early thirties? Not so wonderful I’d guess. In fact I really doubt that people in my position in 20 years time will be able to bear such a triple burden of debt. So they’ll box and cox, like we all do. They’ll not be willing to risk quite so much in any particular debt obligation.

So: who’s volunteering to tell the Daily Mail that this move to cut Higher Education funding is going to drive house prices down?

P.S. 'Course, if I were one of those bug-eyed Marxist wallahs,I might make some point about the way unproductive (aka finance) capital constantly seeks to re-order the world to create more opportunities for it to reproduce itself. But that would just be extremism of a most old fashioned stripe and hardly welcome in today's Big Society. I'll leave that to the entirely non Marxist Richard Murphy.

By Grand Central Primary School I Sat Down & Wept

Coming to a status conscious household near you: a chance to spent $1000 preparing your 4 year old to get into the kindergarten of your choice. (via). These people are the market leaders it seems:

There are so many things to worry about when applying to top public and private schools in NYC. We, at Bright Kids NYC, will take away the anxiety associated with prepping for the appropriate tests so that you as parents can focus on the rest of the admissions process.

It is brutal out there for parents with young children. The public gifted and the private school entry in New York City is getting increasingly competitive, particularly for young kids. If you are serious about gaining admissions to a top school, you must get serious about preparing your child for the appropriate tests.

They say social mobility stopped more or less dead with the cohort born in 1970. That makes a kinds of sense - those were the last people who grew to maturity as the West went through the shift from needing lots of both skilled and unskilled manual jobs into a world where there are many more white collar workers, more and more layers of which get deskilled or simply routinised into 'call-centre type' work experiences as the years tick by. The opportunities for advancement out of routine or dirty or dangerous or simply boring family work traditions are not widening as they were when I grew up - they're narrowing. & no amount of guff about 'the knowledge economy' coming to save us is going to change this fact.

So education becomes a frantic, scary, elbows-out-push-your-neighbour-aside scramble to get on that ladder. 'Cos now it's one-in-and-one-out for the class with the nice life.

& 4 year olds start studying for tests - and the class that can afford it bribes its way to the top.

This is a human disaster.

Free School: A Three Card Trick to Promote Privatisation

Clarification from the Dept of Education:

Free Schools will have the same legal requirements as academies. Free Schools are normally brand-new schools set up by charities, universities, business, community or faith groups, teachers and groups of parents where there is parental demand. Academies are usually a change to an existing maintained school.

Legally the structure is the same, and they are expected to meet the same requirements as other academies. Free Schools will also benefit from the same freedoms and flexibilities as academies....

OK, so I get that: they're the same thing except 'free schools' are new and Academies are the option available to existing state schools. but, ah-ha, wait, there's more:

Can an existing independent school become a Free School?

Yes. Independent schools can apply to become a Free School and become state-funded independent schools. These schools will need to meet the entry criteria – including an agreement that their admissions policy is in line with the Admissions Code, demonstrate they have a good record of success as an education provider and financial viability. Independent schools applying to become Free Schools will not be able to retain any existing academic selection admission arrangements.

OK, I get that as well: it's a way of channeling tax payers money into the private sector. But you might object that few independent schools would take this option as they wouldn't be allowed to charge top-up fees. Well, not necessarily. The cornerstone of the policy is quite simple:

How will applicants be expected to demonstrate that they are suitable education providers?
... Proposers will not have to be groups who already provide education services; they can be new providers but we will expect them to be able to demonstrate a capability to deliver their plans. This might mean partnering new providers with a third-party group with education experience or having plans in place to subcontract parts of the running and management of the school to other suitable organisations. ( my emphasis)

Hey-ho: here's the rub. Basically parents don't get to set up schools, they get to choose 'third party groups with educational experience' to do so on their behalf. But not councils - who might otherwise be thought to be precisely the most obvious 'third party groups' with such experience. No, the point is to debar them and promote other providers. Which can only mean either the private sector - sometimes thinly disguised as 'charitable trusts' a la Eton, Harrow and so on - or ultimately Church backed front organisations.

Michael Gove: Encouraging Educational Leylandii

Michael Gove is a very, very clever politician - probably the most dangerous person in government at the moment from my point of view, despite the odd spot of entertaining hypocrisy in his past. (yes, there's a reason for the dodgy photo - follow the link).

I think he is dangerous because he is the one who seems to have properly thought through how to dismantle the support for - as oppose to simple cut - a basic state funded service. I suspect him of being one of those right wingers who have read their Gramsci and really understood the concept of 'hegemony'. If his educational policies are successful he will have moved education out of the 'health' box - where there remains strong public support for an universalist service - into the 'housing' box -where private satisfaction of our needs is seen as normal and 'social' housing is seen as residual, welfare provision.

His plans focus on two main points: 'enabling' parents to set up so called free schools, and 'liberating' high performing state schools to become Academies. Note the language of freedom implicit in the presentation: both polices are suppose to give consumers (parents) and staff (well, managers) powers now held by town halls. This was once the language of the left. The danger for the left is that in opposing them they sound as if they're defending bureaucrats and stuffy procedures against the wishes of ordinary people. What's more, New Labour - not a group I consider co-terminus with 'the left' - has the not inconsiderable problem that Academies were their idea in the first place.

Let's get one thing clear however: there is nothing to stop Toby Young and co going off to start a school for their children as it is. But what they're actually asking for is the right to take large chunks of public money and set up a school which they can run as they like, more or less - or rather appoint any private sector provider they might like. &, here's the rub, they'd be taking this public money from the national government, not the town hall, riding rough shod over the local educational ecology. Contrast this with the local partnership approach of Britain's first parent promoted school. It's a different world view.

Similarly, the so-called freedoms of Academies should be carefully picked apart by the left. The freedom to ignore large parts of the National Curriculum? Bring it on - but do it for all schools, and let's have some backstops to prevent nutty creationists taking over the show. Given these caveats there is nothing to oppose here. Nor is there any in principle reason to get too hot under the collar about devolving currently centralised budgets to schools - and even introducing some flexibility into nationally negotiated pay scales is a pill which, after careful union negotiation, the left might be able to swallow. The key issue is admissions. Who controls who gets to go to which school? Again, this is about the local educational ecology.

All schools have what economists call 'externalities': by virtue of their very existence they don't just affect the children who attend the particular school they also affect the choices open to children who don't.

So let's try the Gove trick: let's try and put the case against his reforms in the language of our opponents. To take a favourite Daily Mail theme, schools are like leylandi: they don't just affect your own garden when you plant them. They can bring your neighbours' pleasure and appreciated privacy, sure - but they can also block out the sun. It really ain't a private matter when you put them in the soil - it's a community matter. It's a matter of local social ecology.

Education is a community garden and Toby Young or prospective Academy Heads shouldn't be able to plant just what they like without some say for the rest of us.

Education: End the Religous Divide

Accord: it's a Good Thing.

It's simply a campaign aiming to ensure that faith schools cannot discriminate against non members of that faith when considering admissions or employment applications.

This is my idea of a secular society. I don't care if people of faith manage schools as long as they don't prevent my children going to them, stop my friends being employed in them or teach the kids unbalanced stuff about religion, science or personal relationships. & I'm happy to say lots of religious people agree, as well as atheists and agnostics.

Now they need your help. In the coming weeks the government is bringing forward its Equality Bill, many of whose clauses directly affect the issue of inclusivity and exclusivity in education. Accord's aim is to make sure that it removes the exemptions that allow faith schools to discriminate in their admissions, curriculum and employment practices.

They need as many supporters as they can get. Join their list of supporters by registering here for regular email updates and campaign news. & do post it on your own blog if you have one.

Two stories about work and mind altering substances.

This last week it's been half term in London schools. Just the right time to organise a police raid on my nine-year old's primary school...

I should explain. The caretaker had been growing - ahem, I mean allegedly growing, of course - a small forest of cannabis plants in the boiler room. It was the sky-high electricity bills which revealed the secret. Someone tipped off a tabloid and suddenly Mrs. Charlie, a parent governor, has spent half the week issuing po-faced statements of support for the excellent head and the other half fending off humorous texts from her mates archly asking if this was a new PTA fund raising initiative. This should be a nine day wonder: there's no suggestion that any one's little darling came into contact with the plants.

But these things can linger in the collective memory, as Richard Fortey's rather wonderful 'The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum- Dry Store Room No.1' has reminded me. Before the war, there was allegedly an illicit still inside the hollow Big Blue Whale. (It's a delightful book - the NYRB review is reproduced here). The Head of Exhibitions was said to be responsible. I can only imagine it didn't show up on the utility bills....

Blairite Modernisation at 8.10am

Amidst the normal chaos of a family breakfast I half caught a Today programme item on adult illiteracy this morning. The relevant Minster, John Denham, praised the existing programmes, claiming that they were recognised as world leading - despite criticism by a Commons Committee. The other interviewee was Phil Beadle, one-time ‘Teacher of the Year’.

Now Denham is, in my view at least, very much the principled face of New Labour: I don’t agree with him about much but I do recognise his integrity. He knew how to deal with Humphreys – he gave competent, political answers. Beadle – who I also respect as a communicator – didn’t. He gave professional answers: he stressed that the existing programmes weren’t targeting the right people, that the current definitions of illiteracy were bizarre, that the easier cases were being targeted and that the wrong methods – e.g. something other than phonics – were being used. Humphreys simply didn’t understand the detail and, for once, seemed genuinely bemused.

It set me thinking, once again, about the target driven culture of public services. People game play when faced with targets. Things which feel like basic management information for those at the top of the tree can seem like byzantine and pointless form filling for those actually doing the work – and form-filling which actually prevents them from telling people higher up what’s really going on.

I don’t believe this is unique to public or not-for-profit services. But I do think that the culture is more pernicious in public service as it seems much more plausible that a profit driven enterprise might well have relatively simple aims – boosting revenues, financial returns and share values, for example – whereby top management can accurately measure local performance on the basis of a limited number of indicators. Public service is inherently different: what counts as success - or failure – is more complex to define, and may change over time due to political perceptions of the current balance of problems. So either targets grow like topsy so there become simply too many of them – or they just measure the wrong things. Both routinely happen in my experience.

Never mind all this ideological stuff about 'provider capture'. Any well run enterprise wants to be captured by its staff, because it wants the staff to feel it owns the work that they do. & that means facilitating a dialogue between the top of any organisation and the people who work for it - and the people who consume its services - over what they're trying to do in the first place.

Are We Of One Accord?

I've always felt a bit ambivalent about militant atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens. Basically I agree with them but they seem to be fighting an American fight against creationism which barely exists in this country, not concentrating on the tough issues that have to be faced to properly secularise Britain.

This, on the other hand, is something I wholeheartedly support - a campaign for equality and human rights and against the special exemptions enjoyed by religious schools. A campaign which focuses on fair admissions and fair employment practices. &, best of all, a campaign supported by religious people as well as non-believers. (There is no necessary conflict between belief and wanting to live in a secular society.)

Ashok Kumar MP has tabled an Early Day motion supporting the Accord Coalition. It reads:

"EDM 530: Accord Coalition

That this House supports Accord, the national coalition that unites religious and non-religious individuals and organisations campaigning for inclusive schools; believes that all state schools should be open to children and teachers of all backgrounds and beliefs; is concerned that current legislation permits schools with a religious character to discriminate against staff and students on the basis of their religion or belief and to teach a partial religious education curriculum; calls for religious education to be objective, balanced and fair; welcomes the positive approach taken by Accord and the breadth of its membership; and urges the Government to remove exemptions from equalities legislation for state-funded religious schools."

They need as many people as possible to contact their MPs asking them to sign the motion. This is a very effective way of letting your MP know how you feel about the way faith schools operate.

Education, Education, Education

Thirty years ago I was taught that of all the myriad of educational statistics – and my, doesn't the world of education like its' statistics – the one that best correlated to a child's final education achievement was the social class of the mother. But it looks like correlating them with which ever parent counts as the 'head of the household' still works pretty well.

Fascinating social class categories: I'll return to this.