Having worked as a teacher for 10 years in a grammar, an independent and now a community comprehensive school, the calls to tax independent schools, as echoed by Fiona Millar, ring with the ideological purity of those who are prepared to place motives above outcomes (Reform grammar schools and ditch the GCSE treadmill – here’s how Labour can fix education in England, 13 August).
I wholeheartedly believe in her summative closing paragraph, calling for an educational experience that supports and ensures success according to each child’s needs and ambitions. She is also correct in recognising that this is what parents are paying for through independent education. And yet, where many parents opt 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 penalise these children and their families. Motive and means, it seems, trump outcomes in an educational retelling of Margaret Thatcher’s “so long as the gap is smaller”.
Labour should be identifying and distilling the underlying principles that make many independent, comprehensive and grammar schools successful, and subsequently ensuring a programme of training and funding to deliver this. Success would remove many of the motivating factors for an independent education, and organically 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.
Jake Dewar
Cockermouth, Cumbria
• Fiona Millar’s proposal to bring in an all-embracing school or college leaving qualification has many attractive features, but it does not sit well in an enabling framework 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 aiming for higher qualifications, but GCSEs and A-levels are essential entry qualifications for many jobs and professional courses such as nursing and teaching. Many children and adults have experienced disruptions and need to study for these qualifications outside school, often alongside family and work commitments. It is hard enough at present for an independent student to access these courses and exams, but it would be impossible to achieve a school leaving certificate if you were not at school. This is one reason why the demise of GCSEs and possibly A-levels would close many doors for lifelong learners.
I write from the experience of being a former CEO and now trustee of the National Extension College, an education charity set up 60 years ago with the remit to ensure that there is an opportunity for those left behind to catch up.
Ros Morpeth
Cambridge
• Fiona Millar makes 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 exceptionally careful design if it were to solve the inequalities she correctly highlights, for several reasons. First, scrapping the now almost pointless GCSEs is a good idea for the reasons she cites, but such a change comes with the caveat that if her baccalaureate were to involve terminal exams, then those baccalaureate exams would be the first occasion that students would undertake such high-stakes tests, which presents an issue.
Second, the IB, which requires students to do most of what Millar proposes, works them into the ground. Sixth-formers taking the IB have an entirely different experience of years 12 and 13 to that of their peers doing A-levels, as the IB students are run ragged trying to jump through so many disparate hoops. Third, well-resourced schools offering a wide range of co-curricular activities (not least independent schools) will inevitably afford their students greater opportunities to excel across a diverse curriculum than less well-resourced schools.
The children of those with the sharpest elbows and greater resources will still succeed disproportionately, whatever the final qualification offered. And the inequalities of outcomes highlighted by Millar cannot be effectively addressed to any significant extent by changing the qualifications regime without also changing the entire structure of the UK’s education system.
Name and address supplied
• Fiona Millar’s article is a valuable contribution to the debate about a future Labour government’s education policy. However, previous major reforms undertaken by both parties were effected through local education authorities (LEAs), now stripped of many of their powers and functions. I wonder if those currently responsible for the running of academies and free schools will be as cooperative with central government as LEAs were, despite political differences.
A reforming Labour government will need resources, courage and time to unravel the present inequitable patchwork and create a fairer system for all our children. It will be a huge challenge.
John Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire
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