thm, not many (if any) of the parents at my kids’state schools drive X5s. The kids who are really under performing are not the ones whose parents have posh cars.

Most people are not choosing a life of luxury over paying for private education, and all the evidence shows state education is better than private.

Very true Mike the kids not doing well are in lower socio economic levels. Not sure about evidence of state being better than private though. Would be very hard to compare..

The state vs private comparison was when controlling for socioeconomic factors, though my Sunday-morning-Googling-from-my-phone attempts to find a supporting link has failed.

I blame my state education 😉

Is the reception poor in the X5 😉

I found the Singapore comparison curious. A mate, who’s had a permanent interest in cricket, worked there for many years. He commented that he never saw children out after school playing games as we did growing up. The pressure to keep up at school kept them indoors doing homework or whatever.

He felt that they missed out on fitness and social skills.

(edit) And will they apply such high standards in Westminster?

will they apply such high standards in Westminster?

MPs already swear an oath, and we’ve seen how well they perform.

I’ve taught kids from Singapore and while the work ethic was astounding the ability to think was poor. They did well in Maths and “logic” follow the method subjects until an open question came up when the majority just could’t cope with the possibility that there was more than one approach to answering the questions.

Scotland introduced Chartered teachers to keep the good ones in the classroom. training was paid for partly by the teachers. It was stopped through short sightedness.

Oh and funny as being a Tristram is more pertinent is the fact he is Tristram Hunt which would be better than if Ed Balls had made it to Ed Sec.

We have world class education in the UK attracting students from Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. And yet, rather than celebrating and learning from this, we obsess with learning from other counties and deriding our own excellence. In fact, we deliberately try to damage our own centres of excellence with bizarre calls to even ban some of them.

Education, like health, is a strange, strange business!!

Oh how the Brits English love their teachers (not). Even on STW it’s best to don flame retardant clothing before posting anything positive about the profession. Who’d be a teacher, eh? Under pressure from kids, their parents, the bosses, the other meddlers who stick their noses in the running of a school, the politicians, the Daily… . A hiding to nothing, which perhaps explains why many of the really competent teachers I’ve known over the years haven’t set foot in a school for years; the loss is to society, not them.

In fact, we deliberately try to damage our own centres of excellence with bizarre calls to even ban some of them.

Could you highlight specific examples to support this claim?

Sadly, they’re still obsessed with parental choice when most parents just want the school at the end of their street to be good enough.

This, this and this.

Junkyard I expect he’s talking about Eton et al

3 things would actually make a difference. Much is made of the ‘why do independent schools do better’ debate; I think it’s down to this…

1. More teachers and smaller classes, thus allowing teachers to deliver less lessons and thus be better able to prepare, mark and meet with students 1-2-1 to offer advice.

2. Parental attitudes to success.

3. Stop government fiddling with things. New specs, new inspection regimes, new regulatory requirements. I give you the example of our maths and Geography departments, who have taught the same (ish) specs for the past 20 and 10 years respectively. Unsurprisingly the results are very good.

In any school there will be some curriculum areas that get better results than others. Good management is about spreading this success elsewhere.

I don’t need a bloody compass. What a moron.

GB

Private schools get A level and GCSE specs changed the same as state. Mostly it boils down to having more engaged kids having more money spent on them. I doubt Eton would do very well with some of the classes I teach.

Teachers dont need a compass as most young kids know there is only “ONE DIRECTION” and Harry Styles is the Son of a God. .

Who is Harry Stiles? I am so not down with the kids!

2. Parental attitudes to success….3. Stop government fiddling with things.

Job done. Easy really.

Ignore both and we end up with all the current shenanigans trying to correct the obvious consequences.

How do we change parental attitudes then? Spotting the problem is easy, doing something about it isnt.

Scotland introduced Chartered teachers to keep the good ones in the classroom. training was paid for partly by the teachers. It was stopped through short sightedness.

It wasn’t really short sightedness that stopped it. It was just really poorly thought out and administered. Write some essays, get a pay rise was the format with no thought given to the quality of applicants and no mechanisms put in place for them to share their good practice. Some of the worst teachers I know will get paid 6+ grand a year more than top of the regular scale for the rest of their careers because they got on the CT scheme.

How do we change parental attitudes then?

What that question really means is ‘how do we fix society’

The bloke is a complete idiot.
What value is there is any oath that is in any way even slightly forced. It has no point. If he had the slightest clue about education he would try useful things like cut class sizes, give the schools enough money and remove paperwork and the pressures of an inspection system that is only satisfied when they fail you. Never herd of the cretin before but would I be safe in assuming that he isn’t a teacher?
If he is he should hang his head in shame and if not he should shut up as he has nothing to say that has value.

CT scheme seems very similar to AST scheme down here, now defunct too.

We have world class education in the UK attracting students from Singapore and elsewhere in Asia. And yet, rather than celebrating and learning from this, we obsess with learning from other counties and deriding our own excellence. In fact, we deliberately try to damage our own centres of excellence with bizarre calls to even ban some of them.

Are those parents sending their children here because the schools are better, or because they want them to get in on the Old School Tie gravytrain?

They’re also, presumably, not reading with the kids that they’ve sent to the other side of the world?