Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 January 2008 09:49:38
I am now paying the price of trying to play it safe with the "education lottery" game and dealing with the distress of a teenager who is desperately unhappy, at the moment, being in the school they are in and is blaming me for heavily influencing the choices they were given when it came to secondary school education.
I, like others in my position, am paying the price for trying to do the best for my daughter and perhaps, just perhaps making the wrong call by trying to encourage her into making the right choice based on the law of probabilities and being risk adverse when it came to playing the "education lottery". In our case we knew we already had the religion card in our hand and we were willing to use it.
For those not familiar with the "eduation lottery" and how it operates and why as this Times article says increasing numbers of people are trying to getting religion for the purpose of playing the game let me explain.
The 1988 Education Reform Act sought to extend parental choice and competition between schools but ended up with an increase in the gap between the high achieving and low achieving schools in this country. The good schools have increasingly become over subscribed whilst the lower achieving schools have struggled with incresaing numbers of children with behaviourial and educational difficulties and the pressure of being seen as underachieving schools. To combat this the lower schools have increasingly turned their focus on vocational (skills based) courses for their children and, often as academies, with a specialisation in a practical subject such as sport have pulled themselves up that way.
Now, this is fine if your child is clearly gifted in some way (because schools can select up to 10% of their intake on ability) but if you have an average child who is good at some stuff but not at other stuff and is more academic than practically able and happens to live in one of the increasing numbers of areas which may or maynot be in the catchment area for a good school you have a problem. In that situation you are likely, as a parent to look for the best comprehensive school (i.e. mixed ability) you can which might let your child in and in this country those schools are church schools. Because of their status the selection criteria is different and whilst they can select up to 10% on ability a much larger part of their eligibility criteria is linked to religious practice (particularly church attendance) and so if you go to church and live in an area with a church school you are increasing your chances of getting your child into an appropriate school. This is the nationwide situation.
In Kent where I live it is complicated by the fact we also have the grammar school system and so the competition for true comprehensive places is even greater. If you don't go for the church school in the first instance or the local good comp which you have to basically live within 1 mile of to be sure of a place, but rather choose to risk the 11+ and your child fails you are then stuck with schools which are working really hard to improve themselves but which are taking the vocational route to do so.
So it was I, against all my political judgements about fairness, did the best for my child by telling her the choice was hers but warning her against taking the risk and pointing out we could, as long term practicing Christians, get a place at the church comp. I am now faced with that guidance coming back to haunt me and a child desperate to try and get into a grammar school (which is of course over subscribed) and who feels she never really got the choice. Yet I know in all conscience were I faced with the choices we were in year 6 again I would do the same and I know if I were a non-religious parent with a child in years 4 or 5 I would be tempted to get religion very quickly.
So is the answer, as some people in Ruth Gledhill's article argue, to stop building faith schools? Not necessarily, I think the answer is to accept that within this country there are lots of average children, the sorts of children who will come out with the odd A-A* and a bulk of B's and C's (5+ in total) but will also get a few D's, E's and F's and that lots of these kids happen to live in average housing on the edge of catchment areas. These are the kids who lose out, in Kent, under the grammar school system and under the tri-partite system lost out in the rest of the country (being faced with the choice of scraping into grammars and being at the bottom or put in more vocational schools when actually they are more academically able) and are also increasing losing out under the system of specialist schools and academies. These are the children whose parents are increasingly taking the faith school route out of practical consideration rather than belief and these are the children who are also being ignored by policy initiatives which seek to focus on G"n" T's (gifted and talented) or socailly excluded children. It is time educational policy in this country accepted there is a growing problem in appropriate provision for the overall average and those just above who happen to have a few very weak areas, (particularly as these are the students who the government want to help meet its targets for increased HE participation).