Malcolm McLean's Blog: Faith schools and Catholic culture., page 3

T-levels

The latest wheeze is T-levels. A-levels are academic, T-levels will be technical or vocational. But listen to the lady who is promoting them.

Dr Ogden’s passion for the changes on the educational horizon is palpable: “It’s about an education that, particularly post-16, is able to inspire and motivate and equip young people,” she says. “It’s about how you are able to then use that love of learning - and those skills in the scholarship of your subject at a high level - to go on and do something great in the world. It is about the contribution that you can make back to community, back to society.”

Yuck. T-level are for those who aren't clever enough for A-levels. Let's get that straight. If you're clever enough for academic work then, unless you are unusually lazy, do it. You can always go into something technical later. But plenty of children aren't clever enough for A-levels, T-level are not therefore a bad idea.

But if we pretend that they're about "that love of learning" or "skills in scholarship at a high level" then the T-level can only disappoint. They're courses in, mainly, routine technical jobs like car maintenance (but not automotive engineering) , building trades (but not architecture), office work (but not IT systems analysis). People do these jobs because they need a wage packet, they might prefer them to some of the obvious alternatives, but they seldom love them. The exception is arts and crafts, but it's hard to make a living from hand-made pottery, and the way in is often from academic courses. Arts and crafts can be a good hobby.

Don't be fooled by the DR Ogdens of this world. There is a subject that anyone can do, and that interests everybody, and which you don't have to get a good mark in to succeed at. That's religious studies.

Grammar schools

St Tom's is a highly selective school. That doesn't mean that the children are all swots, in fact only Albert and Adam have any real academic interests. But they are bright enough to take advantage of great teaching. The exception is Ibrahim, whose primary schoolmaster cheated on the entrance examination. It doesn't really do Ibrahim any favours, out of his depth, he struggles.

Selective schools, or in British terms, "grammar schools" are a big issue at the moment. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, herself a grammar school girl, has promised to reverse the policy of abandoning selection at 11+. What happens, of course, is that the parents of those who narrowly fail the 11+ kick up a huge fuss. But their children can seldom point to an academic subject that they really like, or a non-school academic interest they pursue. The reason is simple, ability is a bell curve. If you cut off the top 10% or so on the bell, you get a few children like Adam and James clearly in the upper tail of the distribution. Then the rest are bunched up together, near your cut-off point. For every Cecilia - a nice bright girl but no intellectual heavyweight - there's a similar girl who was into horses and dogs and who didn't quite make the cut.

The children who narrowly fail the 11+ are by and large the marginal ones, ones who could reasonably be assigned to either a grammar or a secondary modern school, But there will be some child somewhere who is of lower ability, and nevertheless got into the grammar. For parents, that is galling, it seems unfair. But it isn't really unfair, if the child has no academic interests, he doesn't have a right to an environment where academic interests are common and nurtured. And if we accepted all marginal cases, we'd just create another, larger class of marginals below them.

Boarding or Day?

School stories tend to work best if they are set in boarding schools. The reason is simple, you've removed the parents and created a controlled, closed environment. Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is a bit grittier and more realistic than many other boarding school stories. But it's still essentially a fantasy, children shouldn't think that because they like St Tom's, they will like boarding school.

I didn't go to boarding school myself. Many of the scenes are actually ripped from my time at Keble, Oxford, which is a residential educational college, but not a school - undergraduates are older than schoolchildren and not subject to school discipline. Most of my close friends who have been to boarding school feel they have been damaged by it. On the other hand, plenty of people have also been damaged by attending sink state schools.

My view is that children need a certain amount of time away from home. But boarding school is too high a dose. The amount of money changing hands and the states are so high that there's bound to be inordinate pressure on children to succeed, and most children are not terribly academic. The American tradition of day schools and summer camps strikes me as a better balance.

Sometimes however there is no realistic choice, parents are separated or work in distant countries, and children cannot attend day school. So even if we admit that Adam and Abagail Go to St Tom's is fantasy, and real schools are not as nice as that, we still have to answer the question, how do we make boarding schools as good as possible.