Social class is the strongest predictor of educational attainment.

Whether it is because your parents can pay your rent during an internship, use their contacts to secure work experience or simply provide a lifestyle that familiarises you with the predominantly middleclass worlds of higher education and elite progressions, who your parents are will have a bigger impact on your life chances than your ability.

Young people from low-income backgrounds need better formal and informal support to help them traverse this gap, make decisions about progression and ultimately have fulfilling careers.

Our research focuses on the FE sector because this is where a majority of young people from low income families are concentrated in their post-16 studies.

Working well, the FE sector can support disadvantaged young people into fulfilling careers, perhaps via higher education. But at the moment the sector is constrained in this role due to its comparative under-funding, lack of policy attention and low status compared to higher education and school sixth forms.

Evidently, the FE sector alone cannot address the social inequalities that underpin different levels of social, cultural and economic capital, or indeed remedy the very real structural barriers that preclude equality of opportunity.

However, some of the constraints that disadvantaged students experience are possible to tackle.

By better aligning FE provision to economic needs, by providing new means of transferring social capital and through the timely provision of information and support on financial hardship, young people from low-income backgrounds can be better supported in education and eventual progression into the workplace.

Far from being ‘second division’, the FE sector should further develop its role in improving the prospects of disadvantaged students and tackling broader social injustices.’

http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/410039/RSA-Education-Not-enough-capital1.pdf

“It [the Government] must continue in its plans to create more competition, lower barriers to entry for new suppliers, remove obstacles to innovation, and give consumers more information and choice.”

I particularly like the “lower barriers to entry for new suppliers” – I suppose this means setting up schools in any old building (Boris Johnson suggests redundant London Underground buildings – I presume he doesn’t mean some disused tube somewhere) and stuffing children into corridors and store rooms.

“Remove obstacles to innovation” – there’s nothing to stop any school being innovative if they wish to. The only barrier is likely to be the enormous one of whether Ofsted (or Gove) would approve of the innovations on offer. Can’t see a truly innovative school like Summerhills getting the go-ahead, but a free school that proposes striped blazers and looks down its nose at vocational qualifications is likely to be given the all-clear.

It was claimed that there were 6,000 English schools which had been judged satisfactory. This no longer meant they satisfied the criteria but that they “required improvement”. This in turn meant they were “failing” and O’Shaughnessy argued they should become academies, preferably in a chain, or, if academy conversion didn’t work then they should be placed in the hands of for-profit education providers who would receive “payment by results”.

But these 6,000 schools were judged “satisfactory” in the past. Mary Bousted, NUT, pointed out that the new “requires improvement” category can’t be applied retrospectively. Each of these schools would need to be re-inspected. Until these inspections take place it is impossible to say how many English schools “require improvement”.

The programme highlighted Harris as a successful chain but most Harris academies in 2011 entered pupils for a large number of equivalent exams (see my post 29/06/12 at 8.26 on this thread).

http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2012/06/on-dfe-criteria-academies-gcse-results-are-artificially-inflated/

Newsnight interviewed the CEO of the Harris chain, Sir Daniel Moynihan, who explained that the key to improvement was schools collaborating, sharing, pooling ideas. But academy status isn’t needed for this type of co-operation.

O’Shaughnessy claimed that there was ample evidence to show that academies work. This is not true as Henry’s research has found. Numerous reports have warned that academy conversion is not a magic bullet. Neither Newsnight nor O’Shaughnessy mentioned the more successful City Challenge programme.

A representative of the NUT told Newsnight that O’Shaughnessy’s ideas were a “dogmatic solution for a dogmatic design flaw of a new inspection system which sets up schools to fail.” Extra support for struggling schools was what was required plus initiatives by the Government to deal with poverty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01ngs92/Newsnight_16_10_2012/?t=14m36s

Russell…..stresses access to impartial sources of knowledge; without such access, our critical abilities cannot function.’

‘…..I also seek to locate the underlying dynamic of changes in the government
sector, the fundamental drivers that shape key organisational development in the
digital era.

Essentially they can be summed up in a rather ugly but nonetheless
powerfully descriptive word – disintermediation – which means the stripping out
or slimming down or simplification of intermediaries in the process of delivering
public services.

Disintermediation achieves ‘joining-up’ by significantly and visibly reducing the complexity of the institutional landscape that citizens confront in trying to access, draw on and improve public services.

A great deal of previous ‘joining-up’ does not qualify as disintermediation because it has been back-office in style and approach.

It matters to in-the-know bureaucrats behind the scenes (and it may be quite important for how they do their jobs).

But it is not obvious or meaningful to citizens’

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28373/1/The_Future_of_Joined_Up_Public_Services.pdf

It may well make such promises.

But as soon as it is elected (as it likely will be given that Gove and Wilshaw in particular, but also the rest of the ConDems, are doing everything possible to maximise the Labour vote) it will just carry on with the same lunatic policies.

It’s what they did last time after pretending they would change things. It’s what they will certainly do next time after barely bothering to pretend they would change things.

Beats me why anyone (except those expecting to make money out of it) would vote Labour (or for any other bit of the liblabcons). I wouldn’t dream of doing so.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=415611

Even the Mail featured an article by the programme’s presenter:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365695/Revealed-The-new-public-service-Fat-Cats-theyre-immune-cuts.html

However, the quotation you give can be criticised as follows:

1 Sweden’s PISA results have not improved.

2 “Multi-country research indicates that independent school competition raises PISA scores and reduces costs.” This may appear to be endorsed by the following comment by the OECD which administers PISA:

“On average across OECD countries, privately managed schools display a performance advantage of 30 score points on the PISA reading scale (in the United Kingdom even of 62 score points).”

But this much-cited quotation is followed immediately by this:

“However, once the socio-economic background of students and schools is accounted for, public schools come out with a slight advantage of 7 score points, on average across OECD countries (in the United Kingdom public schools outscore privately managed schools by 20 score points once the socio-economic background is accounted for).”

In other words, public schools (state-funded, publicly run schools in this context) perform better than private schools when the background of pupils is factored in. In the UK this turn-around in favour of state schools is greater than other countries.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/46624007.pdf

3 “competitive incentives” are likely to undermine co-operation between schools which the report discussed in the top article says is essential for improvement. When schools co-operate and share good practice then this does tend to improve outcomes. “Competitive incentives” are also likely to shift education spending away from teaching to non-teaching eg marketing (see faqs above).

4 “Financial repercussions of failure” presumably means closing schools. But no-one has explained what happens to the children than attend these closing schools. And no-one has said how “failure” would be judged. If “failure” is judged merely on results this can lead to teaching-to-the-test, “gaming” even cheating as has happened in many US states.

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6111394

5 re autonomy – UK schools already have a great deal of autonomy. See my post 17/10/12 at 1.03pm above and this thread below which compares the so-called freedoms enjoyed by US charter schools with freedoms enjoyed by all UK state schools:

http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2012/07/no-need-to-look-to-charter-schools-in-the-land-of-the-free-the-freedom-theyve-got-has-been-enjoyed-by-uk-schools-for-the-last-twenty-years/

The current policy is lacking in this respect. Without a different funding mechanism, competitive incentives in state schools will not emerge. The government failed to recognise that the key feature of the Swedish system is not free schools, but vouchers. It needs to embrace Swedish-style vouchers, encompassing all schools, while simultaneously abolishing minimum income guarantees to ensure financial repercussions of failure.

But without autonomy, schools cannot react to incentives in the event that they do emerge.’

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/incentives-must-be-the-foundation-of-a-revolution-in-british-education

He cites evidence from the Cato Instistute (a libertarian organisation) which shows that philanthropists in California only backed the “best schools”.

http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/other-lottery-are-philanthropists-backing-best-charter-schools

Far from this being an argument for allowing for-profit providers, the situation in California points to the opposite. It is low state investment in California’s education system that is bringing it to the point of collapse:

http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2012/06/from-one-of-the-best-systems-to-one-of-the-worst-how-reduced-taxation-starved-californian-schools-of-cash/

The author of the iea report also mentions Chile to support his argument for profit-making provision in education. But in Chile there have been mass student protests for over a year against for-profit schools:

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/06/28/chileans-students-protest-for-profit-schools/

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/16/chilean_student_movement_awarded_for_organizing#transcript

The World Bank and the OECD recognise that both recognise that education systems which are more equitable perform better. OECD found that top-performing countries in PISA tests tended to be those which were most equitable

http://www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2012/07/when-market-forces-are-introduced-into-education-equity-is-at-risk/

Finally, read Do market forces in education increase achievement and efficiency?” in faqs above which showed that a review of international research (mainly USA, but also looking at Sweden, Chile and the UK) which revealed that the evidence was “fragmentary” and “inconclusive”. Since this review was published, Sweden has announced an enquiry into the motivation of the for-profit companies which operate most of Sweden’s free schools.

*available here: http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/the-case-for-bona-fide-profit-making-schools

I cite a review article covering all PISA/TIMSS research in which a consistent finding is that private-school competition raises international test scores. This research is not mixed.

Although most studies use relatively unsophisticated methodologies, I highlight a paper using a more careful research design. It finds that private/independent-school competition increases PISA scores –among pupils in state and private/independent schools – as well as decreases costs.

Since international tests are important in today’s education debate, and since cross-national studies can capture system-level effects better than most within-country analyses, these results are conspicuous……..

A key feature of policy making in my home country has been its reliance on social scientific research – it is time that UK education policy makers, and wonks, also adopt this approach.

http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/research-not-ideology-should-guide-the-for-profit-school-debate