# UK education system reform **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 4, 2004, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636 "2004-01-04T13:35:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2004, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/1 "2004-01-04T13:35:27Z")
Here in the UK we have two parallel education systems - state and private, with the latter nominally charities. The state school system is widely reviled and there is a lot of interference from the Local Education Authority, though there are many good schools, especially where there are still grammar schools. Currently education is a right, not a privilege. I’m thinking about shading that a little: children have a right to be educated but attending a school is a privilege. Sounds odd, so let me elaborate. Firstly all but get rid of the LEAs and devolve all responsibilities back to the schools. You can attend any school that will have you and the state will pay a certain amount; if the school charges more then it must offer scholarships pro-rata (to be defined) or it loses its charitable status (because then they’re clearly in it for the money). If the school expels you, the school stops getting funding for you and it’s up to your parents to find another school that will have you. If your parents can’t find another school that will accept you, they’ll just have to home-school you until your behaviour improves and a school will accept you. This would be subject to frequent inspection to prevent fraud. I can sense the incoming fire already. ---
**Author:** ![GorillaMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/50afbb/32.png) [@GorillaMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GorillaMan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2004, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/2 "2004-01-04T13:46:05Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by qts \* > \*\*The state school system is widely reviled and there is a lot of interference from the Local Education Authority, though there are many good schools, especially where there are still grammar schools. > \*\* Wow…what a couple of assumtions…do you read the Mail, by any chance? Sure, it’s widely acknowledged that there’s big problems with the state sector, but “widely reviled”??? Not around here, it’s not. And there’s a huge number of excellent comprehensive schools, as well as high-flying grammars which abandon a large proportion of the population before they reach their teens. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2004, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/3 "2004-01-04T14:01:51Z")
Pretty emotive language, there, mate. Actually, I used to work for Buckinghamshire County Council where they retain the grammar school system. And I can assure you that those who did not get in to the grammar schools were not abandoned. During my time at BCC I reckon I visited every single school in the County. D_mn good job they do too. But Buckinghamshire is the exception rather than the rule. Now I’m in Bedfordshire and I look at the local secondary schools and they’re cr_p. But if I were a parent, I’d be forced to send my child there. I’d rather the freedom of choice. ---
**Author:** ![casdave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c6cbf5/32.png) [@casdave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/casdave)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2004, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/4 "2004-01-04T23:27:00Z")
Education in the UK is far more than a right, it is in fact a legal requirement for parents to ensure their child attend school. (…and if you really know about UK education then surely you know this) Add to this that the LEA has is also legally bound to provide the means for that education, and if you abolish the LEA that responsibility will fall in some way to the state which will then have to create and fund organisations to enforce the law. This is why we end up with the situation that travellers children are sometimes taken to school in taxis cabs funded by the LEA, and why evey expelled child must be found some other means of delivering education. Once the parents fulfill their legal obligation it is then the responsibility of a state sponsored organisation. As for the state schools and LEAs being reviled, far from it, parents are known to move house simply to fall within the catchments area of a known good school, and these are exclusively state schools, fee-paying schools make no bones about catchment areas all you need is the money. Some of those parents could well afford to pay for private schooling but choose not to do so, moving house can cost more than several years of tuition. It is true that there are bad state schools and utterly terrible ones, and many students don’t have the choice, neither do the parents who are concerned. Your idea does notheing at all to address the problem of these bad schools and the unfortunate enthusiastic students surrounded by a sea of ignorant urchins whose parents couldn’t be bothered to teach them how to use a knife and fork. I wonder who is better able to understand the requirements of local schooling in a particular area, some appointed unelected, and publicly unaccountable bunch of civil servants in Whitehall, or maybe local school governors boards comprising representatives of the local community, locally elected council officials, local teachers with input from local companies and local higher education institutions. We have had a few changes to the law to make it easier for Local Authorities to bring errant parents before the law, and there have been a few widely publicised cases, much more need to be done. What you are proposing is a voucher system, where any differance in fees will be made up by parents. Few flaws here, Most parents have plenty to pay for, they pay vast amounts of tax and they also have the worry that if their offspring are succesful in their studies there might well be University fees to pay. That is one heck of a commmitment over a long period of time, especially if there are several children of differing ages. What if you are a good parent and the only good school reasonably near is going to cost more money than the voucher value? You could try stump up the cash if you could. Would you as a parent condemn your child to an institution that is just a portal to prison.(yes, my local schools are pretty much that, being rated as lowest in the entire country - Seacroft Middle School) A scholarship system would be full of massive holes, just what percentage are we talking about, and when a good school is full, it could charge whatever it wanted to limit demand. Competition is generally a good thing, but how do you sort out the wheat from the chaff, I was almost the last to take the 11 plus exam and I passed. This is despite my coming from a worse background than almost anyone I know, including the prisoners I work with. The types of questions were disgraceful, the class bias was simply an affront, Questions such as:- What is a decanter for ? How many blue collar 11 years olds would know that! Who wrote Ivanhoe ? Not too many lower working class 11 years olds get that book as a present I’ll bet! What were “the wooden walls of England”? How many adults know that! As it happened I did, but the 11 plus exam was nothing more than a scholarship to grammar school with class biased questions and no obvious school lesson content that would inform prospective 11 year olds - we had no state set curriculum back then. I’ll leave it there for now, I would be pleased to address this matter in much greater depth. ---
**Author:** ![London\_Calling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@London\_Calling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/London_Calling)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2004, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/5 "2004-01-05T00:22:57Z")
You can’t build anything without the right tools. My first step would always be to pay teachers professional salaries in order to encourage _competition_ for teaching places. Thus, I’d like to see Government endorse an experimental period where pay scales would be increased annually until they reached the point where there were (in the region of) 2.5 qualified applicants for each teaching job. Of course, that has to come with pre-conditions concerning class sizes and funding. If increasing the quality of teaching didn’t sufficiently address the issues, then sure look at the structures themselves, but it seems a little premature to me to start pulling down entire edifices because of generations of under funding in the professionals themselves. You’re just putting the same monkey’s in a different zoo. How to finance increased salaries ? Tell parents they get what they pay for. It’s their choice, either pay for better teachers through tax or stop complaining. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_Wright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@Steve\_Wright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_Wright)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2004, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/6 "2004-01-05T11:01:15Z")
Blimey, **casdave** - you can’t have taken the eleven-plus more than four or five years ahead of me, and I don’t remember anything about decanters or _Ivanhoe_ - it was all “verbal reasoning” IQ-test sort of stuff when I did it. (Just as well, I’ve still not read _Ivanhoe_.) Of course, I was in the Buckinghamshire system, of which **qts** speaks so highly ( **qts** , what _did_ you think of Challoner’s, then?) Generally speaking, I agree with **London\_Calling**. A proper education system is an investment in the future (which pays off by providing a pool of properly skilled workers for industry to draw on). You can f\*\*\* around with the management as much as you like, but if you’re not prepared to _make_ the investment - spend the money necessary to get the right people into the teaching profession - all you’re doing is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. You can start debating the merits of voucher schemes, or the content of the National Curriculum, or the merits of A-levels versus the International Baccalaureat, _after_ you’ve got enough resources into the system to ensure that all the kids get the education they _need_. ---
**Author:** ![Daftbugger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Daftbugger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daftbugger)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2004, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/7 "2004-01-05T14:07:08Z")
Don’t even start on the mess the government has made on the A-Level system and the universities. 50% of young people going to university? What rubbish! ---
**Author:** ![Baron\_Greenback](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baron_greenback/32/48_2.png) [@Baron\_Greenback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baron_Greenback)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2014, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/9 "2014-09-13T20:18:00Z")
Have you learnt anything in the ten years since your OP, Quartz? Factual errors in the first sentence etc? ---
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2014, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/10 "2014-09-13T20:19:04Z")
> [@casdave](#): > > Competition is generally a good thing, but how do you sort out the wheat from the chaff, I was almost the last to take the 11 plus exam and I passed. > This is despite my coming from a worse background than almost anyone I know, including the prisoners I work with. > The types of questions were disgraceful, the class bias was simply an affront, > > \ > > As it happened I did, but the 11 plus exam was nothing more than a scholarship to grammar school with class biased questions and no obvious school lesson content that would inform prospective 11 year olds - we had no state set curriculum back then. > > I’ll leave it there for now, I would be pleased to address this matter in much greater depth. Wow, I sat the 11+ in Northern Ireland and it was nothing like that _at all_. Of course just a few years ago we had a world-class education system, then the politicians got their hands on it and systematically dismantled it in the name of personal ideology. 😕 I have several friends and relatives who are teachers _(mostly in England)_ and on talking to them the education system is in a poor state and is only getting worse. ---
**Author:** ![blindboyard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blindboyard/32/2833_2.png) [@blindboyard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blindboyard)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/11 "2014-09-14T18:25:16Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > Pretty emotive language, there, mate. Actually, I used to work for Buckinghamshire County Council where they retain the grammar school system. And I can assure you that those who did not get in to the grammar schools were not abandoned. During my time at BCC I reckon I visited every single school in the County. D_mn good job they do too. But Buckinghamshire is the exception rather than the rule. Now I’m in Bedfordshire and I look at the local secondary schools and they’re cr_p. But if I were a parent, I’d be forced to send my child there. I’d rather the freedom of choice. Choice leads to popular schools being oversubscribed and poor schools getting less and less resources. Hence an inefficient distribution of resources and and ever widening gap between the best and worst schools. Choice is bad. ---
**Author:** ![blindboyard](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blindboyard/32/2833_2.png) [@blindboyard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blindboyard)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/12 "2014-09-14T18:36:25Z")
> [@casdave](#): > > The types of questions were disgraceful, the class bias was simply an affront, > > Questions such as:- > > What is a decanter for ? > How many blue collar 11 years olds would know that! It’s for decanting. It’s implicit in the word. > [@](#): > > Who wrote Ivanhoe ? > Not too many lower working class 11 years olds get that book as a present I’ll bet! Lucky us. Scott’s shit. > [@](#): > > What were “the wooden walls of England”? > How many adults know that! Carpentry? Secondary modern. Trick question. > [@Daftbugger](#): > > Don’t even start on the mess the government has made on the A-Level system and the universities. 50% of young people going to university? What rubbish! It keeps the dole figures down. In America they do the same thing with their oversized army and prison population. > [@London\_Calling](#): > > You can’t build anything without the right tools. My first step would always be to pay teachers professional salaries in order to encourage _competition_ for teaching places. There are already more teachers than teaching positions, to the extent of massive competition for jobs as supply teachers. Paying more would just attract more mercenaries. > [@](#): > > Thus, I’d like to see Government endorse an experimental period where pay scales would be increased annually until they reached the point where there were (in the region of) 2.5 qualified applicants for each teaching job. That would probably lead to lower wages than are currently paid, and realistically any increase in funding would go to decreasing class sizes. > [@](#): > > Of course, that has to come with pre-conditions concerning class sizes and funding. Class sizes are irrelevant. > [@](#): > > If increasing the quality of teaching didn’t sufficiently address the issues, then sure look at the structures themselves, but it seems a little premature to me to start pulling down entire edifices because of generations of under funding in the professionals themselves. > > You’re just putting the same monkey’s in a different zoo. Paying more doesn’t get better results. In public services it normally makes things worse. > [@](#): > > How to finance increased salaries ? Tell parents they get what they pay for. It’s their choice, either pay for better teachers through tax or stop complaining. Or, better yet, ban anyone with a degree in education from teaching. Instead hire people with real degrees in things like mathematics or engineering. ---
**Author:** ![Idle\_Thoughts](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/838e76/32.png) [@Idle\_Thoughts](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Idle_Thoughts)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-education-system-reform/222636/13 "2014-09-14T19:21:33Z")
Since this topic is from 10 years ago, I’m going to close it.