The Emperor's New Clothes


More than anything else, it's a country's educational system what should ensure equal opportunities for all citizens, regardless of whether they are born in Chelsea or in Blackpool. The human mind is a marvel of nature and it works the same for everyone. But the British education system does exactly the opposite. By means of a huge deception it perpetuates class differences and the lack of equal opportunities for everyone. Add deep rooted corruption into the mix and things get as bad as they actually are in the UK. But nobody does anything about it. No one dares to say that the emperor is naked.

According to some it may still take a few decades for the situation to touch bottom. In the meantime whole generations will find themselves let down by the education system, and their futures jeopardized for ever.

This blog will show you how British state education is flawed and corrupt. Beware: the evidence is brutal. Stop reading if you don't want to change your high opinion of the UK's educational system.

If you are new to this site I recommend reading first the 4 unnumbered and/or the numbered entries in their chronological order using the TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Thursday 5 July 2018

Apartheid in UK schools: CLASS-ification and the sabotage of widening participation


For tourists and occasional visitors, one of the most attractive features of the UK is that atmosphere of the ancient that one can find in so many beautiful corners of our cities and villages. One could almost see and hear a carriage with Sherlock Holmes sitting inside when walking in certain areas engulfed by an early morning mist. What these visitors fail to see and the local population is not aware of, is the great extent these appearances can be true when it comes to class differences. The rhetoric about class is, in all modern countries except the UK, something everyone associates with the past, with the times of Marxism and the post-industrial-revolution era. In the UK, however, it is still “normal” to hear about “working class neighbourhoods” and “middle class jobs”; people being labelled according to their “class”; and politicians addressing voters from one or the other “class”. For any person regarding this from the outside, this is as strange as a pink cow. But here no-one questions the very reality of this. Many, of course, struggle against class differences, and aspire to climb the socioeconomic ladder, but just in order to be in the “upper” class and start behaving as such as soon as possible. Very few do actually achieve this, but they soon will forget that there are others in that struggle, and will begin to enjoy the privilege of having jumped the gap.  This is the only possible goal of anyone in the lower classes. Because they have been shown that class differences are part of life, this is how society works. No one from “below” and of course no one from “above” questions the existence of this weird anomaly in the world of the 21st century.

This can easily be understood when one sees that this segregation becomes part of life from the earliest years in people’s lives. The education system is designed to perpetuate the class differences in the UK. Yes, it is designed this way. Segregation in schools is not something that happens in pockets of bad practice, it is built into the system. “Good” teachers are the ones who will be most effective in applying the disgraceful system of targets, by which children from the youngest ages are CLASS-ified according to those targets, solely based on socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Not only through the use of postcodes to set these targets (so as to ensure that in low achieving areas the same outcomes are obtained as in the past), but even under the disguise of previous attainment – who do you think would be the low attainers other than those who do not live in wealthy, stable neighbourhoods with parents who can afford private tuition?

Young children are very permeable to quickly pick up things about how society works. CLASS-ification is part and parcel of their time in school, which is where they spend most of their time. All that time in school there will be those who are offered to attempt the more advanced questions while others are told to not even try, just be satisfied with the more basic ones, “you are not bright enough for more”. When they reach secondary schools their final scores in primary – already conditioned by the targets set initially – are automatically converted into GCSE targets and pupils are grouped according to the CLASS-ification of their targets and segregated into “higher tier” and “foundation”. So, CLASS-ification is now materialized in actual groups within a school year. There are the bright ones who will be entered to the “higher tier” exams. As these are the only ones that count for the assessment of the quality of the school, the teachers (individuals unworthy of this name) will ensure no one will be included who poses the least risk not to get high grades. Then there is the “middle class”, whose targets are to barely pass the GCSEs, and the “lower class”, whose targets are Ds, Es, Fs or Us (or their current equivalent numeric grades), and whose parents will be deceived as long as possible, hopefully until it is too late to do anything, with reports saying that their children are doing well because they are “on target”. In other words, they will be great assets to maintain the current socioeconomic class divide by ensuring that their families stay where they started.

It is hardly surprising that this apartheid is then transferred directly into society when they leave schools. They will be sold nice leavers’ hoodies and even have a prom, so they can live the dream for one night, with those suits and ties, but the morning after the CLASS-ification will continue its course. The high achievers with their triple As and A*s will go to university, the “middle class” children will have access to “middle class” jobs or further education courses that require about three Cs, and the lower class pupils, being totally on target and therefore having done fantastically well according to school reports and headteachers (“he is such a lovely boy”), will go where they belong, which is where they came from.

Then we have the laudable yet pathetically ineffective efforts to promote “widening participation”. Millions of pounds are spent by government agencies and institutions of higher education to go out to recruit students for university degrees and other courses of tertiary education from among young people who have just left school after being told for about 15 years that they are not worth to be considered for anything but low targets. Every day for about 15 years apartheid in schools has chiselled into their brains and their self-esteem that they belong to a lower class, that they are second- or third-class citizens. Is it surprising in any way that the “widening participation” efforts are mostly wasted? I once attended an academic talk on research about widening participation at postgraduate level. I commented that by then the damage has already been done, and that the widening participation target population had already been filtered out by the education system at school level. While some academics who obviously are very proud of the current education system looked at me with horrified faces (how could I even dare to put this nearly perfect education system into question?) the speaker admitted, jokingly, that maybe the best way to invest in widening participation is to take all the money and pour it into tackling the problem at school level. He may have said this as a joke, but I truly believe that this is the case. Money alone, of course, will not do the job: we need to start challenging this apartheid, which introduces CLASS-ification in society at its roots, and so stop it from sabotaging true “widening participation”.

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