I'm still in shock over the £30,000 a year it takes to send your child (clearly, not YOUR child, you peasant) to Eton. Over 8 years, £240,000. For
one child.
Here's a crazy idea - why don't all the rich people sending their kids to private schools put that money into the state school system so the state schools can be good schools, and not just their own children can benefit?
I know, I know.
And another thing. In
this programme Andrew Neil kept on saying 'I'm not socialist, I'm not coming from a left-wing perspective, but...' and then being irresistibly drawn to left-wing conclusions. He got the Minister for Schools to admit that it's shit that 65% of MPs went to private schools when only 7% of the country go to private schools.
There was a lot of nostalgia for grammar schools as a conveyor belt for social mobility, but grammar schools were just private schools that you didn't have to pay for - they had high academic success rates not through some miraculous pedagogy, but by the simple expedient of excluding non academic kids, troublesome kids, forget about those with special needs or learning difficulties. That's what the 11+ was for - not to let them in, but to keep the others out. (And grammar schools raised the 11+ pass rate for girls without publishing this fact at the time. Hmm. The name of the game is Exclusion.)
Anyway, if I ruled the world...
I'd have many more schools, with much smaller classes, and more staff. Better communication with parents & more involvement & responsibility for parents. More emphasis on home & school working together. (They're your kids.)
Way more focus on children finding out who they are and what they're good at (- no point flogging a dead horse, we're not all athletes or artists and we're not all readers and writers, if they have a good enough standard of literacy to get by then why make them study something they hate for years on end, they're not going to get better at it and you'll only turn them off?)
Don't make them stay at school until they're 18 - school is not for everyone. It's just so they can avoid them turning into an unemployment statistic. Schools shouldn't have to act like jails for rampaging teenagers who don't want to be there.
Bring in apprenticeships and make them lead to proper jobs at the end of it.
Bring in more vocational training and opportunities to do work experience and work shadowing. Have companies/trades partner up with school and guarantee to take students on at the end of work placements.
Have better links with world of work and more contacts come into schools so children know what opportunities are out there. I didn't know half the jobs you could do even by the time I left school, aged 18. It wasn't considered part of education.