And equality for all?

There are two letters in today's Herald that I have taken exception to.

The first is by Bill Brown. Mr Brown is a retired quality improvement officer in Glasgow's education department and a regular letter-writer to the Herald. The subject under discussion is: why are more young people from outside the middle class not making their way to university? A report by Prof David Raffe of Edinburgh University this week suggests working class young people suffer due to finance problems and lack of access to the kind of academic education and the expectations middle class weans get from 'good' state schools and private schools.

Bill Brown describes young people I just don't recognise as typical students of Scottish schools: he says 'many' of the young people we want to target to send to university are anti-authority. They are agin 'teachers, government officials or police' to such an extent that they see all authority figures as 'alien and hostile', reject the education offered and embrace 'a parochial and non-compliant alliance to survive growing up with their local peers.'

This isn't the working class he's describing - this is some sort of feral underclass. I don't recognise from his description the young people and their parents that I worked with both as a teacher and a quality improvement officer. Yes, I encountered parents who had hated school and sadly passed on their negative views to their kids and I met kids who for lots of reasons (low expectations, social and mental health problems, family disruption, etc) could not take advantage of the education offered to them but they were relatively few in number. Most of the parents I met in schools were keen to see their kids do well. The younger the kids are, the more ambitious the parents are: the parents of nursery and primary age children have boundless hopes for their kids. It's in secondary school that things go wrong.

And that brings me to the second letter, by Robert Gibson, who wants Scotland to look at the educational reforms proposed for English secondary schools by Michael Gove: less 'coursework' (I'm guessing this means internal assessment) and more exams. Robert Gibson thinks more emphasis on exams would level the playing field for working class young people, who don't have access to 'a network of educated friends and family to advise them' and 'word processors' to help with their spelling and punctuation. He reckons if we move over to exams 'the socially and economically disadvantaged will be beneficiaries.' The naivety is touching. But I want to tell him he's talking mince, that schools have long been in the business of equipping young people with everything they can give them: not just word processors but before school classes, after school classes, holiday classes, study weekends away. Extra tuition at playtime and lunchtime is offered by many teachers as a matter of course.

If Robert Gibson had just read what Ian Bell wrote on page 13 of the Herald, he would realise the challenge that faces our society is a bit more complicated than shifting from coursework to exams in our schools. Middle class kids start out with an advantage whatever the assessment system. Their educated friends and family see their job as being to maintain their advantage in 'an era of rampart self-interest.' The challenge for our schools is to reduce the advantage of the middle class by equipping young people from less prosperous social backgrounds with the skills needed to compete. Of course, there's a limit to what schools can do and for 60 years we've been happily piling the responsibility onto schools and teachers for what is a societal problem.

Perhaps the most cynical comment in these letters is by Bill Brown: failure (my words) is 'part of the inevitable human condition in a mixed-class society.' I'm only glad nobody thought like that when I was at my scheme school and I'm damned if anybody is going to be allowed to think like that about the kids in my family.