Education, Careers & Professional News
State Education System ‘Must Die’
CHRIS WOODHEAD, the former head of Ofsted, said yesterday that he was looking forward to the destruction of the state education system.
Mr Woodhead urged the head teachers of independent schools not to engage in partnerships with their state counterparts, saying that they were only propping up a failed system. He told the annual Brighton College conference that private schools should devote their energies to serving fee-paying parents rather than succumb to government pressure to work with the state sector.
Mr Woodhead was appointed by Michael Howard before the general election to advise the Conservatives on education and is chairman of the Cognita group of 24 fee-paying schools.
We have got to invest more time to partnership with the state sector, he said. Well, why do we have to do that? Our responsibility is to parents who pay our fees and it seems a statement of arithmetical fact that the more time we spend with a failing state school the less time we devote to the education of our own children.
Mr Woodhead, who was Chief Inspector of Schools in England until he resigned in 2001, said that he subscribed to the apocalypse theory of public policy, in which the state education system would have to collapse before real change occurred. He believed that all schools should be run privately, with parents given vouchers towards all or part of the fees.
Dont prop things up with partnerships, he said. I simply dont believe they are the best form of insider training.
The Government has been encouraging state and independent schools since 1997 to build partnerships in sports, arts and specialist teaching. More than 300 now operate across the country.
Meanwhile, a former top government adviser said yesterday that hundreds of secondary schools were holding back improvements to the education system. David Hopkins, who left the Department for Education four days ago, said that new Labour had struggled to tackle the 600 underperforming secondary schools in England. I have learnt that policy is not decided in an absolutely rational way, Professor Hopkins said. Poverty is still the most powerful predictor of education success.
Yesterday, a key government adviser said that independent schools should take in disruptive pupils to help break a spiral of failure in scores of sink comprehensives.
Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools Trust, said fee-paying schools should welcome one or two unruly children into each year group. This would alleviate problems in the state system, where the most difficult 6,000 children were concentrated in the same 200 sink schools each year.
Sir Cyril said that privately educated pupils would also gain by learning the importance of caring for others. Many of the most unruly pupils were boys of 13 or 14, some of whom were quite bright.
The Independent Schools Council said that its members wanted to offer places to poorer youngsters, but not disruptive ones. Jonathan Shephard, the ISCs general secretary, said: We have our share of difficult pupils. But to import somebody who is disruptive is not something for our schools.