Tonight:
9°c
Having once spent a lonely evening in Helsinki weeping into my vodka after interviewing telecoms executives during the course of a relationship break-up, I associate Finland with the dark night of the soul, not a beacon of guiding light. Yet in one area of life, Finland shows us the way. It is very good at educating its children. We aren't. Year after year, Finnish children come top of the international league. Last year, ours came 13th in reading and 18th in maths.
Measured against its aspirations, the Government's failure to improve our schools is its biggest policy disaster. Tony Blair's “education, education, education” mantra is a national embarrassment, for there is no sign that children are getting brighter. Last year an academic at King's College London repeated tests of youngsters' thinking ability that had first been carried out 30 years earlier. Three decades ago, a fifth performed very well. Last year, a tenth did.
The Tories have now dug up some startling figures on how state schools compare with private schools. Almost a third of private pupils get three As at A-level, compared with less than one in 10 at comprehensives; and the gap between the two has doubled since Labour came to power. Even though private schools educate only seven per cent of children, they produce more pupils with three As than do the state schools that educate 93 per cent of pupils. The worst failure, though, is lower down the educational ladder. More than half leave school without five decent GCSEs; one in 20 leaves with no qualifications at all.
The Government has run out of new ideas. It has tried testing children to exhaustion. It has tried faith schools, specialist schools, city academies, all to no avail. It has tried prising schools away from the control of local education authorities, but Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, seems to be returning them to LEA bondage. It can't try selection because the unions wouldn't wear it, even though experience suggests that's the only way to give clever children a better chance. It can't try vouchers because its ideology wouldn't permit it, even though they are being used to good effect in America.
This seems, therefore, a good time to broach the Finnish option. The Finns select pupils, but in a way that Labour could probably live with, for they offer special treatment not to the clever children but to the dim ones. Each year, children are examined, and the bottom 20 per cent identified. They are put in classes of 10 — half the average size — and resources are thrown at their teachers. It's expensive, but cheaper than turfing people out of school with no job prospects; and, overall, the Finns spend no more on education than we do, even though their results are startlingly better.
I don't recommend Finland as a place to soothe a wounded heart. But I do recommend it to government ministers trying to make amends for an education policy that has betrayed those who elected them.
I'm partial to my namesake
The Royal Ballet is reviving Kenneth MacMillan's controversial work about Isadora Duncan, a dancer to whom I've always been very partial. She was the only glamorous person who has ever carried my surname; she inspired most of the great artists of her time; and she was gloriously scandalous. She had two illegitimate children, countless lovers and a notorious affair with an alcoholic Russian poet half her age. High society was horrified, and the crowds loved her for it. We shall not see her like again, not because people don't do the stuff that she did, but because modern life has abolished scandal: when everybody's done everything, nobody can scandalise anybody.
Myerson has done us a favour
On the great debate of the week — whether Julie Myerson should have written that book — I reckon she has done the nation a service. It's not so much that, as she suggests, parents with difficult teenagers will benefit from learning about somebody else's experience. It's more that she makes the rest of us feel so good. When we get ratty with our children, when they stomp off and slam the door, when we say painful things to them and they to us, we can at least comfort ourselves with the fact that we didn't magnify the pain by writing a book about it.
* Never mind Marley, the movie dog who is supposed to have taught “life lessons” to some tiresome American family: what about Alfie? Alfie is a Norfolk terrier who came into our lives as a result of persistence on my children's part and feeble-mindedness on mine. But Alfie has taught me what true love is. Everybody in my family is sometimes horrible to everybody else, but nobody is ever horrible to Alfie, nor he to them.
Now Alfie is ill. We spend our time crowded round his basket looking like a Victorian
painting of a family around a deathbed. I have forked out about half my annual income in vet's fees but I don't care, so long as she makes him better. Please remember Alfie in your prayers tonight, for he has made us better people...
Reader views (2)
You can ponder the results Chris, but it basically still comes down to the fact that the Finns are doing it better.
- Aussie, Melbourne,Australia
Hi, agreed if you target resources at the underperforming as the Finns do you can improve their exam results - equally if you select via an entrance exam and a large annual fee you can deliver good exam results for good performers.
So can you objectively compare a selective system with a comprehensive system that takes allcomers ? Shouldn't you compare the private schools with the remaining grammar schools which also select ? Ah, but then you may not get the answer the survey was looking for.
Also do the stats add up ? The article says tha one-third of the 7% privately educated get 3 As which is more individuals than the other 93% - so the total percentage with 3 As is about 4.5% - seems pretty low to me given that 20 to 25% of entrants per A level gets As.
- Chris E, London
