Go to the bottom of the class (From The Northern Echo)

Go to the bottom of the class

11:44am Tuesday 1st December 2009

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WHEN is the Labour party going to apologise for spoiling the lives of the poor by failing to give them a decent basic education?

In 1965, the Labour education secretary Anthony Crosland said: “I’m going to destroy every f*****g grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.” Ever since then, the education of ordinary working class people has been ruined by the politics of class envy and the introduction of trendy teaching methods. Now a report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) says that a whole generation of working class boys is “being transformed into misfits and criminals”

by the educational system.

The report blames the “ideological fads of the left-wing educational establishment” according to which proper discipline is neglected as “something belonging to the Dark Ages and pupils are being allowed to run riot.”

Critics will say that the Centre for Policy Studies is a biased centre-right organisation naturally opposed to left-wing ideas and policies wherever these are to be found. But its report only echoes what the Government’s official watchdog Ofsted has admitted: “Poor teaching is holding back progress at thousands of schools.”

The Government’s own figures say clearly enough that 43 per cent of our children leave school after 11 years of compulsory state education unable to read, write and count adequately.

This is a national scandal and a disgrace – especially as schools have received increased funding year on year for all the time the Labour government has been in office.

Harriet Sergeant, author of the CPS report, says: “The cause of the crisis is clear– the capture of our schools and teacher training colleges by the current educational orthodoxy.

Effective ways of teaching children to read have been replaced by a system which completely fails those who find reading most difficult. The tragedy is that we are turning large numbers of potentially decent young men into misfits and criminals.”

The problem is made worse by the chaotic home background of the poorest pupils. Government benefits and housing policies have encouraged single parent families, absent fathers and children of many different fathers all living under one roof. This is no environment in which to raise children to be literate, numerate and responsible.

Everybody knows that this is the way of life for too many of our children. The trouble is that nothing is ever done to relieve the problem because anyone who points to its causes is accused of attacking the poor.

There is no poverty now compared to the Thirties (and even the Fifties) before the establishment of the dependency culture.

This terrible chaos has not fallen upon us by some appalling accident of fate: it is the direct consequence of deliberate and explicit government policies going back to the mid- Sixties.

The Conservative governments of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher had their opportunities to reform education, but they lacked the courage to confront the prevailing ideological idiocy which for forty years has ruined the lives of so many young people. We need a sane consensus.

A national catastrophe requires a united national solution.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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